By Robert LaSalle
Inspired by a Conversation with Uncle Pete
July 13, 2025
Burnt coffee beans grinded into powder, distilled to their strongest essence and then heavily diluted with water is known across the world as “Americano.” This is an apt metaphor for “Americana” music. In order to be considered Americana music, a song must be written in either 3/4 or 4/4 time signature with no diminished chords, no transitory chords, no embellished chords other than occasional 7ths, and the minor chords must be either 6m, 2m or 3m. Americana lyrics are allowed to be clever, but not poetic. (Further reading on this subject: study William Blake to learn the differences between clever rhymes and poeticism.)
All of these same rules apply to almost all “American Roots Music,” including folk, blues, bluegrass and country. If gospel music is considered roots music, these rules become lax, as gospel musicians embellish the hell out of chord progressions and rhythms, and truly the Bible is full of poeticism even as most of its followers prefer the watered down version.
If jazz is considered roots music, none of the aforementioned rules apply. Jazz may be the only genre in the history of music which is expected to break all of these rules. Jazz borrows from roots music, and roots music borrows from jazz music, but among all of the genres I will attempt to dissect and discuss, jazz is the only unmistakably singular genre within the so-called “Roots” category, which is why I would not consider jazz to be roots music at all.
The caveat to my seemingly disparaging sentiments about roots music is — rules are not necessarily bad. Without the rules that govern our weird world, rocks might float away and rain might fall upwards. And where would our roots be without gravity? And how could anything grow from our roots if they never received rainwater?
But as life evolves, life breaks the rules. Newton sat under the apple tree looking downwards at an apple, but he paid no attention to the force that pushed the apple tree upwards defying gravity. That’s the force I’m interested in: Life Force. The roots of the tree are incredibly important to sustaining its growth and evolution. The roots are absolutely necessary to the sustenance and maintenance of life. But the roots are just a small part of it.
The Christian who only quotes the Bible and the atheist who only quotes Scientific American articles are not unlike the roots musicians and roots audiences who refuse to see what’s evolving in front of and behind their own faces. Within every human, there are roots, a trunk reaching into the heavens, branches reaching out in every direction along the way, and leaves which capture all the light and convert it into sustenance. And the fruit of our labors falls back down onto the earth sustaining life ever-evolving.
Every artist must know their roots. I must’ve been 7 years old when I started playing piano duets with my dad at dinner parties. I played oscillating fifths on the lower register while my dad played fast, showy blues scales up and down the keyboard. At a very young age, I understood that what my dad and I were doing was more like a magic trick than an art form. We were playing 3-chord “boogie woogie” dressed to impress. Both my dad and I could’ve played the same thing while blindfolded and being held upside-down by our feet. Perhaps we should’ve kept rabbits in both of our sleeves to release as an encore. But no one heard my dad’s actual talent as he unwound in his little home studio after work each day, where his actual compositions defied all the rules and carried him to far off places.
You can’t grow up in North Alabama without honoring its great musical legacy. And I worked in plenty of studios in North Alabama before and after moving to Nashville. I started working at The Ryman Auditorium in 2005 when I was 18 years old and still based in Murfreesboro. As a stagehand, I obsequiously served a plethora of artists and bands I admired and adored. I lived off of Chet Atkins Place in 2007 back when musicians could still afford to live on Music Row. I walked past RCA Studio B every day. I paid homage to the great roots musicians who unearthed the ground I walked upon. I recorded all over music row. I was honored to be so close to greatness. I recorded in the same room on the same console where Neil Young’s Harvest was recorded. I arranged, produced and performed on all kinds of roots recordings. I played my original music down the street on Demonbreun then sat in on piano with the Irish band at Dan McGuinness. I played my original music at 12th & Porter, 3rd & Lindsley, The Rutledge, Mercy Lounge, The Basement and many more original music venues. Again, I bowed to Chet Atkins each day when I moved downtown next to his statue. I played guitar, banjo, mandolin and dulcimer on many of my own recordings and other artists I produced. I moved to West Nashville where I lived with 7 other musicians in a rundown mansion from the 70’s. We threw quadruple-kegger “Zombie Mansion” parties with live music on the weekends with audiences of up to two or three hundred people. Then I moved to East Nashville where the real artists lived before The Great Gentrification of Nashville was completed and all of Nashville’s artists were served the same fate as those who’d been born with melanin in their skin.
See Picasso’s early work and notice how he’d mastered every style that came before him? A lot of so-called avant-garde musicians have forgotten this tidbit in their attempts to create “newness.” I could write an entire book on Rachmaninoff’s influence on American music. I’m often perturbed to see him left out of our music’s history, presumably for some post-mcCarthyist paranoid reason. It’s interesting to note how similar Russian “roots” music is to ours except that 1 and 4 chords are minor while the 5 chord stays major. These Russian melodies are exactly like our folk melodies with the exception that they follow a minor scale instead of a major one. These minor chords and melodies perceived by western ears as “dreary” or “sad,” are the same chords and melodies the red army would’ve been singing while celebrating around a barrel fire in east Berlin in 1945.
