The Music Was Never Crossing Over

BlackAmericana Fest was built so Black artists in folk, country, roots, and Americana could find one another, reclaim the history beneath the music, and belong without explanation.

BlackAmericana Fest was built so Black artists in folk, country, roots, and Americana could find one another, learn the history beneath the music, and take up space without first explaining why they belonged there. In New Orleans, the community they built may be the strongest argument of all.

The last hour of my drive into New Orleans, I turned the music off.

That’s not how I usually do road trips. Normally, the car is full of music—Hamilton, Renaissance, anything that makes the drive feel less like a chore. But somewhere between Mississippi and Louisiana, I let the car go quiet and kept it that way. I’d been thinking about food, making mental notes that every future reporting trip should come with a Coke, a full Stanley, and at least one local treat. In that last stretch, though, my mind wandered from the crabmeat beignet I planned to buy to the city waiting for me, and the reason I was headed there at all.

Technically, it was my third time in New Orleans, but the first time I’d come with nobody else’s plans tied to mine. The last time I drove down alone, it was to pick up my cousin and bring her home. This time, there was no one waiting. Just interviews on my calendar, two cameras in the back seat, and BlackAmericana Fest: Still We Sing at The Broadside. It was also the first time I’d ever tried to report a story.

I expected nerves, but instead I felt strangely calm. That last hour, I kept circling around New Orleans in my mind—what it means to hold a festival for Black Americana in a city where Black music has never paid much attention to the lines people tried to draw around it. I was coming in with questions about folk, country, roots, ownership, inheritance, and what Black artists are allowed to claim as theirs.

BlackAmericana Fest had started with questions of its own.

Before There Was a Festival, There Was the Question of Who Else Was Out There

The festival’s official history begins with founder Dusky Waters—Jenn Jeffers—wanting to understand more of her own musical heritage, hear from culture bearers, and elevate Black artists whose contributions were too often missing from the way folk and Americana were narrated. Teena May came to the project with her own complicated relationship to the music: she had loved country but once believed making folk, roots, and Americana somehow meant betraying her community or making music that was not really hers. Finding their places inside those traditions brought both women a sense of belonging, and the festival grew from the conviction that other Black artists deserved access to the same recognition.

Waters has described the loneliness that could accompany making this music as a Black artist. She loved Americana and folk, but part of what she wanted was simple: “a space for us”—somewhere artists could know the others existed and connect. Meeting Teena May, and finding artists like Lilli Lewis and Joy Clark in New Orleans, began answering the question. The musicians were already there. They simply were not always visible to one another, or to an audience accustomed to imagining Americana through a much whiter frame.

That origin matters because BlackAmericana Fest was never conceived as only a booking exercise. Its mission is to honor the heritage, legacy, and contributions of Black artists making Americana and folk music in New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta. From its beginning, the organizers paired performance with history, storytelling, visual art, panels, songwriter showcases, and opportunities for newer artists to be seen alongside culture bearers and established musicians. Waters has spoken explicitly about representation and mentorship: not simply opening a door, but leaving it open behind you.

So I didn’t walk into some neutral venue where a handful of Black musicians just happened to be on the same bill. I walked into the answer to a question that had been hanging in the air for years.

First, though, I had to get there.

Whatever reporting-trip ritual I thought I’d have fell apart at Loretta’s. I got there at 12:18, saw fourteen people ahead of me in line, another group still waiting on their food, and my first interview set for 12:30. I hadn’t eaten before leaving home. I was starving. I’d driven all the way to New Orleans to report my first story, and the idea of being late to my first interview because I needed a crabmeat beignet felt like the kind of thing I’d never live down.

The beignet lost.

Then I spent fifteen minutes circling The Broadside, looking for a place to park. By the time I finally found a spot, I’d let go of any hope that my first day reporting would look like anything but what it was. But once I stepped inside the festival, everything felt surprisingly put together.

