Everyone loves a list, and at AUK we are no exception. Our Essentials strand is amongst the best-read features on the site, and our Top 10 lists are always well supported by both writers and readers. So, when Uncut, the most americana-friendly of the mainstream magazines, announced a special edition to rank the 200 greatest Americana albums, we had to take a look.
Editor John Robinson introduces the magazine by saying: “Here at Uncut, Americana is very much at the heart of what we do. It was, legendarily, on a 1996 trip to interview Lambchop that founding editor Allan Jones started to think that what he was witnessing had a place in a different kind of magazine than the one he was currently editing.” He also has a go at the question which taxes AUK writers whenever a few gather to share a beverage; what is americana. Robinson concludes that, “if you were forced to pin it down… you might say that you could think of it as a mid-sized town on the map with neighbours in Bob Dylan & The Band, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. There’s an excellent museum which contains traditional recordings from the past… residents are encouraged to visit, but no penalties are issued for ignoring the exhibits – you can take as much or as little as you want from here and do what you want with it.” Now that’s not bad, but as we’ll see shortly laden with irony.
By the time this piece is published, the magazine will have been out for a month or so, and we’ll assume that if you’re going to, you have probably bought it, so beware: spoilers lie below.
As always with these Uncut specials, there are a variety of interesting archive interviews. The opening one with Will Oldham and those with Jason Isbell and Mercury Rev are particularly good. The countdown from 200-51 is an album cover and about 50 words explain the entry. That’s inevitable for purely commercial reasons. 50–21 get a couple of hundred words and the top 20 full 2-page spreads. These essays are written by some excellent writers: Andrew Mueller, Garry Mulholland and my personal favourite writer on americana, Stephen Deusner. This is a really good read about a lot of excellent albums, which you may have forgotten or overlooked, as long as you ignore the numbers.
The whole thing is of course highly subjective. And as we know, everyone loves to disagree with a list; here goes… The oldest album, as far as I can find, and I’ve read it through a lot to check my stats, is 1992’s Hollywood Town Hall by The Jayhawks, which sits in the high 20s. There is a smattering of other work from the 90s, but it is overwhelmingly a 21st century list. Another question which arises is: can an album released in 2026 be reckoned amongst the all-time greats, or is it just too soon? Brown Horse and Greazy Alice’s albums are good, but perhaps a bit of distance on those and the 2025 releases is needed. We mentioned the irony of suggesting that Americana is built on the foundation of Bob Dylan, The Band, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. Dylan, The Band and Young are nowhere to be found. Springsteen’s only entry is at 169 with The Seeger Sessions, and the only mention of Gram Parsons is to be found on Robert Plant’s T-shirt on the front cover. Anyone else associated with the Byrds is also absent.
There is a TV quiz called Pointless where the contestants try to second-guess answers from a list. We thought it would be fun to try an AUK version on our writers’ forum. Based on the top-scoring albums in our own lists, some of us voted on what we thought Uncut’s number 1 album would be. Car Wheels On a Gravel Road was one of the favourites; it languishes at number 17, as was the self-titled The Band album, nowhere to be seen despite strong showings in previous Uncut lists. Jason Isbell’s Southeastern (also in the teens) and Raising Sand (top 5) were also strong contenders with the AUK team. The actual number one (which we won’t spoil) got 20% of our votes, so we weren’t all wrong.
The beauty of lists is the discoveries, and here that comes in the form of David Berman’s Purple Mountains. AUK scored it 9 out of 10 on its release in 2019, but Berman’s subsequent death probably blunted its impact, so being reminded of it was worth any number of excluded big names. There are also albums I haven’t listened to enough by Giant Sand and The Mekons to revisit.
It’s easy to criticise, of course, but the point of lists surely is for people to do exactly that and that’s what the comments section below is for…
A reminder of Purple Mountains, an album which should get more notice.
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I’m interested about how many writers/staf they polled to get these lists together, and using what criteria – as you write Tim, there’s very little from before about 1990. A couple of glaring omissions for me: There’s one Cowboy Junkies album and it’s not The Trinity Session, which seems almost wilfully provocative.
The other is nothing on the list from Ryan Adams except Heartbreaker (very low in the list). Given that he was Uncut’s poster boy for some time and they gave Gold album of the year when it came out… could it be that his occupation of the cultural naughty step has put a thumb on their scales? I’d have Whiskeytown’s Strangers Almanac and Pneumonia in there, for starters.
All this said, these lists are created to provoke debate…. and here we are. Job done!