AOTA-240503 - Abigail Washburn, Spotlight Memorial Opera House - Beautiful, The Carole King Story

This week on Art in the Air, they feature Abigail Washburn, a banjo player and singer-songwriter who blends folk elements with diverse sounds in her music. She has won 16 Grammy Awards as a duo with her husband Bela Fleck. The spotlight is on Memorial Opera House's production of Beautiful, the Carole King Story, opening on April 29th. The hosts of the show are Larry Breckner and Esther Golden. The show is supported by various arts organizations and can be heard on different radio stations and podcast platforms. Megan Stoner, the Executive Director of Memorial Opera House, discusses upcoming events, including the renovation of the venue and the musical Beautiful, which tells the story of Carole King. The musical opens on April 25th and tickets can be purchased through their website or in person at the box office. The Penguin Project will also be performing High School Musical Junior in August. This week on Art in the Air features singing, songwriting, Illinois-born, Nashville-based, long-time banjo player Abigail Washburn, who blends venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds in her music, and is a 16-time Grammy Award winner as a duo with her husband, banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck. Our spotlight's Memorial Opera House's production of Beautiful, the Carole King Story, opening April 29th. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. You're in the know with Esther and Mary, with Art on the Air today. They're in the know with Mary and Esther, Art on the Air our way. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Welcome, you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, WVLP 103.1 FM, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout northwest Indiana and beyond. I'm Larry Breckner of New Perspectives Photography, right alongside here with Esther Golden of The Nest in Michigan City. Aloha everyone. We're your hosts for Art on the Air. Art on the Air is supported by an Indiana Arts Commission Arts Project Grant, South Shore Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Art on the Air is heard every Sunday at 7 p.m. on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, also streaming live at LakeshorePublicMedia.org, and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast. Also heard on Friday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 5 p.m. on WVLP 103.1 FM, streaming live at WVLP.org, and Tuesdays at 4 p.m. on WDSO 88.3 FM. Our spotlight interviews are also heard Wednesdays on Lakeshore Public Media. Information about Art on the Air is available at our website, breck.com slash AOTA. That includes a complete show archive, spotlight interviews, plus our show is available on multiple podcast platforms, including NPR One. Please like us on Facebook, Art on the Air WVLP, for information about upcoming shows and interviews. We'd like to welcome back to Art on the Air Spotlight, Megan Stoner, the Executive Director of Memorial Opera House, and she's going to tell us about some of the things that have happened there, and also what's coming up in the opera house. Megan, welcome back to Art on the Air Spotlight. Thank you so much. Thank you, Megan. Well, you've had some other neat events there. You know, we had you on last to talk about Echoes of Pompeii and things, so tell us about that, and then let's talk about what you have coming up theatrically. Yes, we had the Echoes of Pompeii visit in April, which was magnificent, amazing light show, absolutely visually and audibly spectacular. It was pretty amazing to have that in our building. It felt very big time, very cool. Yeah, and speaking of which, your upcoming, of course, again, we've talked about this in your previous interviews, about in May they're going to start the really heavy-duty renovation of the place. Maybe remind our audience once again what's coming into the interior of that. Yeah, so if any of you have been in our seats, which I hope you have, and if you haven't, please come visit, you will notice that our seats are quite old. They have been there a long time, very long time, and we are getting new ones. They're a bit wider to accommodate for our American booty, but they are beautiful. They're very comfortable. You'll also see our lobby is a lot bigger and a lot more accommodating. I know a lot of people like to come to the Opera House early before a show just to soak it in and get in the ambiance, and now there will be a lot more space for people to be able to do that, get their drink or their snack before the show, and I'm really excited to see what the lobby is going to look like. And then maybe, not so glamorous, but welcome for everyone, is a much more regulated heating and air conditioning system. Well, it's important. You know, it's the behind-the-scenes things that make the biggest difference sometimes. That's true. That's true. Well, you know, if you're not comfortable, you know, and look, you know, going back and renovating a facility that's as old as that, that's, yeah, that takes a lot of work and can be a lot different than, like, a new modern facility where they already have, like, forced air cooling and things like that. It's a different challenge. Yeah, different challenge for sure. So, how does the larger