Many First Nations people’s ritual melodies follow similar “roots” melodies and even imply similar chord progressions of 1, 4 and 5. Granted, the native people of our country did not feel the need to create chords. Their melodies and rhythms were enough for them, and perhaps they were so rooted to this earth, their roots spread across the whole continent. If modern “roots” music dug that deep and spread that far, I’d have to reassess “roots” music entirely.
1901 Queen Victoria dies, marking the end of the Victorian Era; President McKinley dies and Teddy Roosevelt ascends to the presidency, marking the beginning of the progressive era; and something else happens in 1901: people start writing about this strange phenomena known as “Jazz” coming out of New Orleans. Platitudes about the “melting pot” in American culture may have been beaten into the ground, but this magical land where the Mighty Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico really was occupied by the French, Spanish, English and Americans, and really was home to every First Nations tribe of the southeast at one time or another. And it was a place where even African slaves were allowed to celebrate… sometimes. Notably, every Sunday people of all ethnicities danced and played music together in the square. This combination of European instruments with African and Native American rhythms really is the “roots” of American music.
Often considered the highest culture by music snobs the world over, Mahler might be the Finnegans Wake of music. It’s interesting to note that even as Mahler broke all the rules and conventions of his predecessors, he often alluded to his “roots.” Buried in his first symphony’s slow movement, “Ziemlich langsam” sounds like a folk song straight out of the ground. It sounds like the world’s roots. You could sing it in Hebrew or German or Czech and it’d be Hebrew or German or Czech. Since the 1 chord and the 4 chord are minor, it could even be Russian. You could make the 1 chord major while keeping the 4 chord minor and it would sound Celtic. Make all three chords major and it becomes a traditional patriotic folk song. Add some finger-picked instruments, and it’s bluegrass. Strum the chords while singing the melody with either 1 or 4 major or minor, and it’s American folk. Slow it down, shuffle the beat and fall into the pocket rhythmically and it’s American blues.
Since I was 9 years old, I always played the same guitar lick when tuning my guitar to “Drop D.” In 2017 during a cowriting session in Los Angeles, I played the lick to make sure my guitar was in tune and my cowriter said, “THAT! Play that!” That stupid lick became my first Rakefire song which was featured in numerous films and television shows. I realized then that people who weren’t seeped in their own “roots” still sought to find and to hear that grit, that dirt, that twang that came so naturally to me.
Riff-based, 3-chord music is like a magic trick. Once you know the trick, it’s not so impressive anymore. It’s just disappointing to me when people I consider intelligent, empathic and open-minded tell me how impressed I should be by another riffy, 3-chord song with a moderately clever lyrical hook. “I know that trick already,” is what I want to tell them, but I know that’s never perceived well. The truth is, I just want to hear something new, and that’s the only reason I make music in the first place. I want to hear it. I want to feel it. Whether I’m doing it or somebody else is doing it doesn’t matter to me as much as that it takes me somewhere I haven’t been before.
Believe me or don’t, but I’d bet my life on anybody willing to pay the bills for 3 months to leave me in a room far away from people with an upright bass, a high-end acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo and dulcimer, two ribbon mikes, one condenser mike, a stereo outboard compressor and 2 preamps that I’ll write, record, sing, perform and mix a Grammy-worthy 10-song “roots” album in 3 months. Conversely, I do not have the same confidence in every genre. Roots music is just easy music. That’s all I’m trying to convey here. Being excited about roots music is like being excited to have feet. Let us spend our lives focused entirely on our feet and see how far we get. They’re made for movement, aren’t they? We ought not dwell on them, nor should we disparage them, for they are quite necessary. In fact, I’d like to take this moment to remind myself how much I cherish having feet. I do not wish to lose them. It’s also come to my attention that many people of earth fetishize feet. That too, I do not disparage. To each their own. They’re aptly designed to carry me far and wide through this life, and that’s all I have to say about feet.