The volunteers knew things.

That might sound small, but only if you haven’t been to enough events where every question gets met with a shrug and a vague promise to find someone who might know more. At BlackAmericana Fest, people actually knew what was happening. They pointed me where I needed to go. There was a quiet order to the whole thing that made it easy to settle in once I was inside.

You could see the care in other places too. Most of the folks behind the vendor tables were Black. There was a kid zone, so parents could actually enjoy the festival without juggling everything. Early in the day, the programming moved between the indoor and outdoor spaces without making the stages compete for attention. People could gather around one thing before moving to the next. Later, things overlapped a little, but for most of the afternoon, the schedule gave each performance room to breathe.

There was also something you couldn’t put on a schedule: the artists were everywhere. They weren’t hidden until five minutes before their sets or tucked away somewhere acting important out of sight. They watched other artists, sat in the audience, talked to people, and moved through the same spaces as everybody else. Waters once said artists leaving the first BlackAmericana Fest described it as a “warm hug.” Standing there two years later, I understood exactly what they meant.

The sense of community wasn’t happening because someone kept saying the word from a stage. People were just acting like one.

Tracee Perrin and the Voice Somebody Else Heard First

I interviewed Tracee Perrin sitting in front of flowers. I took a picture of them after we finished, mostly because her energy felt so much like them that I wanted to remember it right. They were full and bright without looking too put together, soft but not fragile. Perrin moved through the world the same way—warm, thoughtful, unhurried, even with a whole festival swirling around us.

Her musical life had never belonged to one genre. Janet Jackson was there. Motown was there. Country came through her mother. Rap came through her older brother. Later came Tracy Chapman, Patty Griffin, songwriting, Nashville, and eventually the collection of words people use to describe what she makes now.

Country pulled her toward harmony and storytelling, toward the emotional depth possible when a song can hold somebody’s life for three or four minutes. But one of the most revealing things Perrin told me was not about what she heard in other artists. It was about what other people thought they should hear from her.

When she was young, people expected Perrin to have a certain kind of soulful voice because she was Black. She resented it. She had not even had the chance to figure out what her own voice was before somebody else had attached a racial expectation to it.

That experience sits underneath any conversation about Black artists and genre. An industry does not always wait until the music is made before deciding where somebody belongs. Sometimes the expectation arrives years earlier, attached to the body of the person who might one day make it.

Perrin’s relationship to what the market wants has shifted over time. She knows that not chasing what sells might be part of why her career looks the way it does, but she also sounded less and less interested in measuring her life by how close it comes to the biggest dream she once had. The goal changed. What matters now is being able to keep writing and performing, making music that feels honest instead of music designed primarily to sell. There was liberation in the way she described that shift.

Talking with her made me see the festival’s mission in a new way. It is not enough to tell a Black artist, You can stand here too. If she gets onstage and still has to carry a list of expectations about what her Blackness should sound like, the room might be bigger, but it is not any freer. BlackAmericana Fest created the room. Perrin was interested in what she could sound like once she was inside it.

Bolton Serunjogi and the Geography of “Roots”

Bolton Serunjogi made the room geographically larger. Serunjogi is Ugandan-born and Texas-based, and his music can bring instruments such as the Adungu and Janzi beside acoustic guitar and storytelling that American listeners might readily recognize as folk. The easiest language for that is fusion: traditions meeting, sounds crossing, worlds being joined.

The longer we talked, the less satisfying that description became. Fusion acts like the important part is two things meeting, as if they were always separate. It almost never asks who decided they were separate in the first place.

Serunjogi’s way of talking about roots moved through people, memory, place, migration, and the musical environments that shape somebody before anybody starts naming genre. His perspective widened “roots” beyond an exclusively American geography. A root can move. People carry music. Instruments carry memory. A storytelling language does not become less rooted because its geography is complicated.

