Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticBrandi Carlile, Yola and Allison Russell lead the nominations for the 2022 Americana Honors & Awards with three nods each, the Americana Music Association announced during a live unveiling Monday afternoon at Nashville’s National Museum of African American Music.Adia Victoria and the duo of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss also fared well in the voting, each drawing two nominations, in a small crop of categories where it’s generally not possible for any artist to get more than three noms in a single year.The Americana Honors & Awards show takes place Sept.
14 at the Ryman Auditorium, and is the flagship event during the AmericanaFest conference, which will take place for a 22nd year at venues around Nashville on Sept.
13-17. The fact that the announcement ceremony was being held at a museum honoring Black music, and that the entertainment at the event was being provided by Victoria, the duo the War & Treaty and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, was a pretty strong tip-off that the nominations would be marked by a good deal of racial and gender diversity, in contrast to the Americana genre’s one-time reputation as a bastion of white men.
And the heavy representation for women and/or people of color really was reflective of which Americana artists were capturing attention in 2021-22.In the key album of the year category, all five nominations went either to women or — in the case of Plant and Krauss — to an act where a woman is equally billed.
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