seats affect the amount of people you can seat? Has it reduced it? Yeah, that is a great question. It has reduced it. Not by a lot, by about 30 seats, but it has reduced it. So, we still have balcony seats. We still have the loge seats. You know, none of that has changed. It's just, you know, kind of spread things out just a tiny bit everywhere else, so. Explain to some non-theatrical people what loge seats are. I know you know. Yeah, loge seats are those really romantic seats that they show in the movies where the actor is, like, right up by the stage and that fancy seat, like, right next to the stage. It is very cool. You feel very important, and best of all, you get to see things really, really up close. It is the best seat in the house, by far. It's wonderful. Excellent. Well, let's talk about what you have coming up. It's a great musical that I see a lot of groups throughout the country are doing this, but Moran Offross is producing it. So, tell us all about that. It's beautiful, the Carole King story. Now, some of you listening may be saying, oh, yes, Carole King. I love Carole King. And the rest of you are saying, who's Carole King? Well, I promise the rest of you that you have heard of Carole King. If you've ever heard of Natural Woman, You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman, Carole King wrote that. She has written so many top ten hits over the course of, I believe, five decades. So, what this musical does is it walks through her life. How did she get to where she is? And how did she impact so many people in the music and show business industry? So, this musical is great for anybody who, number one, loves musicals. The songs in it are top notch. It is absolutely spectacular, the arrangement. But this is also a musical for people who love pop culture, people who love film, because so many of her songs have been put in films. So, if any of you are avid trivia goers, you know, you've got your Tuesday night trivia, I guarantee you this musical is going to seriously help you someday. You are going to go away and you're going to say, oh, I know when that was. I saw beautiful, the Carole King story. So, it's a really great musical. It's beautiful. As the title says, yes. In fact, it's a Tony Award winning, Grammy Award winning musical. And, of course, she's won, I didn't research before the show, but a whole slew of Grammys. A lot of the songs she also co-wrote. And, yeah, You've Got a Friend. Yeah, it's a whole one. So Far Away, Up on the Roof, and there's so many more as well as Natural Woman. So, it's a great. Yeah, and she just got her star in Hollywood not that long ago. So, she's a heavy hitter. And she's actually not a bad actress. She actually appeared for a while on Gilmore Girls as running a music shop. I mean, that was funny several years ago. That's a perfect role. No. So, and then just remind us what's coming up after that theatrically. Oh, theatrically, you're going to have to wait a while. You're going to have to wait until September for Memorial Opera House. But before that, we have our Penguin Project that will be opening in August. And they are performing High School Musical Junior. I cannot wait to tell you more about that. It's going to be so much fun, so bright, so colorful. They've been working on it since March. So, everyone who's had a hand in it has worked incredibly hard. It's going to be an amazing production. Excellent. So, it's beautiful. The Carole King musical opens April 25th running through May 12th. And you can get tickets, of course, at where? You can get tickets at our website, MemorialOperaHouse.com. Or you can check out our Facebook page, Instagram, or TikTok. And that will have direct links to tickets. Or if you're feeling friendly, you can just walk into our box office. That's at 104 Indiana Avenue in downtown Valparaiso. And we're open from 10 to 2, Tuesday to Friday. Well, that's Megan Stoner, the Executive Director of Memorial Opera House. Thank you again for coming on Art on the Air Spotlight. Beautiful seeing you. Thank you. Art on the Air Spotlight and the complete one-hour program on Lakeshore Public Media is brought to you by Macaulay Real Estate in Valparaiso, Global Patrician Senior Broker. And as a reminder, if you'd like to have your event on Art on the Air Spotlight or have a longer feature interview, email us at aota.brech.com. That's aota.brech.com. Did you know that you can also listen to Art on the Air anytime as a podcast at Lakeshore Public Media's website through Lakeshore's app or from NPR? Plus, it's available on demand from your favorite podcast website, including TuneIn, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pandora, Apple Music, iHeartRadio, and many more. If you have a smart speaker like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri, just tell to play Art on the Air to hear the latest episode. ♪ Hey, this is Bela Fleck, and you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, and on WVLP, 103.1 FM. ♪ We are happy to welcome Abigail Washburn to Art on the Air. Abigail is an American clawhammer, banjo player, singer, songwriter, clogger, and social advocate. She re-radicalized the banjo by combining it with Far East culture and sounds. She performs and records as a soloist as well as with old-time band Uncle Earl, with the Sparrow Quartet, also the