Jad, Dolly Parton's America.
So, I did say last week that the next episode would be in two weeks, and that is true.
Shima and I are working on episode seven as we speak, but consider this a bonus, because during the course of producing and recording this series, we collected a lot of music.
A lot of people came in and performed songs for us.
Actually, a lot of people we were interviewing suddenly broke into song.
And we ended up having a lot of music and we've been getting a lot of emails saying play more music.
Okay, so here we go.
In this bonus EP, I'm going to present to you guys some of the musicians that we encountered, most of whom were interpreting Dolly's music.
A bit later, I'm going to play you selections from a live event that I hosted that that was loosely inspired by the series and by the music in the series.
But for the moment, I just want to play you some stuff that people have asked for, starting with, well, you know, last EP we did, episode six, about Jolene.
We featured a guy named Justin Hiltner playing a song, his song, Silver Daxi wasn't his song.
It was an old British ballad that he heard Dolly cover on one of her bluegrass albums that became very important to him.
It's a song called Silver Dagger.
And he played that.
We had a lot of people ask to hear the whole thing.
So here it is. And I'll tell you, when he first played this song for us, it stuck so deep in my head.
Maybe we would want to reset for that.
Yeah, let's reset for that.
Okay. So you don't have the two mics and everything.
Justin was recorded by Tasha Lemley.
Alright, here's Silver Dagger.
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother.
She's sleeping here, right by my side.
In her right hand is a silver dagger.
She says that I can't be your bride.
All men are fools So says my mother They'll tell you wicked Love and lies And then they'll go And court some other Leave you alone to pine inside My daddy is a handsome devil He's got a chain five miles long And on every link A heart does dangle Of another maid He's loving wrong Go court another Tender maiden In hopes that she might be your wife For I've been warned And I've decided I'll sleep alone All of my life Don't sing love songs You'll wake my mother She's laying here Right by my side And in her right hand Is a silver dagger She says that I can't be your bride.
songs, which I also now blend with country.
I carry my guitar and do like two country songs, then I do my other gospel kikuyu songs.
For episode three, we interviewed a woman named Esther Concarra, who's known as the Kenyan Dolly Parton.
She performed over Skype for us from Kiambu County, just outside of Nairobi, Kenya, and she sang a bunch of stuff for us.
Some gospel songs in her native kikuyu, and also some dolly songs.
We'll crossfade from one to the other.
says um i will sing this song to praise you god because you have always been my great deliverer despite the many battles in my life you have always made me but i loved all these songs that say that when a flower grow wild it can always survive so i grew wild and i've survived what song is that when a flower grow wide you don't have a song it's called wildflower Oh, sing it grow so I ran fearing not where I go when a flower grow wild it can always survive while flowers don't care where they grow I grew up fast and wild and I never felt right in a world so different from me I just never belong I
just long to be gone so that garden one day set me free I hitched a ride with the wind and since she was my friend I just let him decide where I go When a flower grow wide it can always survive White flowers don't care where they grow it's a long song That was great.
That's beautiful. That's Esther Concaro singing a bit of Dolly Parton's song Wildflowers, which is off of her album Trio.
Esther was recorded in Nairobi by Tomas Brickhill.
Speaking of trios, we actually got a trio to come in and play some scoring music for us.
Three amazing musicians.
Steph Jenkins, Steph Coleman, and Courtney Hartman.
Here's a little something they played for us.
¶¶ Thank you. We connected with Steph and Steph and Courtney through an event we hosted at Radio Lab and then got them into the studio to record. During that session, which we recorded at WNYC and which was engineered by the amazing Alex Overington.
Courtney who plays guitar just sort of spur of the moment shredded through this instrumental cover of Dolly's Marry Me.
Total earworm. That's the vibe on guitar.
That's all she played, but I have listened to that one minute like 70 times.
we'll be featuring more from that trio Steph Jenkins, Stephanie Coleman and Courtney Harmon in the next few episodes gonna take a short break now and then we'll be back with some very different kind of music that I presented at a live event in Brooklyn that was loosely inspired by the series that's coming up Hello, hello.
Hi, everybody. Thank you, Eleanor.
Thank you, National Sawdust, for getting me back here and creating a place where I can do a weird thing.
Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad, back with a bonus EP of music we recorded live as part of the series Dolly Burns America.
About two weeks before we released the series, Into the Wild, I hosted an event in Brooklyn that was sort of inspired by that visit that Shima and I took to Dolly's Tennessee Tennessee Mountain Home, which I described in Episode 4, how we went up there to see the home and it reminded me very strongly of my dad's Lebanese mountain home.
And so when we came back, I got to thinking about all the songs that we sing about home and how as we leave home, we carry those songs with us, we morph them and transform them.
And so I ended up hosting this event at National Sawdust in Brooklyn as part of the National Sawdust Plus series curated by I got together three incredible musicians, Shelley Washington, Bora Yoon, and Caroline Shaw, who all played traditional music that they connect to, that reminds them of home, that is from their home.
But they all took that music and gave it a new spin.
We called the event Covering Home, like covers of traditional songs of home.
And I'll play you some excerpts.
Please give it up for Shelley Washington.
Shelley Washington was the first one up.
She's a composer at Princeton University.
Her work has been performed all around the world.
Hello, everyone. So I will be playing this large tube.
This is a baritone saxophone.
If you have not seen one before, it's also the one that Lisa Simpson plays.
