As a category, Americana is tricky. For starters, it isn’t even really a single genre but an amalgam of country, folk, blues, soul, bluegrass, gospel, and rock. The term itself didn’t enter the music lexicon until the 1990s, in response to the increasing commercialization of country music. As country musicians like Garth Brooks and Faith Hill became pop stars, Americana was meant to carve out space for rootsier, more authentic sounds that didn’t fit the new radio‑friendly version of country.

But the main difficulty with Americana is that, more than perhaps any other category, it is tied up with national identity. Americana is a sound, but also a mythology. It draws from a community’s cultural history—think bluegrass in Appalachia, or the different flavours of blues that developed across the American South—and pays homage to those sounds and conventions while also pushing boundaries to create something fresh, timely, and uniquely American. It is tradition and evolution, canonization on a national scale. But which traditions—and whose sounds—get to be included in that canon?

BIG MONEY, the ninth studio album by the singer, multi-instrumentalist, and Juilliard-educated composer Jon Batiste, is a response to this question. Throughout his career, Batiste has skirted easy categorization, blurring genres and styles. His GRAMMY^® Award–winning album We Are (2021) fused R&B, jazz, hip-hop, soul, blues and classical music, drawing from influences ranging from Little Richard and James Brown to the Jackson 5 and Kendrick Lamar. Last year’s Beethoven Blues was a blues-infected reimagining of Beethoven compositions. Meanwhile, 2023’s World Music Radio, an ambitious concept album featuring an intergalactic disc jockey named Billy Bob Bo Bob (Batiste), drew from Afrobeat, reggae, K-pop, trap, and more to create a melting-pot vision of what global music could sound like, still rooted in Batiste’s musical foundations of jazz, R&B, and soul.

BIG MONEY continues Batiste’s genre-fluid approach. But where World Music Radio envisioned a global sound, BIG MONEY is rooted in American soil. Gone are the Auto‑Tune, synthesizers, and soaring pop melodies, replaced instead by mandolins, harmonicas, tambourines, organs, and gospel choruses. Across nine songs, the album incorporates elements of blues, gospel, R&B, folk, rock and roll, and jazz. From the rootsy fusion of rockabilly and blues-rock on “Pinnacle,” to the brooding, funk-forward “At All,” to the fuzzy, atmospheric reggae of the closing track “Angels,” Batiste opts for a more organic sound. The album was recorded live off the floor to “maximize connectivity and expression.” In the press release for the album, Batiste defines the album’s sound as “New Americana.”

BIG MONEY is the latest example of a growing movement by artists challenging the gatekeeping and whitewashing of American music institutions. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter (2024), which Batiste worked on alongside his co-producer Dion “No I.D.” Wilson, is probably the most prominent case in point. Cowboy Carter spotlighted overlooked Black country pioneers and lifted up a new generation of artists, challenging not only what country music sounds like, but who it belongs to. “This is the moment, y’all, where we dismantle the genre machine,” Batiste said in response to the album.

Americana may not be as explicitly exclusionary as country music. In its 100-year history, the Grand Ole Opry— the most hallowed institution in country music—has inducted only three Black members, and the first Black person to win Song of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards was Tracy Chapman in 2023, only after her 1988 song “Fast Car” was covered by the white country singer Luke Combs. The Americana Music Association at the very least acknowledges the artistic contributions of non-white musicians, but this is setting the bar quite low. The reality is that gatekeeping does exist when it comes to who is seen as an Americana musician and who gets included in the great American songbook.

I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, home of Cain’s Ballroom, where Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys developed western swing. It was also home to the “Tulsa Sound,” a particular mix of blues and rock and roll with a distinctive shuffle groove, credited to musicians like J.J. Cale and Leon Russell. And, of course, Woody Guthrie, patron saint of American folk music, was born in nearby Okemah. This is the musical mythology that I grew up with, one missing key context. Guthrie was influenced by Lead Belly, Wills by Bessie Smith, and the “Tulsa Sound” by the Black progenitors of blues and R&B. Tulsa’s musical history—and by extension, my musical background—does not exist without these influences.