experimental group the Woo Force, and as a duo with her husband Bela Fleck. Abigail, along with Bufay, co-created their nonprofit The Ripple Effect, which aims to connect, bridge, and expand hearts through the universal language of music. Thank you for joining us on Art on the Air. Aloha and welcome, Abigail. I want to say I so admire what you've done locally and globally with all your talents. It's just truly magnificent. Thank you so much, Esther. It's so nice to hear that. I mean, I'll just receive that because I'm so busy being a mom and taking care of making lunches and wiping butts and, you know, getting people in the car. Wiping noses. I don't really think of much I do as magnificent. And, in fact, probably, you know, the daily work of raising children is more magnificent than anything else I've ever done if I really think about it. But I really, really appreciate you and, you know, you appreciating me. It just feels good, so thanks a lot. Well, Abigail, we always like to have our guests tell us a little bit about their background. I always like to say their origin story. I tee it up by saying how you got from where you were to where you are now. So tell us about Abigail. Well, I was born in Evanston, Illinois, on November 10th, 1977. And I've been thinking about even memorializing a lot of these stories because my father just passed away. So I had a memorial, a zoo memorial for him last weekend, and I'm headed up to Chicago this weekend to spend some time with his siblings who live in the Chicago area. So I've done a couple of oral histories of my relatives in the last couple weeks. And one, my aunt, Jeannie, I ended up on the phone with for five hours because she just dropped so deep into the old stories and it was so beautiful. Well, one of the stories of family lore is my birth, actually, because my brother came before me in 1974, and he was born in the hallway of the hospital on North Side Chicago. And then I just came a little quicker than my brother, and I guess I crowned where my mom thought she had to go to the bathroom. So my head crowned in the toilet. And then my dad managed to get my mom across the street to the St. Francis Hospital, which they literally lived across the street from. And when they got to the doors, she fell down on the welcome mat and said, I can't go any further. And my dad literally delivered me on the welcome mat of the St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois. And a security guard came up and said, sorry, I can't do that here. And then he passed out. So helpful. He had a passed out security guard and I was born on the welcome mat. My dad said I shot out like a football and he caught me like a quarterback. So that's the beginning right there. And yeah, so my parents, I mean, I grew up in a family that didn't start out as extremely privileged, but over time, my dad making money was really important to him. He was born on a farm that was a really beautiful farm in southern Minnesota near Sanborn, near Mankato, Minnesota. And it was a beautiful farm, but his dad really had to strike out on his own and figure out what to do. And so he actually went to livestock auctions and was gone a lot and left sort of money for the mom, like an allowance for the mom for her and her two kids, which eventually became four kids. And a lot of times that allowance didn't stretch as far as they thought it would. So when they were living in Nebraska and my grandpa was going around to livestock auctions, they really struggled to have, I mean my aunt Jeannie says she loved, she actually loved the gravy and ketchup sandwiches, but I do think it was a time when my dad really decided he wanted to make money. So that was a really big goal in his life. So we went from living in a basement apartment of a town house complex to living in a really nice house in the suburbs of Minneapolis by the time I graduated high school. And I got to watch that trajectory, but my family kind of still always acted as if it was trying to, you know, making ends meet and, you know, saving money and living as the children of people in the Great Depression. And so I didn't grow up with a sense of privilege, but I am understanding privilege in many different ways, including race and cultural background and opportunity and things like that. So I am very appreciative for everything that I've had and I've had a really strong security net, you know, my whole life. Now music wasn't a huge part of it. I mean, I did like music. I loved Whitney Houston. It was, you know, LPs. It was vinyl back when I was a kid. And I love this one Whitney Houston record a whole lot with, I believe the children are the future. You know, that song was on there and I want to dance with somebody. I love that record, but I was not a musician. I did not think of myself that way. And my parents were not. My mom loved John Denver. My brother in high school started to really like play electric guitar and like really, you know, go for it and write songs and stuff. But I thought I was going to get into like law and ethics. And I wanted, you know, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a judge. Wow. I know, right? Huh? And the funny thing is I've ended up becoming a musician and my brother ended up going into advertising and, you know, kind of telling stories for a living in a sense, you