Shelley explained that her traditional music was actually a record that her parents gave her when she first started playing the sax, when she was about 12.
My parents gave me one of the Mingus big band essential albums that I immediately just tried to memorize every single line.
I was just obsessed with that entire album, so every solo line I could sing all of them.
And you can hear the band chattering in the background and making these little different exciting moments.
So you might hear that in the piece.
What Shelley did is she took all her favorite Mingus lines, put them all together in the same piece, and then played it on her gigantic baritone sax that she's named Titan.
Here's an excerpt of that piece called Moingus.
Thank you. That was an excerpt of Moingus from composer Shelley Washington.
You can check out more of her work at ShellyWashington .com.
That's S -H -E -L -L -E -Y, Washington .com.
Next up, with composer Bora Yoon.
This is a piece that is called The Houses We Carry Within.
in and it was actually in response to an exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC last spring it's a Korean artist named Doho Seo who makes these really beautiful fabric houses made of actually Korean hanbok material which is this kind of like stiff crinoline that's translucent and he literally makes exact replicas of his Berlin apartment his Lower East Side apartment the house he grew up in Korea but they're all reconstructed from his memory so So there's these fabric houses that just hang in space, and you get to walk through them.
Wow. I mean, it's really OCD to the hilt.
I mean, like radiators, like crocheted together.
So these are all kind of these suspended times and spaces, because he talks about how as an expat from Korea, he goes to all these different cities and lives in all these different places, but his accent's too thick, so they always say he's not from there.
But when he goes home to Korea, they're like, well, you're not from here either.
there you left it's this constant theme in his work is this as so the exhibit was called almost home and this idea of home existing in your memory or in your mind or kind of that the houses that we carry inside of us um and that these architectures live in our memories and our archetypes for the performance bora played about a dozen different instruments and found percussion objects and very strange things like a stro violin which is a violin with a horn on it And she played electronics saying, here's an excerpt.
It's a memory, it's a memory of your childhood.
Thank you. That was an excerpt of Bora Yoon performing her multimedia piece, The Houses We Carry Within.
It's a beautiful piece that you really kind of need to see as well as hear.
So I would urge you to go to borayoon .com.
That's B -O -R -A -Y -O -O -N .com.
You can see a lot of her multimedia stuff there, hear a lot of her music.
Okay, the final performer of the evening was Caroline Shaw.
Pulitzer Prize winning performer, composer, collaborated with pretty much everybody from Kanye to the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.
And she did a duet with cellist Andrew Yee.
Series of duets, actually.
so I'm going to play you two of them.
Okay. So maybe just set up the next song, and then I think our fellow composers, performers should join me on the stage because we're going to be Caroline's backup bowl band.
Sure. So what are we about to hear?
The next tune is called On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand.
At least that's the first line.
It's not really a title.
And that was written, the words are written by Samuel Stennett of England in 1787.
But it also is essentially, you know this essential um exodus narrative of leaving a place searching for freedom crossing the river jordan and the the function of the river jordan is is strong in a lot of these songs and the last one is a very famous i'll fly away which is uh also written by albert brumley in 1932 doing all the history it's an interesting history the song though because um he himself is kind of covering other songs that have to do with the Exodus narrative in the South.
So I find the song kind of interesting and problematic, and I keep trying to find what it means to go home in that song.
Excellent. Caroline Shaw, Andrew Yee, give it up.
I'm very happy to be joined by Shelley and Bora and Elena and Jad here too On Jordan's stormy banks I stand And cast a wishful eye To Canaan's fair and happy land Where my possessions lie Don't you feel like going home Don't you feel like going home My home is in the promised land And I feel like going home Oh, that transportive rapture scene That rises to my eyes Sweet fields Arrayed in living green And rivers of delight Don't you feel like going home Don't you feel like going home My home is in the promised land And I feel like going home Some bright morning when this life is over I'll fly away
To that home on God's celestial shore I'll fly away I'll fly away, oh glory I'll fly away When I die, hallelujah, by and by I'll fly away When the shadows of this life are over I'll fly away Like a bird from those prison walls I'll fly I'll fly away I'll fly away, oh glory I'll fly away When I die Hallelujah By and by I'll fly away Oh, how glad and happy When we meet I'll fly away No more cold iron shackles On your feet I'll fly away I'll fly away, oh glory I'll fly away When I die, hallelujah, by and by I'll fly away Just a few more weary days and then I'll fly away To a land where joys will never
end I'll fly away I'll fly away, oh glory I'll fly away When I die, hallelujah You're by and by I'll fly away those are excerpts from a night at National Sawdust in Brooklyn night I put together with curator Elena Park loosely inspired by Dolly Parton's America All those Dolly songs, like Tennessee Mountain Home, that are about trying to hold a feeling of home even while you're wandering far, far away.
This was part of the National Sawdust Plus series that Elena curates.
I want to thank Jeff Tang, Charles Hagman, Garth McAlevey, who was the mix engineer for the night.
Thank you to Jeremy Bloom for helping to mix this episode.
And all the musicians who appeared in this bonus EP, Justin Hiltner, Esther Kankara, Steph Chenkin, Steph Coleman, Courtney Hartman, Shelley Washington, Bora Yoon, Caroline Shaw, and Andrew Yee.
Shima and I will be back in one week with another episode of Dolly Parton's America.
Until then, I'm Jad Aboumarab.
Thanks for listening.
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