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There are some new frontiers on the map of Americana. It’s a long road trip from Laurel Canyon to Lincolnshire, and an improbable hop from Nashville to Chatham, Kent, but the roots of America’s indigenous acoustic music are becoming ever more entwined. The emergence of several British artists underlines how the mystique of the great American outdoors is being widely felt on these shores. Fleet Foxes, it turns out, do not have an exclusive on Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonies.

Grantura and the Storys are two of the UK bands making that clear, while Chatham native Pete Molinari, though of Maltese and Egyptian blood, invokes the ghost of early country music’s “Singing Brakeman”, Jimmie Rodgers. Danny Wilson, formerly of south London’s Grand Drive, is whooping up a “cosmic yeehaw” with Danny & the Champions of the World. And Holly Golightly, also a Londoner, is absorbed in a milieu inspired by bourbon, ribs and Leadbelly.

The number of venues welcoming such artists to their stages, and holding record nights, is also on the rise. The capital has clubs like Nashville-on-Thames, What’s Cookin’ and Nashville Babylon, but this is by no means a Londoncentric trend. Swansea’s Made in Americana and SXSC, in Winchester, are among the other regular gatherings.

Americana, sometimes called alt country, has as many definitions as the number of people you ask, but at its core represents a kind of uncommercialised purity in the US country and folk forms. Its standard texts, by the likes of the Byrds, the Band and Gram Parsons, continue to cast their spell, complemented by latterday exemplars such as the Handsome Family, Lambchop and Calexico.

The six-piece band Grantura, soon to release a fine debut album, In Dreams and Other Stories, have members hailing from Lincolnshire to Eastbourne, but their first bonding moment was over a bottle of whisky and a jam version of the Band’s The Weight. “Some of us got into the whole country thing via the Stones’ country stuff and the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” says Grantura’s lead singer, Matt Owen, one of their four songwriters. “Then Gram Parsons, then the Burrito Brothers. I inherited my dad’s record collection - he had about 15 Byrds albums, so they’ve always been with me.” Steve Balsamo, front man with the Storys - a Swansea band who have updated the harmonically layered California dreaminess of the Eagles - doesn’t deny the influence, or the geographical incongruity. “We did take cues from the Eagles, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Fleetwood Mac,” he says. “There’s a romantic idea about America, always has been. It’s so vast, any band wants to go there, get in a van and drive across it. If you talk about Oklahoma or Tulsa, it’s going to be more romantic than Swansea or Cardiff, unfortunately.”

Loose, a west London label that has been an Americana bol thole for a decade, sees expanding interest in the world of country. “It’s still amazing, the demos we get,” says the label’s Mark Rogers. “When people come to us now, they talk of Gram or the Byrds, but they also talk of the Handsome Family or Willard Grant Conspiracy.” Indeed, the Handsomes, the husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks, have had their mesmerisingly doleful songs covered by the likes of Cerys Matthews and Christy Moore. “We may never sell a million of anything,” Rogers adds, “but we’ll always tick over.”

Nashville-on-Thames, at the Buffalo Bar, in north London, advertises “violins that weep like widows and pianos that tinkle like windows shattered by angrily flung bar stools”. “Beer will be served,” it promises, “that you may catch your tears in it; customers will, however, need to bring their own ass to kick.” The night was started last year by the journalist Andrew Mueller. His partner in the venture, Rob Burrow, says it was conceived “as a way to showcase bands that play ‘proper’ country music, as well as classic and contemporary country songs that you’d expect to hear coming out of an American truckstop jukebox. When we launched, there was a dearth of similar nights in London. Since then, we’ve seen loads more springing up all around. The impression I have is that, outside London, there’s an even bigger scene.”

Golightly, once of the all-girl band Thee Headcoatees, is mining a rich seam inspired by road trips around the American west, creating songs with titles such as Getting High for Jesus and You Can’t Buy a Gun When You’re Crying. “I do understand the British fascination with white American music,” she says. “I think of that as being largely derived from our own European folk music, which would have been imported, along with our sombre hymns, a few hundred years ago. Back then, music was a necessity rather than a profession, to prevent you from going nuts, whether you were stuck out in the desert or isolated in the mountains. If you weren’t lucky enough to have any external influence, you might learn songs from playing and singing with your family and friends. That’s why it developed such a strong geographical identity. Early American folk and gospel are the seeds from which every kind of music I know and love have grown. There’s always been a British romance with it, but perhaps people are finding it fresh because it has an official name and can be sourced easily. I’m not sure how I found it, but I’m glad I did.”

Pete Molinari, who is currently touring the UK, has A Virtual Landslide out now on Damaged Goods, which will release Dirt Don’t Hurt by Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs on September 29. Grantura’s In Dreams and Other Stories is out on Ruffa Lane the same day

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