know, to sell things. But I, at some point it was in, for college, you know, thankful for the privilege I had of my dad making money. I went off to college debt-free at the Colorado college. And while I was there, I saw a sign in the hallway leading into the canteen, the cafeteria that said study Chinese in China. And so I went from being really focused on like psychology and economics and, and ethics and philosophy to all of a sudden going and getting my language credit in China over the summer and studying Chinese. And the long and short of it is that it really changed my trajectory. I came back to the Midwest and I thought, man, that's a rough, like, it was rough in China for me because I was so culturally uncomfortable there. I couldn't speak the language. It was so hard to learn the language. It was just such a different language that I just really couldn't understand what people were saying and trying to speak this tonal language was just so difficult that I didn't make much progress in the seven weeks I was there. So I came back pretty frustrated, but what happened was while I was in China, I was savvy enough. And thanks to my teachers to see that there was this propaganda that was being fed to Chinese about America. That was different than I thought people around the world perceived us as it was more like that. We were a big bully and we were forcing different countries to do certain things. And that there was a saying back that then in China, that China can say no, you know, you know, and so that turned my, turned my thinking cap on as we say in the Midwest, it got me thinking cap going. And so I, I got home. And when I got home, I had some different relatives that called and said, how was it, honey? And you know, several of my relatives didn't ask. They were like, how was Japan or how was Korea? They just, they hadn't really processed like Asia being these very different cultures. So all of a sudden I saw this window of opportunity for understanding something deeply that was not a part of my heritage to heritage, to understand. And it became a real passion for me to try to create a bridge between the people, the home I love, my family that raised me, created the support network and this wildly different culture and nation that is extremely misunderstood. And the other piece I started to understand in America was the propaganda we were being fed by American media. And I started to understand myself more as someone who needs to think hard about what I'm hearing and what, not just assume that the messages I'm receiving are true or need to be the full story. So I just have become addicted to trying to reach outside my comfort zone into spaces that helped me understand a bigger picture beyond what I hear and what I'm told in my comfort, in my comfort space here in America, you know? So that became the beginning of me exploring a lot of things, including Chinese music. And ultimately I, in my studies of Chinese, as I became very serious about it, I started to realize that people in China, you know, when I went to study abroad, when I worked in China, they would ask me about American culture. Like what is American culture to them? It was, it was Hollywood. It was this political bullying, you know? And I was like, gosh, there's so much more to America than that. But what? I came back to America. Every time I came back from China with new questions about what is American culture. Then what on one of those occasions, there was a really obvious, obvious information that I received. I heard a record of Doc Watson playing. And I thought to myself, now that sounds distinctly American. And I decided to start playing banjo, learning Doc's music. I got further into the music and realized what an incredible window into the history of America. It was especially the Eastern sea border of America. And I started to learn about deeper into the history of the banjo being an African instrument, the way the Africans, the way the slave trade and oppressing Africans became a foundational piece of American music. The way that suffering in Ireland and Scotland, potato famine led to a lot of music coming to America. The way natives have almost entirely been erased. The erasure is so profound. It's outrageous. And yet it was a huge piece of early American music. And the way we thought about circle dance, rhythms, communication, and music, dance, literally dance forms came from native, different native traditions, along the Eastern seaboard. So, wow. What an uncovering, what an amazing, rich experience it came, became for me to learn more about this music. And I think ultimately I thought I was going to go to law school in China. And yet, because I had this awareness of how special music is in America and could become in terms of exchange and deeper understanding with China. It was on this one trip that I went to the International Bluegrass Music Association convention before I was going to go off to law school. And it was in Louisville, Kentucky at the time. It was one of my first experiences really being in the South and playing music in the South. And I only knew four or five songs at the time, but I literally was offered a record deal after a record executive heard me in the hallway, the gulp house in Louisville back then. I think it was 2001 or 2002. And I just was floored that I was