The Americans

American music brought to you by The Americans

An interactive Folk, Blues, and Rock concert performed by The Americans band.

The Americans band

The story:

The Group

The Americans are an original rock and roll band with deep roots in traditional American folk and blues. In their lecture performance on traditional American music, the band takes up banjo, fiddle, slide guitar, and harmonica to faithfully illustrate the origins and influences of pre-war American music. We have brought our program to over two dozen embassies, consulates, and universities.

The Program

The Americans present the saga of rural recording artists who became unlikely stars in the emerging genres of country and blues, setting the standard for popular music today. Performing faithful renditions of various styles of early blues, folk, and country, the band discusses the unprecedented melding of international cultures and musical genres precipitated by the recording industry boom of the 1920s and ‘30s.

Our program is both a lecture on the history of music and a musical performance. We explore the histories of the various styles of music that contributed to American popular music, as well as the people who brought them to the United States, and faithfully perform music in those styles in between.

The program runs 45 to 60 minutes, including a question and answer period. Our plan is to present our program in a way that is unique to the location’s musical culture, and to involve local traditional musicians whenever possible.

The Purpose

While many understand that today’s popular music evolved from older, traditional styles, few have been introduced to the diverse immigrant groups and little-known rural communities that contributed to the creation of modern popular music as an institution. Our goal is to familiarize audiences with a singular time in history that came to affect today’s popular music around the world. Traditional American music is a testament to the advantages and mutual gains of cultural cross-pollination, democracy, and multiculturalism. Our lecture performance lends context and deeper understanding of traditional American music, and offers our audiences an opportunity to see it performed authentically, as one might have in its heyday.

We work closely with faculty in both American Studies and Music departments to fashion our lecture around the arc of their courses. If our audience contains music students, we can work together on a piece of music we can perform together on stage.

Grammy winning producer T Bone Burnett once said that heritage music is to the United States what wine is to France. We hope that by teaching audiences about the influences of various cultures on American music, and conveying the enormous influence those humble beginnings have had on popular music worldwide, we will increase their appreciation for both American culture and other cultures around the world.

Artist bio:

Frank Fairfield is a multi-instrumentalist, music teacher, and record collector. He spent many years performing old-time American folk music around the country and the world performing at such notable venues as the Royal Albert Hall and the Kennedy Center, playing at notable festivals such as Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and the Newport Folk Festival, and providing music for film and television including the animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall.

Coming from a family of American folk musicians going back at least four generations, Zac Sokolow plays banjo and fiddle and sings, playing a combination of old-time ballads, gospel songs, blues, fiddle tunes and banjo instrumentals. He has toured the world with Los Angeles roots-rock band The Americans. He’s played at Hyde Park Festival, Stockholm Americana Festival, Bristol Rhythm and Roots, recorded with Jack White and T Bone Burnett, and worked in musical diplomacy on behalf of the Department of State, performing all over South-East Asia and Europe.

Zac Sokolow and Frank have toured for years together, and appeared together on BBC's American Epic, and NPR's Tiny Desk Concert.