The Americana Music Organization meets for its well-established annual convention and music festival in the greater Nashville area September 9–13, providing conference sessions for industry professionals with city-wide performances for roots music fans. The birth of the organization and its subsequent growth can be traced to a meeting of volunteers in Austin during South by Southwest in 1999. The first convention was held in Nashville in September 2020, with the Awards show added two years later.
Tamara Saviano was present from the beginning as the dream became a reality. Though not a musician herself, Saviano has multiple layers of involvement in all aspects of the music industry. She authored Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark, which won the Louis Black Lone Star Award from SXSW Film Festival in 2021. She has also been nominated for three Grammys so far in her career, with a win for producing Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster in 2005.
Saviano is most likely the only person who could tell her story adequately, tracing her entrance into the industry, her move to Nashville, and her interaction with some of the best-loved artists in Americana Music. For her recent publication Poets and Dreamers: My Life in American Music, published this summer, she not only drew on her own treasure trove of memories, but engaged in extensive interviews with the singers, songwriters, movers, and shakers with whom her life has intertwined.
Calling it “part memoir and part oral history,” Saviano said, “I’m weaving in my own journey through Americana with what was happening with the building of community.” It is that idea of community she most wanted to explore in the book. “I wanted it to be heartfelt and nostalgic,” she said. “I wrote this book for a very specific audience—the people in our Americana Music community.”
Most amazing, perhaps, is her sheer productivity, keeping multiple projects going at once.
“I have to prioritize,” she explains. “Sometimes something I’m working on will have to wait until I finish something else. I can’t really multi-task on the things I do, so I have to carve out time. . . . I’m a good planner and organizer, so I usually have a year scheduled in advance. I know what’s going to happen every month for a year. People do try to upset my apple cart, but I don’t let them.”
The book reveals how, through her interactions with people in her music community, projects seemed to find her. For several years, she worked as publicist and managed the record label for Kris Kristofferson—until his death in 2024. “He did not have a manager,” said Saviano. “As we used to say, ‘Kris is unmanageable’–because he was the smartest person in any room and did not need management.”
While she kept other projects going, she says, “Kris always was my number one. If I needed to be with Kris, everybody else had to wait. He was my main source of income and my first client.” In one of the most tender parts of the book, she describes her close relationship with Kristofferson and with his family, particularly as his memory and his health began to fail him.
Poets and Dreamers reads like a Who’s Who in Americana music, as Saviano interacted with major acts and rising stars; however, rather than experiencing a tell-all vibe, her readers—the ones for whom she intended the book—are more likely to see Saviano’s narrative paralleling their own musical experiences—film screenings, tribute concerts, AmericanaFest appearances. She succeeds in making the book about her music community.
In addition to her interaction with recording artists, she also acknowledges her close friendship with others in supporting roles on the professional side of the industry, such as Craig Havighurst (at whose wedding she served as an usher), and his colleagues at WMOT Jessie Scott and Shilah Morrow. Asked about some of the people she mentored who went on to prominent roles in the industry—such as singer songwriter Kelsey Walden or Maria Ivey of IVPR—she was quick to avoid credit for their success, adding, “It’s always been my policy to work with people I think are better than me so I can learn from them.”
Saviano shows no signs of slowing down as projects continue to find her. She now runs Truly Handmade Records, the late Guy Clark’s label, with Shawn Camp’s The Ghost of Sis Draper set for release September 13. She met Camp, who she says is like a brother, when the two were in their twenties and she was working in radio in Milwaukee.
“We’ve worked on many projects together,” she said. “This is just the latest. Every time I think we’re finished, something happens.” The album is a perfect fit for Saviano and the label, a album of songs co-written by Camp and Clark revolving around the character Sis Draper.
Saviano is less involved now with the AmericanaFest, spending the time reconnecting with many of the friends chronicled in her book. She will appear at a book signing at Grimey’s on Tuesday, September 9, at 4 pm promoting Poets and Dreamers. Singer-songwriter Laurel Lewis will also perform at the event. With this book tour and work on her next book under way, AmericanaFest week in Nashville is a great opportunity to cross paths with Saviano and to pick up a copy of a book. Readers may want to check out the companion play list she has curated on Spotify as well.