offered a record deal because I did not think I was much good at any of this stuff, but I thought it was really special and I wanted to do it. So that, that was a real turning point for me. And I decided to go to Nashville and cut a demo because I was offered that. And so I had a boyfriend down there at the time. So there was a lot of alignment around that. And I ended up staying. And when I wrote back to some of my friends in China and said, you guys, I'm not coming back to law school. Like I got offered a record deal. They were like, you play music. You know, I was like, what? And I was like, yes, yes, apparently I do. I do play music, but it took me about five years to accept and admit that I was a musician, even though I was making records and going on the road. It was just all so fresh, so new. And then was it always the banjo? It was always the banjo, the banjo and only the banjo and singing. I've always loved singing. I've always loved in particular black gospel music. I was in a black gospel choir in college and just adored it. And I think that kind of primed the pump for this, having a strong voice for the ballad singing and things like that, or not having a strong voice, but believing a strong voice is okay, you know, for ballad singing and such things like that. So I said, I love all the Appalachian music. It's just, you know, the instruments and the sounds of the voices. Just so beautiful. I love it when you and Bela do the, you know, the old time songs. Me too. It feels really good. I mean, for both of us, I think both of us were deeply drawn to the banjo, although we play very different banjo styles. We were both drawn to the banjo because of ancient tones, ancient tones, you know, harken back to original musics and the need to even communicate beyond grunting and hunting, you know. We'll talk about your style later, how they're different, but I'd like to see a chance to get some of your music in from Echo in the Valley, Over the Divide. Tell us a little bit about that, and then we'll take a listen to that. You can distinctly hear our different banjo styles in there. Bela doing his three finger bluegrass, more bluegrass oriented or originated role, literally role of the fingers on the banjo strings. And then I'm doing more of my round peak and claw hammer drop thumb style of playing. So you can hear those two styles happening at once. And we're on both of our main banjos, so we're taking up sort of a similar tonal center, which usually we try to separate into like a banjo ukulele to get the higher register, a baritone banjo or a cello banjo to kind of separate things out. This is one tune where we decided to just go all in both our main banjos, the same tonal center, that same sort of register. And it's a tune that we wrote together. And then we also put lyrics on it that are connected to very much to immigration and the idea of who comes in and who doesn't and why. And does it get decided on our long racial lines or humanistic lines where cultural lines, where does this happen? And we had read a story about a man in Austria that went over the Austrian Serbian border and would help Serbians get out of Serbia in his little farm truck in the mountains. And he would sing to the, I guess the price of the ride was that he would sing and yodel to them the whole way over. And so he became the sort of the character that was the inspiration for this song. Well, let's take a listen to this from Echo in the Valley, Over the Divide, Abigail Washburn and Bayla Fleck playing together. Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, And that was Over the Divide, Echo in the Valley. And you're listening to our guest today, Abigail Washburn on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM and on WVLP, 103.1 FM. So tell us a little bit how your style of playing differs from his, a little bit, the claw hammer versus the three finger. So claw hammer playing is more clearly and historically closer to the original, more original forms of banjo playing that came to America. And banjo, just for a quick history, came from during the slave trade. There are stories in African countries like Tanzania, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, of the idea that hide your lute players because the slave masters are coming, which meant if the lute player was there, they would grab lute players because they realized after a period of time that more of their embargo of the, you know, the enslaved Africans would literally live to the other side of the journey. If there was music playing, either they would hear it and their soul would stay more intact with their body, or literally they would come up on deck and they would get turns dancing just to stay alive. So, yes. So there's a strong connection to the idea that a lot of music was actually on board these slave ships during the slave trade. The slave trade eventually had to go through the Caribbean. So the first real American banjo prototype is being tracked back to the Caribbean. And then it was brought up to the Eastern seaboard from there. The most likely place that was the strongest influence on the prototype was, and the playing was an instrument from the Gambia called the acante, which is a three string instrument. The key to why it seems to be that is twofold. One is that there's a shorter drone string on