A Milwaukeean’s ‘Life in Americana Music’

Alt-country insider Tamara Saviano will discuss her latest book at Boswell.

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Books

“I’m still a Milwaukee girl,” says Tamara Saviano. After trading the Cream City for Nashville’s Music Row 30 years ago, Saviano earned a Grammy for producing Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster plus two other Grammy nominations. She won the Americana Music Association Album of the Year for producing a Guy Clark tribute LP and awards on the film festival circuit for her documentary on that singer-songwriter. She produced recordings for Kris Kristofferson, advised Ken Burns during the production of his PBS series “Country Music” and authored several books. Her latest is a memoir, Poets and Dreamers: My Life in Americana Music.

Her formative musical education in Milwaukee was eclectic. “I fell in love with music through Summerfest. I saw a lot of artists and different genres there,” Saviano recalls. She danced at Park Avenue, tended bar at the Lost Dutchman punk club in Sydney Hih and worked in marketing for the MOR-ish WMIL and WOKY.

Her turn toward Americana came while working at WMIL-WOKY. The stations’ music director “got hundreds of CDs—he’d make piles on his desk and go ‘Ugh!’ and throw some of them into a corner of the office. Everything he threw away is what we’d call Americana today—Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Jason and The Scorchers. I’d retrieve them, and they became the core of my CD collection,” she says, as well as a turning point in her professional life.

Great American Music

In 1995, the year Saviano left Milwaukee, the Gavin Report, a radio industry trade paper, launched its Americana Music Chart and four years later, the Americana Music Association was formed. Saviano landed a job in Nashville with Capitol Records (“I didn’t like the music business,” she says) before becoming an editor at Country Music magazine and a job with the Great American Country cable network. She worked as Guy Clark’s publicist and when John Prine introduced her to Kristofferson in 2002, she went to work for the great singer-songwriter until his retirement in 2020.

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“Americana sounds like a big tent,” she says. “To me, it’s artists based in roots music writing their own songs, playing their own instruments. Like rock and roll, you know it when you hear it.”

Saviano plans to move back to Milwaukee in another year or so, and is working on a novel, historical fiction about Mary Nohl and her circle of artist friends from ‘40s-‘50s Wisconsin.

Milwaukee folksinger Will Branch will interview Saviano at Boswell Book Company, 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 27. “I’ll tell some stories, maybe read a little bit from Poets and Dreamers,” she says.

Buy Poets and Dreamers on Amazon here.

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