His understanding of folk came back, ultimately, to people—to your folk, the people around whom the music was learned, lived, remembered. I am from Mississippi. We say kinfolk without needing a seminar on the word. That part made immediate sense to me.

It also made BlackAmericana Fest’s New Orleans home feel less like a curious choice and more like part of the point. Waters has said one of the festival’s questions was where Americana fits inside New Orleans’s musical landscape, especially since country and Americana aren’t the first genres outsiders think of here. The festival doesn’t try to pull New Orleans away from jazz, brass, Creole, zydeco, blues, gospel, or any of the other traditions that belong to it. Instead, it asks what we see when those histories get to sit side by side, without pretending Black Southern music ever grew up in neat little boxes.

By the time I finished speaking with Serunjogi, the question I had brought to New Orleans had started changing. I had arrived wondering what Black artists were doing inside Americana.

“Inside” was beginning to feel like the wrong word.

The Kentucky Gentlemen Did Not Cross a Border That Was Never Inside Them

Then there were Derek and Brandon Campbell.

The first thing you should know about The Kentucky Gentlemen isn’t especially useful for music criticism, but I’m not about to pretend otherwise: they look like gods. They’re almost offensively beautiful, the kind of faces, clothes, and presence that should make people keep their distance—like folks that put together probably don’t want strangers wandering over.

Instead, people gravitated toward them. So did I.

The twins were funny, warm, easy to talk to, and fit right in with something I’d been noticing all day: the artists here weren’t interested in using visibility as a way to keep people at arm’s length.

Musically, The Kentucky Gentlemen live in a space where country, R&B, soul, and pop all fit. Crossover is one of those words that sounds like it explains something fast, but it misses the whole point. The influences they described were not separate territories. Brooks & Dunn and Boyz II Men could belong in one brother’s musical world; Jagged Edge and Kenny Rogers could occupy the other’s. This was not a story of two men raised inside one tradition who later discovered a second one and bravely crossed over. All of it had already been there. Authenticity made more sense to them than crossover.

Even their clothes made the point. They share a face, but their style makes sure nobody confuses sameness with identity: cowboy hat, scarf, pieces they’ve altered themselves, necklines changed, rhinestones added. They talked about taking clothes and making them their own.

I kept thinking about that after the interview. Take what comes to you. Don’t ask whether you’re supposed to want it. Make it yours.

When I asked what their blood harmonies let them say, the answer wasn’t really about technique. Sure, they can go a while without singing together and still find the blend again, easy as breathing, but the real answer was in everything they’ve shared: childhood, happiness, hurt, all those years of living the same life from two different places nobody else could stand in. The harmony carries their history before the words even have to.

That is what BlackAmericana Fest’s emphasis on multiplicity protects. If the only goal were to prove Black men can sing country music, The Kentucky Gentlemen could be flattened into evidence for a thesis and everybody could go home. They are much more interesting than that. Their music is not meaningful because it demonstrates that Blackness can fit inside country. It becomes more interesting once that question stops consuming all the oxygen and we get to hear them.

What Happens After You Correct the History?

Samantha Harden had been talking about the banjo all day by the time I reached her.

She was there representing the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, an organization she described to me, in the most official language possible, as a cultural heritage preservation organization. Then she laughed at how little that phrase actually tells somebody about the work.

What the organization is interested in is not simply proving that the banjo has African and Black roots. Harden started there because the history matters: the instrument was taken from Black people, used in caricature and mockery, and eventually folded into an American musical imagination that often forgot where it came from. But her question was the same one that had been underneath my own: once people know that, what comes next?

For Harden, you have to go further back than the theft.

“What culture were we talking about in the first place?” she asked.

She described enslaved Black people from different cultures coming together and creating something new with what they carried in their spirits, traditions, and practices. Gourds were grown. Instruments were built. People gathered even when laws told them they were not supposed to gather. They danced, played, connected with one another, and used the instrument as what Harden called both a channeling tool and a form of “joyful resistance.”

