Roots Rock

Roots rock is Rock music that consciously and predominantly incorporates elements of its musical predecessors and original (especially American) roots such as Country, Blues, Rhythm & Blues, Rock & Roll and American Folk Music, but also may include other American traditions such as the latin-tinged Tex-Mex or Cajun Music. It is closely related to other roots-influenced genres such as Country Rock, Southern Rock and the blues-laden Swamp Rock. As an approach blending different traditionally American music idioms with rock music, roots rock also has large overlaps with genres like Alt-Country and Americana.

Although the term itself grew out of a back-to-basics approach to solid rock in the mid-1980s, it is currently used to encompass much earlier bands and movements with similar aims. The most prominent acts of the first phase in the late 1960s were the Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Band, taking cues from Bob Dylan and even influencing British acts like The Rolling Stones on their late 1960s albums. Alongside southern rock and the less traditionalist Heartland Rock, roots rock continued to be influential in the 1970s with Link Wray, Little Feat and Ry Cooder as prominent acts. It faded from public interest somewhat in the late 1970s. The sound of the phase that established the term in the 1980s can be seen as a grittier, more conservative counterweight to the sonically more radical Heavy Metal or the more modernly electronic New Wave. Among the main artists were John Hiatt and Los Lobos. While in the current use Ry Cooder has come to epitomize the historically conscious, eclecticist nature of roots rock with his records of the early 1970s, the term also continues to be used for artists with similar preserving approaches to American music traditions and rock music – an ongoing endeavour that can, for instance, be observed in Bob Dylan’s, Levon Helm’s and some of Neil Young’s albums of the 2000s and 2010s.