Kelly McCartney

In a tender, previously unreleased bonus track, the country singer expresses the enervating nature of a seeker's life.

Backed only by Ry Cooder and his magnificent riffs, Rodney Crowell offered up a tender take on "God I'm Missing You" as part of his Americana Music Awards performance. The song of longing was composed as a collaboration between Crowell and a poet friend of his, Mary Karr, ...

It doesn't get much better than Loretta Lynn singing her life's story on the stage of Ryman Auditorium. That's the stuff of legends; the stuff on which country-music dreams have been built for more than a few decades. After accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award for songwriting from Kacey ...

One of the most captivating voices in Americana music, Hurray For The Riff Raff's Alynda Lee Segarra turns the personal into the political in "The Body Electric," from 2014's Small Town Heroes. The song and album wowed fans and critics with its understated urgency, and this performance is just ...

Look no further than this performance to understand and appreciate the current state of American roots music: It's alive and very, very well. Rosanne Cash, along with a band led by her husband and producer John Leventhal, worked through "A Feather's Not A Bird" from 2014's The River & ...

Young Oklahoma upstart Parker Millsap took the Americana world by storm in 2014, thanks in part to fiery live performances like this one. Here, Millsap (accompanied by Michael Rose on upright bass and Daniel Foulks on fiddle) preaches his "Truck Stop Gospel" in Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, known as the ...

Last year was a great one for Americana music, from both the longtime pillars of the form and its emerging young vanguard. Robert Ellis falls squarely into the latter group, as evidenced by this performance of "Only Lies" from 2014's The Lights From The Chemical Plant.

The tune includes ...

Introduced at the Americana Music Awards as "the hero of outlaw country" by Elizabeth Cook (who surely knows of what she speaks), Sturgill Simpson did his darnedest not to disappoint as he ripped and roared through "Life Of Sin" from his breakthrough album, Metamodern Sounds In Country Music.

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Winner of the 2014 Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne demonstrated exactly why the honor was bestowed upon him with a rendering of "The Long Way Around," a cut from his album Standing In The Breach.

The song wraps a melody around a look back at ...

Putting her glorious pipes to work on Willie Dixon's "I Want To Be Loved," Cassandra Wilson offered a master class in vocal restraint at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. Where she could have easily reached for the rafters, Wilson chose to follow the song's lead and, instead, slide down into more ...

For his second song in a performance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, Jackson Browne reached back 40 years to play "Fountain Of Sorrow," from 1974's classic Late For The Sky.

Joined by longtime friend and collaborator J.D. Souther on harmony vocals, Browne showed that he hasn't lost a step ...

From legends to upstarts, the year in roots music had something for everyone, with highlights ranging from the solo acoustic sketches of Steve Dawson to the orchestra-backed epics of First Aid Kit.

One of the threads tying together several of our top 10 albums (chosen by our friends at

Like Brandy Clark, Ashley Monroe and Kacey Musgraves, Lee Ann Womack makes country music with an eye toward pushing the genre's boundaries, both in style and in subject matter.

The title track from The Way I'm Livin' feels like the natural heart of the set: It ...

Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn have just released their first album together. Fleck says its main conceit was that "it would just be the two of us all the way" — and not just in the studio, either. They also wanted to tour the project properly, honorably, as ...