On Sam Barber’s AMA Win for Breakthrough Country Artist

On Monday, May 25th, the most unimportant awards show to country music, the American Music Awards, happened at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Morgan Wallen won the Best Male Country Artist, Ella Langley Best Female Country Artist and Best Country Song (“Choosin’ Texas”), and Megan Moroney’s Cloud 9 won Best Country Album. Zac Brown Band also won for Best Country Duo or Group—a rather wild pick, though perhaps a nod to their recent residency at The Sphere in Vegas.

Zac Brown winning anything in 2026 really tells you all you need to know about the American Music Awards. But the win that has seemed to stir the most interest, and that has some pontificating that it is some sort of big breakthrough moment or transformational shift in country is Sam Barber winning the AMA for Breakthrough Country Artist over Tucker Wetmore and Zach Top.

Hey, good for Sam Barber. He seems like a well put together young man, has some good songs for sure, and resides outside of the mainstream Nashville power structure that usually preordains such wins for whoever is next on the conveyor belt out of Music Row, not someone like Sam Barber who doesn’t even sniff country radio play, and isn’t considered for country music’s other major awards.

But where does this rate on the scale of the big breakthroughs from Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, Zach Bryan, or even Zach Top who lost to Sam Barber? It’s hard to say it rates there at all. Sam Barber’s big breakout happened a couple of years ago via support from TikTok, and if anything, he’s now coasting a little bit, and cashing in with this AMA win.

Again, they’re just the AMAs, and though some are making a big deal since it’s a fan-voted award, in some ways that’s what makes it the most uninteresting. Fan-voted awards are more a measure of who is most effective at activating their fan bases as opposed to a true barometer of public sentiment. Sure, the people spoke for Sam Barber. But the truth is the majority of people had no idea the AMAs even happened on Monday, and even fewer care.

That’s not to say Sam Barber and his fans shouldn’t celebrate the win, or that he isn’t popular. Of course he is, and maybe more popular than Zach Top or Tucker Wetmore at the moment. Zach Top has been trailing off, and Tucker is being propped up by the industry. But it feels like those two offer a much bigger threat to defining the future of country music (for better or worse) than Sam Barber.

It doesn’t feel like we should even be recognizing Sam Barber as a country artist at all, any more than we should be recognizing Treaty Oak Revival, BigXthaPlug, or Sam Hunt as such. When you have an artist that doesn’t fit well anywhere else and still embodies elements of country like The Red Clay Strays or The Mavericks back in the day, it’s easier to be more permissive to them in country.

But Sam Barber is a contemporary folk artist who has so much more similar in style, sound and approach to the music of Zach Bryan, Noah Kahan, Joshua Slone, and other massive artists that have been dominating charts and tour grosses over the last few years. You could also lump other major acts into that category such as The Lumineers.

That doesn’t mean these artists don’t have some sort of kinship with country, or specific songs that are more country than others, or that they’re “bad.” But calling them country feels like a miscategorization.

Contemporary folk right now is a massive, massive commercially successful and critically-acclaimed genre of music all unto itself that needs to be recognized as such as opposed to being lumped in with country where it doesn’t really fit. Noah Kahan’s recent album The Great Divide spent multiple weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200, even beating out Ella Langley’s massive Dandelion.

Many of the artists in the contemporary folk world including Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan have sworn off allegiance to country. Not wanting to be called country, or to complete with country artists is one of the reasons Zach Bryan recused himself from Grammy consideration for his last album.

It’s also for these very reasons that folks are petitioning the Grammy Awards to bring back the Contemporary Folk category, similar to how they split traditional and contemporary country into two categories last year. This contemporary folk category of music is so massive at the moment, it deserves its own ecosystem. It already has massive superstars like Zach Bryan selling out stadiums, and all-genre dominant stars like Noah Kahan. Sam Barber tops many of the 2nd tier stars in country in monthly listeners, and feels like the future of contemporary folk.

It remains a heartening development in modern American music that coming out of the pandemic, so many young people are connecting with heartfelt songwriting, vulnerable lyricism, and unpretentious, simply produced music that speaks to human emotions like the stuff Sam Barber releases. He’s always felt a little to close to a Zach Bryan clone to sing the praises of him too loudly here at Saving Country Music. But you would much rather see someone like Sam Barber gaining traction than Tucker Wetmore.

Let’s call a spade a spade though. Tucker Wetmore might be more country than Sam Barber from a contemporary perspective. And artists like Zach Bryan, Noah Kahan, Sam Barber, and so many others who put songwriting first deserve their own distinction to break out into. And that distinction fits better into a contemporary version of the folk tradition than it does the country one.

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