The reclamation, then, cannot end with identifying who invented what. It has to become practice again.

The Black Banjo Reclamation Project holds monthly community-building gatherings online and through local chapters. Harden is from Maryland, where chapters in Baltimore and Hyattsville meet regularly. Some people arrive having played for years. Others have never touched a banjo. Some learned its Black history days before walking into the room.

That difference in experience is not treated as a reason anybody should stay quiet. The organization can teach technique, Harden told me, but the instruction eventually comes back to something less institutional: let your spirit lead.

Play the instrument without treating every encounter with it like a performance. Hold it. Use it to move through anger, sadness, joy, exhaustion. Let it become a tool for taking care of yourself and accessing some part of yourself you may not have realized was there.

Harden described moments when her own emotions have felt too deep or strangely familiar, almost as if they echoed backward through time. She feels something related when she plays. Once she reaches the kind of flow state where the music seems to move through her rather than simply come from her hands, she does not experience the feeling as entirely individual.

That language could sound abstract if the organization’s work stopped there.

It doesn’t.

Reclamation also means earth and land. It means gourd-banjo building workshops and talking about the instrument as the product of an indigenous Black practice, where somebody could grow the material and then intentionally transform it into something capable of carrying sound. Harden pushed back hard against an idea she had encountered—that the handmade instrument was somehow later “improved” when manufacturing became industrial.

If somebody grew the plant, tended it, shaped it, and built an instrument from it with intention, she wondered, why would a factory-made object automatically represent improvement?

The question widened beyond banjos while she was answering it. Harden kept returning to slowness, intention, love, effort, care—to practices that do not become less sophisticated simply because industrial culture learned to produce them faster.

Then she used a word I had been circling all day:

de-gatekeeping.

Music, dance, and other creative practices, she argued, were once ordinary spiritual and communal practices before they became institutionalized and sold back to people as disciplines they could only participate in after the right training, lessons, money, or credentials.

People say, I can’t sing. I can’t dance. I can’t play.

Harden hears something bigger underneath the sentence: Who taught you participation had to be earned?

Her vision for the future of the banjo in Black communities therefore does not look primarily like bigger stages or more famous banjo players. She talked instead about people having access to instruments—even instruments they make themselves. Access to land where gourds can grow. Intergenerational skill-sharing spaces where crafts can pass between people. Communities where someone who does not play might dance, shake something, sing, listen, or contribute another way.

Most importantly, she wants to hear less “I can’t.”

Harden grew up Seventh-day Adventist and eventually left the church. What she still misses is something she considers increasingly difficult to find elsewhere: a genuinely intergenerational space. Church had put children, adults, and elders in the same room regularly enough that relationships could form across age. She sees something similar in the Black Banjo Reclamation Project gatherings, where people of different generations can make music, tell stories, teach one another, and simply spend time together.

“That is my Afrofuturism,” she told me. “That is my Afro-optimism.”

Not an imagined technological future, but people together. Land. Music. Skill. Elders and young people. Joy. The ability to participate without first proving expertise.

When I finally asked whether the goal was to recover a history or restore a relationship, Harden did not hesitate.

Restoration.

But she also returned to the word reclamation, because to claim something, as she understands it, means more than knowing intellectually that it belongs to you. It means being able to embody it.

That distinction mattered particularly to her as she thought about Black people—and Black femmes especially—who can be taught to disconnect from their own bodies, instincts, and expressions.

The work, she said, is to get the practice “back into your chest, back into your spirit, back into your bones, back into your soul.”

That was no longer historical correction. That was relationship.

And suddenly the educational side of BlackAmericana Fest felt less like the portion of the event that explains the music happening onstage and more like part of the same work. Waters has talked about learning the Black history of the banjo as something that unlocked her own relationship to the music. Harden was describing what happens when that unlocking becomes collective: when people do not merely learn that something was theirs but begin touching it, building it, playing it, teaching it, growing the material for it, and allowing it to belong to ordinary life again.