I lived in New Orleans just long enough to realize that nothing evolves in New Orleans. It’s a Catch-22, because what I love about New Orleans is the same thing that keeps it stuck. The extremes people go through to keep the traditions alive is what makes it such a unique city. But the creation of these uniquely New Orleans traditions in the 19th and 20th centuries was in defiance of all traditions before them. The genesis of these great traditions was openly and adamantly hostile towards all traditions which came before them, and that is what makes them great traditions. The invention of jazz was the breaking of all musical traditions. While I was in New Orleans, I had friends at UNO majoring in “Jazz Studies” who practiced their “jazz scales” all night and day, and who insisted on romanticizing the “purity” of the art form. It’s ironic though, isn’t it? I think I’m closer to the “purity” of jazz when I play the piano so irreverently that my fingers bleed all over the keyboard. We practice to forget the rules. That’s jazz to me. But I have two heads on this subject. I am simultaneously grateful to walk down Frenchman and hear second line grooves and wild horns while looking up at the Spanish-French-American architecture and smelling the red beans and rice. I am grateful that someone, somewhere, is preserving a great tradition. As much as I am compelled to emphasize the importance of growth and evolution, I am grateful that someone is preserving our roots.
I repeatedly paid homage to the Mississippi Delta. I spent time at the real crossroads. And I visited Robert Johnson’s many alleged graves. I’m reminded watching home videos from my teenage years and early adulthood that much of the soundtrack to my life was Robert Johnson and Chopin. Perhaps the only common thread between them is how personal their music was — and is. As great as Handel was, he obeyed a lot of rules. Great baroque pianists of my generation say that playing Chopin is like reading a personal diary. A lot of them refuse to play Chopin. It’s too personal for baroque people, because they like law and order, rules and structure and convention. And that’s fine. I’m glad a few people exist to preserve the great baroque artists, none more so than Bach. But Chopin’s my heart, and maybe my heart is more important to me than my brain. And the difference between Eric Clapton playing the blues and Robert Johnson playing the blues is obvious. When I listen to Robert Johnson, I believe him when he says there’s a hellhound on his trail.
There were no rules for blues. Robert Johnson was breaking all of the rules of music. It’s funny how quickly the old rebel becomes the new paradigm. Every blues artist who came after Robert Johnson was one degree removed from the heart of blues. By the time my dad and I were playing “boogie woogie” for white people at a dinner parties, it was just a copy of a copy of a copy. All throughout history, this happens. Thomas Paine returns to the country he inspired to create, and already America’s rebellious heart had hardened into a materialistic nihilism hung from a star spangled banner. Even within the first few decades of our existence as a country, we’d already decided not to keep evolving as people unless we were dragged into it kicking and screaming. The ideals of Mother Liberty became like treble clef-shaped pools on the top of hotels on Music Row; like 8th notes painted on sidewalk benches commemorating where musicians once lived before Nashville tore down all its historic studios to build high-rise condominiums named after Nashville musicians, destroying all of Nashville’s culture and music in a city musicians could no longer afford to live in.
If my comparing art with huge world events seems obtuse, please consider the singular event which inspired American colonialists to unite, rebel and ultimately create a new world paradigm. John Adams said “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” It was not a politician who inspired this country into existence. It was not a war hero who inspired this country into existence. He was an artist, a friend of William Blake and Mary Wollstonecraft who knew the rules of the old world better than any American colonialist possibly could, because he was born in the old world. He dreamed up an idea that neither Ben Franklin, George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson had dared to dream. Thomas Paine was first and foremost an artist. His infinite imagination and aestheticism had many branches which reached higher and further than anything which stood before him. And upon his return from France, he was horrified to see the country he’d dreamed up had already distilled itself to its essence and watered itself down.
We like being the symbol of an evolving world without the inconvenience of change. Perhaps that’s what our minds feel when they’re presented with something as of yet unknown. Our minds feel inconvenienced by newness. We like our comfortable beds, our hotbeds of apathy. Why would we seek anything outside of our routine? Change requires effort, and effort requires change. The algorithms know what we like, and they feed us the world we want to see and hear. Spotify gives us a slim sliver of its “top tier” “artists” paid for by 4 major recording conglomerates. The news is catered to us to reinforce all of our biased beliefs. Television and film recommendations abound with each one based on the last thing we watched. And judging by the ads and billboards and smells along the highway, you’d think it was normal to eat deep-fried factory farmed animals three or four times a day. The algorithms feed us this sense of normalized insanity in the world while we normalize the world’s insanity. We can’t break this cycle until we step outside of it.
Seeing, hearing or feeling anything new requires more effort now than ever, and why would we want to expend any of our valuable time and energy seeking anything new when we could just as easily sit and eat trash, watch trash, listen to trash, build more trash, dump more trash in the ocean?
Again, the answer already exists in nature. Life thrives in its diversity. The vibrant colors and sounds are all Mother Nature’s attempts to reach further and higher. Nothing in this world is one color or one sound. Life is aspiring to be everything in Mother Nature’s aspiration to know herself as everything. Her roots are meticulously designed to maximize our efforts to expand, to grow and to evolve. Look and listen to what’s grown up from these roots! There are infinite possibilities above ground. Once your roots are stable and sturdy, try looking upwards and outwards. You could be missing out on the magnificence of life. Know your roots, and then see where they grow.