Folk Alliance International Held International Folk Music Awards Tonight, Kicking Off 38th Annual Conference
Best of the year nominees and winners:
Artist of the Year
Dobro master Abbie Gardner;
* I’m With Her
* Carsie Blanton,
“hopeful, impassioned” songwriter Crys Matthews;
The “beautiful, soulful, exquisitely simple, and totally essential” (Bandcamp Daily) music of Ordinary Elephant
Sam Robbins, who has played the Kerrville, Falcon Ridge and Philadelphia Folk Festivals.
Album of the Year Nominees (winner marked with an asterisk)
Arcadia (Alison Krauss & Union Station, Down the Road Records)
CHURCH (Flamy Grant, Shamus Records/Palm Valley Music)
Room On The Porch (Taj Mahal & Keb’ Mo’, Concord Records)
Reclamation (Crys Matthews)
* Wild and Clear and Blue (I’m With Her, Rounder Records)
Woody At Home: Volumes 1 + 2 (Woody Guthrie, Shamus Records)
Song of the Year
“Ain’t Afraid To Die” (Written and Performed by Woody Guthrie)
“Crying In The Night” (Written by Stevie Nicks; Performed by Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham)
“I BOUGHT ME A PRESIDENT” (Written by Cathy Fink & Tom Paxton; Performed by Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer)
“Room On The Porch” (Written by Kevin R. Moore, Henry St. Claire Fredericks, Jr., Ruby Amanfu, Ahmen Mahal; Performed by Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo’, Ruby Amanfu)
* “Sleeves Up” (Written and Performed by Crys Matthews)
“Sisters Of The Night Watch” (Written by Aoife O’Donovan, Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz; Performed by I’m With Her)
Global Folk Album Award, in partnership with Songlines Magazine
At the Feet of the Beloved (Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali, Real World Records)
Bagola (Da Kali, One World Records)
Niepraudzivaya (Hajda Banda)
Tales of Earth and Sun (Rastak)
* Värav / Vārti / Vartai (The Baltic Sisters, CPL-Music)
Vié Kaz (Votia, ajabu!)
Hip-hop artist and TV personality Big Freedia, known for her “radically inclusive, celebratory performances” (NPR); and 2025 GRAMMY Award-winner Tank (of Tank and the Bangas), both of New Orleans, are the conference’s 2026 keynote speakers. The keynote will be live-streamed on Folk Alliance International’s YouTube channel at noon Central.
Panelists who will participate in programming include Ani DiFranco, Gina Chavez, Irma Thomas, Leyla McCalla, NPR Music writer and renowned author Ann Powers, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings executive director Maureen Loughran, American Routes’ Nick Spitzer, Kyshona, and many more.
The conference’s theme in 2026 is Rise Up.
Highlights of programming at the conference include:
* Songs that Carry Us: Indigenous Perspectives on Folk Tradition
* Beyond “Woke”: Rethinking Lead Belly in the Era of Cowboy Carter
* Face the Music: Collective Power for Equitable Action
* Harmonizing for Change: Organizing for Impact – Lessons from the Field
* Radio Silence: Keeping Folk Music On-Air & In-Concert Despite Lost Federal Funding
* Human Art in a Generative AI Age
Folk Alliance International previously unveiled the lineup of Official Showcases, consisting of 150-plus artists representing 34 countries or countries of origin.
FAI has added several new Official Showcase Artists to the lineup, including:
Highlights of Official Showcases:
* NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert and Newport Folk Fest alums, The Milk Carton Kids, who “sing with harmonies steeped in the great duos of days gone by, like The Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel” (NPR Music)
* Two-time GRAMMY winners Lost Bayou Ramblers, who were featured in the PBS show American Epic and whose evolution as a progressive Louisiana French band rooted in Cajun traditions continues to excite, challenge, and redefine both genre expectations as well as cultural preconceptions;
* Leyla McCalla, whose “magnificently transparent music holds tidings of family, memory, solitude and the inexorability of time: weighty thoughts handled with the lightest touch imaginable” (New York Times);
* Bruce Sudano, hitmaker whose songs have been recorded by Donna Summer, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, and Michael Jackson;
* Two-time GRAMMY winners Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience, whose collaboration with Randy Newman was featured in the Disney film The Princess and the Frog;
* The “electrifying” (NPR) San Francisco songwriter Chuck Prophet, who recently recovered from stage four lymphoma;
* Kyshona, whose music conveys a “righteous conviction and a strong sense of her own voice” (NPR Music);
* Pieta Brown, “self-styled poetess, folk goddess and country waif [whose] music resonates with a seductive simplicity and lyrical grace” (BBC);
* key Egyptian revolutionary, rock artist, and human rights defender Ramy Essam, now living in exile in Sweden and Finland;
* Oh Boy Records artist Emily Scott Robinson