History matters.

But Harden was not trying to put Black people back into a footnote. She wanted the banjo back in their hands.

Elizabeth McCorvey Wants Black People to Be Allowed to Be Petty

Elizabeth McCorvey’s style leans witchy, emo, gothic. From across the festival, she looks like someone who knows exactly what she is about and probably has very little patience for foolishness. Then she speaks, and the impression widens. Her talking voice is sweet. She is warm, funny, deeply thoughtful, and grounded, with an ease that makes the darker aesthetic feel less like armor than simply another part of her. Somewhere in our conversation, she mentioned that she works as a psychotherapist when she is not making music, which made immediate sense.

McCorvey sometimes calls what she makes “bluesgrass.” I liked the word because instead of squeezing herself into a smaller box, she gave herself more room.

She explained that folk is still routinely imagined through an image that looks something like a white man holding an acoustic guitar. That does not adequately prepare someone for her. McCorvey has a big voice. She belts. There is bass in it. She sings in a bluesy way. She plays fiddle and banjo. There is personal writing, social commentary, political observation, humor, and enough room for a fiddle solo wherever she decides one belongs.

Under a narrow definition of folk, the result gets described as crossover. McCorvey’s argument was more direct: she is singing the way her people have sung from the beginning.

Her answer became even more interesting when I asked whether it mattered to her to make Black roots music without every song carrying the obligation to explain Black history.

“Yes,” she said.

She is a psychotherapist, so she has plenty to say about community, identity, and social psychology. She is also acutely aware of how often media centered on Black people becomes media centered on Black pain. McCorvey wants space for Black joy, but she also wants Black pettiness and Black mediocrity. She wants Black people allowed to make a bad decision, be wrong, do a bad job, and exist somewhere other than the poles of suffering and excellence.

“Sometimes I don’t want to be the voice,” she told me. “I want to be petty.”

That may have been one of the most important things anybody said to me all day, because representation can turn into its own burden when every person who finally gets in the room is expected to speak for everybody who looks like them. If Black Americana is only about correcting history, then every Black folk artist ends up standing onstage to prove a point instead of just making music.

McCorvey wants to make art. Sometimes that art has something politically urgent to say. Sometimes she wants to be petty. Both belong to a full human life.

The limitations of representation become obvious to her when she walks onto a stage carrying a banjo. People ask whether she has heard of Rhiannon Giddens. Of course she has. She loves Giddens and her work.

She also does not sound like her.

McCorvey said she is frequently compared to Tracy Chapman too, until eventually the comparison itself starts revealing the size of some listeners’ Black folk reference library. If somebody knows one Black woman in a musical tradition, the next Black woman gets pulled toward that same point of comparison whether the actual sound supports it or not.

Representation without variety just builds a slightly bigger box.

BlackAmericana Fest works against that simply by putting enough different people in the same place that the comparison becomes unsustainable. Tracee Perrin does not sound like Elizabeth McCorvey. McCorvey does not sound like The Kentucky Gentlemen. The Kentucky Gentlemen do not sound like Bolton Serunjogi.

Nobody needs them to.

McCorvey has also watched audiences make assumptions about the instruments themselves. A banjo brings one set of expectations. An acoustic violin can confuse people in ways her electric violin does not because the electric instrument already looks like permission to do something unusual. She talked about the possibility of banjo fitting alongside sounds people would more readily associate with AC/DC or the Rolling Stones—blues, blues-rock, pop, things an audience might not expect simply because it has inherited too small an imagination of the instrument.

“Black folks have been creative this whole time,” she said.

That was the whole festival, right there.

The Event Had to Be More Than a Stage

By mid-afternoon, Lisa Sanders and Brown Sugar were singing inside. They started immediately on time, which by then felt completely consistent with the organization of the day. Sanders led and Brown Sugar sang background vocals, though after a while those terms became less interesting than the way their voices met. They blended with the ease of people who knew how to leave space for one another.