My experience is not unique. Artists like Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash, and Gillian Welch are rightly celebrated as Americana icons, but the Black architects of rock, soul, and folk who laid the foundation are often sidelined. Regarding the whitewashing of Americana, the Canadian musician Allison Russell told Rolling Stone in 2023, “It is the constant and continual devaluing of all artistic, financial, creative, intellectual, academic contributions of the Black diaspora. Americana … reflects the American—and again, I mean, Caribbean to Canada—experience, and all of those roots and influences can be heard. To me, hip-hop is as much Americana as folk music.”

On BIG MONEY, Batiste aims to expand what we think about when we consider Americana and pays tribute to some of the iconic and overlooked Black voices that shaped him and his community growing up near New Orleans. The track “Lean on My Love,” featuring Andra Day, merges gospel, R&B, funk, and soul, evoking Bill Withers, the Staple Singers, and Sly and the Family Stone. “Lonely Avenue” (featuring Randy Newman) is a soul-soaked cover of Ray Charles. “Do It All Again” channels the emotional resonance of Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, while “Maybe” “Maybe”nods to the Chantels’ 1958 song of the same name. Batiste threads through elements of Zydeco, Fats Domino’s rock‑and‑roll swing, and Mahalia Jackson’s gospel stylings. BIG MONEY rightfully offers these influences as vital parts of the canon of American roots music.

BIG MONEY is at its most compelling when it offers social commentary. The title track is a rollicking, gospel‑inflected fusion of blues‑rock and southern folk with a boot‑stomping groove that comments on the thirst for money and power. “Petrichor” is one of the best songs Batiste has released: a climate‑conscious track with stark, minimalist imagery—“swim in the ocean / what’s left of it,” and “wonderful petrichor / no more.” The song draws on spirituals, interpolates Thurston Harris’s “Little Bitty Pretty One,” and uses hambone—body‑slapping—percussion. It’s a thrilling, fresh, and timely synthesis of sounds and influences that serves as a call to action without giving in to existential dread.

The album isn’t just commentary, but also a call for connection—a meta‑commentary on a growing sense of isolation and division. BIG MONEY was inspired by Batiste’s 2024 cross‑country tour and his sense of America’s deepening political and cultural divides. Batiste has always emphasized music’s ability to connect people—after all, this is the musician who, with his band Stay Human, staged guerrilla street performances called “love riots” on the streets of major U.S. cities. In the press release for BIG MONEY, Batiste writes, “This is the circus of love. Under our tent there is revival and joy.” The goal is to create a more inclusive Americana—a big tent that welcomes a broad range of sounds, peoples, and cultures.

But where BIG MONEY succeeds in honouring the Black roots of Americana, it misses an opportunity to engage with contemporary artists of colour who have been pushing the boundaries of American roots music for years. To return to Cowboy Carter, part of what made the album so powerful was that Beyoncé was not only asserting her own right to country music as a child of Texas, but also using her platform to feature up‑and‑coming country artists like Shaboozey and Brittney Spencer. Aside from featuring Randy Newman, Andra Day, and, perhaps most notably, the Womack Sisters—who happen to be Sam Cooke’s granddaughters—the album largely feels like a small, tight‑knit project shared between Batiste, No I.D., and a few others.

Meanwhile, artists like Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, and Allison Russell have been trailblazers for Black Americana for years. Just this year, Keb’ Mo’ and Taj Mahal released a noteworthy collaborative album called Room on the Porch that mixes country, folk, R&B, and blues—its title track announces that “there is room on the porch for everyone.” Batiste’s framing of “New Americana” is compelling, but it risks overshadowing the contributions of musicians who have been pushing Americana forward and who do not have Batiste’s cultural cachet. Ultimately, it would have been powerful to see Batiste give some of these contemporaries a platform on BIG MONEY.

That said, BIG MONEY is an accomplishment and a welcome addition to the discourse surrounding inclusion in American roots music. Despite being a relatively short record, there are more influences and ideas than there is space to unpack here. Even if the album doesn’t fully realize the communal promise of its mission, BIG MONEY is an important step in the evolution of Americana. It reminds us that the roots of American music are deeper and more diverse than many of us have been taught to believe.