FORT WORTH IS MAKING ITS CASE IN NASHVILLE.
There is something slightly strange about having to leave Fort Worth in order to explain Fort Worth to people, but that has essentially been the idea behind the Cowtown GitDown since it began. Every year, the city takes a group of musicians to Nashville during AMERICANAFEST, puts them on a stage in front of an audience already paying attention to roots music, songwriting and independent artists, and asks them to make the case for the city by simply sounding like themselves.
– WORDS BY JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM • PHOTO COURTESY OF HOPE GRAY
This year, Fort Worth returns for the sixth edition of the Cowtown GitDown on September 17 at Tennessee Brew Works, with eleven local artists performing across the day from 11:30 a.m. until 7 p.m.
The lineup is deliberately broad. Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter Abraham Alexander sits alongside Matthew McNeal, Marcel, Mollie Danel, Bolton Serunjogi, Simon Flory, Michael Lee & The Wartime Limousine, Cut Throat Finches, Lincoln Swanzy, TRVR? and Christian Carlos Carvajal & The 300. Taken together, it is less a neat survey of one particular Fort Worth sound than an argument that there probably isn’t one anymore.
That is partly what makes the event interesting. Americana can sometimes suggest a fairly narrow musical vocabulary from the outside, but Fort Worth’s relationship with roots music has always been messier than that. Country, folk, blues, rock and soul all sit close enough together here that musicians routinely move between them without appearing particularly concerned about where one ends and another begins. The Cowtown GitDown gives that ecosystem a national room in which to introduce itself.
Abraham Alexander
Bolton Serunjogi
Christian Carlos Carvajal
Visit Fort Worth describes the event as both a showcase and a piece of destination marketing, which sounds considerably less romantic than a room full of musicians playing songs, but the two ideas are connected. Cities spend enormous amounts of time attempting to invent identities for themselves. Music scenes tend to create them accidentally.
“When Fort Worth artists take the stage at AMERICANAFEST, they’re not just performing, they’re serving as ambassadors for a city with a deep, authentic music identity,” says Tom Martens, vice president of creative and music for Visit Fort Worth. “We’re dedicated to giving our local artists a national platform, and in doing so, we invite music fans, journalists, and industry leaders from across the country to discover the city that shaped the sound.”
The important part of that equation is the artists themselves. A city can tell people it has a music scene as often as it wants, but ultimately somebody has to make music worth paying attention to.
Cut Throat Finches
Lincoln Swanzy
.Marcel.
Matthew McNeal
Matthew McNeal sees the GitDown as an opportunity to put what is happening in Fort Worth directly in front of people who might otherwise never encounter it.
“Fort Worth gave me a foundation I couldn’t have built anywhere else; the community, the venues, and the people who show up for each other,” McNeal says. “Americana takes everything happening in Fort Worth and puts it directly in front of the people who need to see it.”
That matters because AMERICANAFEST is not simply another festival where people happen to be playing music. It brings artists into the same city as journalists, agents, labels, managers, radio programmers and other musicians, meaning a good performance can travel considerably further than the room where it happened.
For McNeal, it can also change the way people outside Texas imagine Fort Worth.
“Events like this change how people think about our city,” he says, “and for musicians trying to decide where to build a career and a life, that perception matters more than most people realize.”
mollie danel
simon flory
trvr
That is perhaps the bigger story behind the Cowtown GitDown after six years. Fort Worth has spent a long time existing beside cities with easier musical identities to explain. Austin has its mythology. Nashville has an industry built around songwriting. Dallas has historically been easier for outsiders to recognize as a major cultural center.
Fort Worth’s identity has developed differently. It is tied to independent venues, small rooms, musicians appearing on each other’s records and bills, and a community that has gradually become confident enough to stop measuring itself against somewhere else.
Taking eleven artists to Nashville cannot represent every corner of that community, but there is something valuable about Fort Worth repeatedly turning up in a national music-industry environment and saying, in effect, this is what is happening here right now.
And perhaps the most convincing part is that the eleven artists on the bill do not all sound as though they came from the same place.