They told the audience they had come to shower us with love, and they sounded like it. The best I could do in my notes was seasonal: fall, hot cocoa, a heated blanket on the coldest day. Their voices were elegant and passionate, but always soothing underneath. They sounded grown, not nostalgic—older artists whose years showed up as mastery, not distance.

They opened with “Angels,” a story-driven song in which different verses seemed to hold different lives together beneath a recurring idea of being watched over. Then the ending turned outward: the angels were watching over you. The song began closer to testimony and ended as an offering.

While Sanders and Brown Sugar were inside, Robin Barnes & The Fiya Birds were outside with a whole different energy: full band, tight, loud, more rock and pop to my ear. I kept trying to pin down the genre and then had to laugh at myself, since I’d spent all afternoon talking to people about how that impulse misses the point.

Maybe the band sounding good as hell was temporarily enough.

That freedom—to move between history and pleasure, analysis and just enjoying a band—is something the event seems to get. Waters and May didn’t build a symposium and tack on concerts. They built a festival where education, music, art, families, vendors, conversation, and joy could all fit in the same space. The official mission is about heritage and legacy, but the atmosphere matters just as much because culture doesn’t survive on information alone. It lasts because people actually want to be together inside it.

The kid zone mattered for the same reason. So did the vendors, the volunteers knowing where people were supposed to go, and artists sitting in other artists’ audiences. Those things do not look as impressive on a poster as a headliner’s name, but they are the things that turn programming into something you can build on.

That infrastructure also made room for an audience larger than the people whose history was being centered. From where I moved through the festival, the crowd looked at times roughly half Black and half white—not a demographic count, only my impression from looking around.

The center of the festival remained unambiguous. That is different from exclusivity. BlackAmericana Fest did not appear to be asking Black artists to make the event less Black so other people could feel welcomed into it. The history, framing, performers, and purpose remained specific, and people outside that identity could simply enter a space whose center had already been named. Waters has described the festival as both a place of belonging for Black artists and a way to bring more people into understanding the history and breadth of these traditions.

At one point, a white woman looked toward a seating area and said, “Hmm, a lot of empty seats.”

There was no performance happening there. A band had just been leaving soundcheck.

I wrote it down because it was wild how quickly emptiness turned into evidence before there was anything to measure. It made me wonder about the crowd’s rhythm. It was still afternoon, and some of the bigger names were set for later. I found myself wondering who was there for the whole festival and who would show up later for just one artist.

Festivals change populations over the course of a day. An empty seat at three can be full at seven. Someone who came for one performer can accidentally discover another, and that possibility is especially consequential here. A person may arrive knowing one Black folk musician and leave having seen ten.

What Happens When Everybody Can Finally See Everybody?

By late afternoon, the phrase I kept scribbling in my notes was a lot less sophisticated than anything I’d asked in an interview:

GIVING COMMUNITY.

Because that was what it felt like. The artists showed up for each other. They were kind. They talked to people. They watched sets that weren’t theirs. The Kentucky Gentlemen looked like they should be behind a velvet rope, but instead felt magnetic because of how easy they were to approach. Tracee Perrin sat in front of flowers, talking about the freedom that comes with letting go of somebody else’s idea of success. Elizabeth McCorvey carried this dark, self-possessed presence and then spoke with a sweetness that never required her to dull the sharper parts of herself.

And Samantha Harden’s vision of reclamation was happening around them too: people gathering, learning, exchanging history, making something communal out of traditions that had been separated from them.

Nobody was being flattened by proximity. They were becoming more distinct.

That might be the festival’s strongest accomplishment.

Waters and May started from a feeling that Black artists making this music could be isolated enough to wonder whether anybody else was out there. The answer now moves around The Broadside in cowboy hats, scarves, banjos, fiddles, full bands, songwriter rounds, panels, vendor tables, camera straps, children’s programming, conversations between sets, and musicians becoming audience members before becoming performers again.

