Americana Up The Wazoo

Broadcast 1st June 2016. (Click on this link then find the section of the programme Americana)

If you’ve been watching Martin Scorsese's HBO music biz drama, Vinyl, you will have heard country star Sturgill Simpson’s theme tune. It backs the grainy opening credits featuring dancing, drug taking and guitars. Alright, so Scorsese has always been adventurous with his music choices; he practically invented using pop music to soundtrack movies in Mean Streets. But this time he’s part of a growing trend of TV producers using country, blues and folk music to lend rootsy authenticity to their shows.

Back in 1999, when The Sopranos co-opted Woke Up This Morning by Brixton's own Alabama 3, something changed. Remember, The Sopranos wasn’t set in Tennesse or Mississippi but New Jersey. It could have easily gone for something more urban to reflect that; a bit of hip hop, some electronica. The fact that it didn’t was a stroke of genius.

Breaking Bad’s meth-dealing high school teacher Walter White was brilliantly summed up by the show’s theme music featuring sleazy bottleneck slide guitar, written by composer David Porter. Its spin-off, Better Call Saul (also set in Albuquerque, New Mexico) has music supplied by R&B trio Little Barrie. They offer a jaunty tremelo-arm led tune theme which is made no less authentic by the fact that the band hail from Nottingham.

Louisiana-based dramas, like vampire romp True Blood and Good Cop/Mad Cop series True Detective understandably use genuine country artists for their themes. The former uses Jace Everett’s guilty pleasure romp Bad Things against a, you guessed it, grainy stream of images juxtaposting swamps, blood and racy underwear.

The Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson tour de force that is True Detective uses alt-country husband and wife duo The Handsome Family’s Far From Any Road over a grainy montage of… oh you get the picture. Actually The Handsome Family are brilliantly qualified for this sort of thing as they have over 20 years form of performing songs about murder suicide and ghosts. Cheers!

Now some of these shows have the excuse that their settings are the places where this music originates. So what about Boardwalk Empire? In a show set in Atlantic City in the 1920s, you’d expect to hear the Charleston or some rag time. Instead you hear distorted electric guitars playing bluesy Americana. Thanks, The Brian Jonestown Massacre. When asked why he’d chosen a theme tune played on instruments which didn’t even exist in Prohibition-era America, series creator Terence Winter said, “I look at it as… a 90-second intro and then you have all the 20s you want.”

Of course, the daddy of all Box Set drama went one further. None-more-urban city under a microscope crime drama, The Wire used an obscure album track by alt-Hollywood godfather Tom Waits, and got it covered by different Americana artists: Season 1: The Blind Boys of Alabama, Season 2, Waits himself, Season 3 the Neville Brothers…

So what’s it all about? Why is American TV drama leaving the cities behind when it comes to theme music? Of course, there are dramas that eschew Americana-flavoured theme tunes – imagine Game of Thrones with a pedal steel guitar or House of Cards with a country fiddle. But largely, if it’s gritty authenticity you want – and let’s face it, what tanned Hollywood TV executive sitting by the pool doesn’t want that? – then it’s Americana all the way.