The Americana Music Association will honor Elvis Costello, Maria Muldaur, Delbert McClinton and the husband and wife songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant with Lifetime Achievement Awards at the organization’s annual awards show next month.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Costello is being honored with the lifetime achievement award for songwriting, Texas blues-rocker McClinton’s honor comes in the performance category, while Muldaur will be awarded the Americana Trailblazer Award for her work going back to her time as part of the folk group Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band in the 1960s, prior to her successful solo career as a pop artist in the ’70s.
Felice and Boudleaux Bryant will be posthumously awarded the 2019 President’s Award. The duo’s catalog of thousands of songs, including “All I Have to Do is Dream” and “Bye Bye Love,” has already won them induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Additionally, Mavis Staples, who won a lifetime achievement award in 2007 but was unable to appear at the time, will be celebrated as she attends the Americana Honors & Awards for the first time as the winner of the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award.
These honorees join the already announced Rhiannon Giddens and the late Frank Johnson, who’ll be dually awarded with the Legacy of Americana Award, being given out for the first time in conjunction with the National Museum of African American Music. Giddens’ notoriety encompasses everything from a role on “Nashville” to having recently formed the group Our Native Daughters with three other black female artists to highlight the legacy of slave narratives in song.
The September 11 award show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville also marks the start of the annual Americanafest, which features seminars by day and showcases in Nashville’s clubs and theaters by night. Americanafest will run through September 15.
photo: Elvis Costello. Credit: Victor Diaz Lamich [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.0 ca], via Wikimedia Commons]