The festival doesn’t make all those people the same. It gives them a place to be different together.

That matters because so much of representation stops at visibility. Put one person in the picture and call it inclusive. BlackAmericana Fest argues for something else: one Black artist can’t show an audience the full range of Black Americana because there’s no single Black Americana sound. You need another artist, and another, and another, until the audience finally loses the ability to treat any one of them as the exception.

That is when representation begins becoming community.

“What’s Aspiring About It?”

Sometime during the afternoon, a man approached me because of my camera. He asked what I was doing, and I told him about Before Page One. I told him about my book. Somewhere in the explanation, I called myself aspiring.

He looked at me.

“Well, you’re doing it, so what’s aspiring about it?”

I laughed, then looked at the camera that had made him walk over in the first place.

That morning, I had driven into New Orleans quietly aware that I was doing something I had never done before: my first reporting trip, my first artist interviews in the field, my first time walking into a cultural event with the responsibility of noticing enough to tell someone else what happened there.

By the afternoon, there were interview recordings from Tracee Perrin, Bolton Serunjogi, The Kentucky Gentlemen, Samantha Harden, and Elizabeth McCorvey. There were photographs of performers and strangers moving through the crowd, flowers I had photographed because they reminded me of the woman I had just interviewed, an abandoned crabmeat beignet, sweat on my skin, and notes full of artists who kept making the vocabulary I had arrived with feel smaller.

The man’s question stayed with me because, without knowing anything about the piece I was reporting, he had landed on the same problem. Sometimes the thing is already happening while the language surrounding it keeps placing it somewhere else: aspiring, emerging, breaking into, crossing over, reclaiming.

Maybe reclaiming was the one word on that list that had changed most for me.

Harden had made clear that reclamation was not passive nostalgia. It was not looking backward long enough to establish ownership and then putting history back on the shelf. It meant embodiment. Participation. Access. Getting something back into the hands, land, communities, spirits, and bones of people who had been separated from it.

BlackAmericana Fest exists because Black musicians were already making folk, roots, country, and Americana even while the culture around those genres acted like their presence was a surprise. Dusky Waters and Teena May didn’t invent those artists by bringing them together. They made it possible for them to see each other. They built a place where artists who might have wondered if anybody else was out there could look across a festival and find each other.

And then, crucially, they let them get on with being artists.

Not symbols. Not interchangeable evidence that Black people can play banjo. Artists.

Tracee Perrin could question what success needed to look like. Bolton Serunjogi could stretch the geography of roots. Derek and Brandon Campbell could make country, R&B, pop, and soul sound less like categories than memories. Samantha Harden could imagine reclamation not as a museum project but as Black people growing gourds, building instruments, making joyful noise, sharing skills across generations, and remembering that participation does not require permission. Elizabeth McCorvey could demand room for Black people to be politically sharp, musically expansive, completely wrong, or just petty. Lisa Sanders and Brown Sugar could make a room feel held. Robin Barnes & The Fiya Birds could make me stop caring what genre word I was supposed to write in my notebook because the band was playing too well for taxonomy to be the most interesting thing happening.

That is what BlackAmericana Fest accomplished in front of me. It honored the history without turning Black artists into reenactments. It taught without making the day feel like homework. It centered Blackness without asking everyone to be the same. It welcomed an audience without shifting the center for whoever walked in. It gave artists a chance to be seen, but maybe more importantly, a chance to see each other.

The first question had been whether anybody else was out there.

By the time I arrived, the answer was walking around everywhere.

On the drive into New Orleans, I thought I’d spend the day asking where Black people belonged inside Americana. By the time I left, that question felt too small to matter.

The artists had already been making the music.

The festival gave them room to hear one another.

The music was never crossing over.

The borders were.