that instrument, which makes it very clearly a part of what became a part of the prototype that came to America. The other thing is the way of playing, which is essentially drop thumb or round peak, claw hammer style. If you look at the gachata family in the Gambia today, and you look at me playing side by side, other than the fact that my instrument is five strings is there, and theirs is three, the style of playing looks almost exactly the same. So those are very, very strong signifiers that we know definitely one of the ancestors of the banjo in America. Yeah. So my style of playing is very much connected to the African origins of the banjo. And my style of playing also became very popularized in certain folk movements through fiddlers gatherings and festivals like Galax. And Cliff Top and different festivals like that, where fiddlers and banjo players would get together and share their styles and they're just jam. And that was a popular way of playing this drop thumb, claw hammer style, which there's another style called round peak, which looks very much like the Gambian way of playing, at least in the gachata family culture, where there's also a pull off on the neck as a part of the role. So there's a strike down with the main finger on the second string pull off on the fret on the neck strike with the middle finger on this, on the string that you just pulled off on. And then a pluck on the drum, the thumb string or the drum string with the thumb and that over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again becomes like a roll. And it's a... And yeah, so that's, that's my style. It's like Belas is more connected to the, what Earl Scruggs created in the forties and fifties, which was very much influenced by black culture and by drop thumb as well. But he just turned it into an up picking style with a very specific kind of role. And it became very much a part of the performance of bluegrass banjo. Bluegrass banjo became the underpinning of all bluegrass banjo forms today created to be in Bill Monroe's band and then separated out and did, did other projects from there, you know, but yeah, so, but Bela, I mean, if anybody knows Bela's music, they know that he's taken that role in many, many different directions as have many other banjo players that have influenced him. But he's a real pioneer in terms of what you can do with a banjo and what you can play on the banjo. I think maybe one of his biggest offerings in, in this generation of music is that you know, everything can be played on the banjo here and now. Really great jazz, you know, classical music, concertos, all kinds of traditions from around the world can be everything. If it's music, it can be made on the banjo, you know? So the band, Bela's definitely proved to us the banjo is not tied to any tradition and yet it is completely informed by tradition. So were you with Bela during Throw Down Your Heart? Were you in Africa with him? No, we were a couple, but I wasn't, I wasn't in Africa, but he took this new technology phone, which we take for granted now, but it was a global phone that he took with him and he'd call me every day. And so I got to hear little stories about what was going on in Africa. And his biggest thing was finding the downbeat that everybody, almost every culture he visited in Tanzania, Uganda, Senegal, Mali, Gambia, the downbeat was just in a different place than he expected. And I remember having the conversation with him where I was like, well, can you just play something that sounds good, even if you don't really know what's going on? Well, you could see that, you could, in the documentary, you could see that on his face and in, you could see that concentration as he was listening to what he was hearing. And that story you told also was, I mean, you were doing exactly the same thing in China, you know, to bridge that because the music, you know, music is a language. And, you know, the story you tell of like some of the Chinese interactions, you know, were so beautiful because of that, because all of that, everything else falls away, but you still have the music. It's true. So I want to say, you know, the two of you have like such an exquisite blending and you're so practiced together and you're, you're on tour together and you're very familiar with each other. And so, and as we know, when you play together, you have to listen, you know, you have to listen to the other person while you're doing what you're doing. But being a couple, a playful couple, do you ever, either of you ever throw in something just to mix things up and surprise the other person during a concert? Yeah, I suppose so. Usually it's not necessarily as much musical, although sometimes it is, but we really like to have fun with each other on stage. So we might throw some, some things at each other that we don't expect, you know, the other person to try out some humor that we didn't check with the person before we got on stage. And so it's fun to see what's going to come out and, and it's been, you know, we've only played four shows over one weekend in the fall since last year at this time. So we, we really haven't played together very much. This is going to be really fresh for us. And I think we're excited to get on stage and see how a year of life and experience and new music making creates a new, a new vibe for us on stage. Yeah. So we want to listen to Blooming Rose next. Is there a story surrounding that? Yes. And this one is very much about native erasure, which I mentioned earlier. And just trying to be, more thoughtful, reshaping the narrative about how that happened, why and our culpability just generally as colonizers. As I've learned more and more about how to move into the future, what I've learned and what I've heard is that we all need to learn how to be better neighbor settlers. So this is a, a, sort of a reworking of the narrative and admittance to the erasure caused by colonization, and then an effort to begin to become better neighbor settlers. Well, let's take a listen. That's Abigail Washburn, Bela Fleck on the Echo in the Valley, Blooming Rose. I was born out to this earth, green grasses softened my thirst, through heaven sheltered me deep, beneath the evergreen sky. I withdrew from the light of the sun, for a wall became my home. I could feel my body growing, with every passing year. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. 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She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. She was a rose, a blooming rose. Me too, I have to say, and man, that beautiful melody that Bela plays on the banjo, what a gorgeous thing. He's so able to find these epic, beautiful melodies on the banjo, which I'm so grateful for. You know, you spoke to how he pioneers things. Of course, his Chick Corea piece is coming up, but the Rhapsodium Bloom, which we had his interview last week, as you know, really explored something, which is kind of that jazz and, of course, his admiration for Gershwin. So I get what you're saying, how he's explored and elevated the banjo to be an instrument that should be well-regarded, which sometimes, I think, historically has not. It's been kind of looked at like the accordion is sometimes as, well, as a less than, and I think his work has really elevated, along with yours, to a different level. I think he's had a big impact on how people perceive the potential of the banjo, the importance of the banjo in American history. I mean, a lot of people are reshaping that. You know, Ryan Giddens, I mean, Bill Keith and Earl Scruggs started to do that, but there was a period, and I think when Bela came into the music, it was still in the period of being perceived as a white, hillbilly, southern instrument that represented a lot of racist history, and all of those things are true, and it's a lot of other things, too. You know, it was a huge history before it was even that southern, hillbilly instrument for that period of time. You know, it was African. It was the music of dance and survival. It was black music, you know. It was the beginnings of American, African-American music, so, I mean, we just need to, we need to look at the bigger story, and that's something, like I said in the very beginning of our talk and my origin story, getting outside the comfort zone and seeing the bigger picture is something I really, really adore, and I like being a part of the, a part of a community that's doing that, you know. You know, we talked before the start of the interview that you balance a performer's life with an active domestic life, and so tell us a little bit about that whole thing, being a mom to two relatively young kids and balancing the whole thing. Taking the kids on tour. Yes, oh my gosh, yes, they'll be on tour with us when we come through Goshen in a few weeks. I mean, being a mom is something I always wanted. I knew I wanted it, and it is, it is the, the most, the biggest blessing I've ever experienced. I mean, it brings ecstasy and terror with it. It brings all of, the full scope of being human I have found within motherhood, and what a gift to see all of that and feel all of that. Yeah, what a tremendous challenge and a tremendous gift. I think taking the boys on tour is so fun, and, you know, our older one, Juno, is 10 now and really wants to be at school and with his friends more often, you know, so we're trying to balance all of that, and that's part of the reason Bayla and I haven't really been on the road for a year, but we're really excited to get on the bus. We all get in our bunks, and we have like a big sleepover every night, and we wake up together in the morning, and we have games we play when we sit at the front of the bus and watch the road go by, and it's a really important piece of our family's connecting, and we love, Bayla and I love to share how passionate we are about what we do with our kids too, and so to have them there with us on the road is really special, and Juno is a beautiful little burgeoning young musician too. He's learning the fiddle, and he sings, and What about clogging? Do the kids clog? You know, not yet, but I have a feeling at some point they might be interested in that because it's such a fun way to My daughter started at like four years old clogging, so Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Juno had a fun stint clogging with you. He was about four and five years old. Yeah. But it hasn't come back yet. We'll see if it does. But does your daughter still clog? No. No, she doesn't, but I'm hoping that she will again. We'll see. Yeah. It's really fun. Social dance is just one of the best things in the world, in my opinion. I feel so much happiness when I'm doing it. Queer dancing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Say like a guilty thing. I have Banjo Babes of 2016, the calendar and the CD. Oh! My friend Kendra Swanson was in the 2016 on the 2016 CD. She was like the second musician to play in our performance, our gallery performance venue when we opened. So, love that banjo. That's so fun. Well, we want to take a chance to listen to the other selection we made today from Echo in the Valley, Take Me to Harlan, and maybe set that up for us real briefly. So, Take Me to Harlan started as an idea I had quite a long time ago where I knew I wanted to clog and sing at the same time. I just had to figure out how to do it. And one day I realized I was going to figure out how to do it when I just did it. I didn't think about it anymore. So, I stood up on my clogging board in my little office here and I just started clogging and Take me to Harlan. It was like the first thing that came out of my mouth while I was just clogging away on that board. And then, Bale and I developed that basic idea into a song that essentially is about how it can be hard to go back home and yet it's and yet it's a powerful and healing thing to do. It can be. So, it's not about hard for everybody to go back home, but we all know a lot about the history of Harlan and the coal mines and how it's a place that I would imagine would be hard to go back home to. And it became a bigger metaphor for just in life when it's hard to go home, but you know you need to when it's healing. Very good. Well, let's take a quick listen to that. Abigail Washburn and Bala Fleck and Take Me to Harlan. Never thought I'd go back Feels when I was falling down on me Kentucky's such a long way There's an echo in the valley I can hear it calling back to me I will come to you, love Now take me to Harlan Anywhere you go Take me to Harlan Didn't you know If you take me to Harlan Doesn't matter how we go If it's you and me This is how it should be Take, take, take Take, take, take Take, take, take To Harlan Never thought I'd go back Feels when I was falling down on me Kentucky's such a long way Distance is a virtue But where it's said to be My heart is touching you, love So take me to Harlan Anywhere you go Take me to Harlan Didn't you know If you take me to Harlan Doesn't matter how we go If it's you and it's me This is how it should be Take me to Harlan Anywhere you go Take me to Harlan Didn't you know If you take me to Harlan Doesn't matter how we go If it's you and me If it's you and me If it's you and it's me This is how it should be Take me, take me Take me to Harlan Take me, take me Take me to Harlan Take me, take me Take me to Harlan This was a way to get over to East Asia with the kids while they're still young and I haven't been back to a Chinese-speaking country in a long time so I'm so excited to go to Taiwan because that's a big part of what I care about and we've got some good friends there and we're going to stay in their apartment with them and we're trying to put together a few little club gigs in Taiwan that we don't have advertised yet because we're not sure of the details yet but we'll get those going at some point soon And it looks like you're back in the States in July October 27th back in Lyons, Colorado and a cave fest in October so you're doing some dates together there Yeah, yeah we are I'm also going back to West Virginia to the Agusta Heritage Center so if anybody wants to come study voice or bluegrass I'm going to be there along with some other really special, dedicated folks who love sharing the Appalachian tradition Well, you know, we really appreciate you coming on Art in the Air and sharing We enjoyed our Vela interview last week and your interview this week and thanks for sharing your music with us and your story, always never seems like there's enough time but that's Abigail Washburn and thank you so much for coming on Art in the Air and sharing your whole story Thank you so much for having me Thank you, it was a complete pleasure Thank you I don't want to cry, cry, cry Let it go Come on baby, try Let it go Let it go I don't want to cry, cry, cry Come on baby, try Let it go Let it go Let it go We'd like to thank our guests this week on Art in the Air our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond Art in the Air is heard Sunday at 7 p.m. on Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM, also streaming live at lakeshorepublicmedia.org and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast Art in the Air is also heard Friday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 5 p.m. on WVLP 103.1 FM, streaming live at wvlp.org If you have a smart speaker like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri just tell it to play Art in the Air to hear the latest episode Our spotlight interviews are heard every Wednesday on Lakeshore Public Media Thanks to Tom Maloney, Vice President of Radio Operation for Lakeshore Public Media and Greg Kovach, WVLP's Station Manager Our theme music is by Billy Foster with a vocal by Renee Foster Art in the Air is supported by the Indiana Arts Commission Arts Project Grant South Shore Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts We'd like to thank our current underwriters for Lakeshore Public Media Macaulay Real Estate and Valparaiso Olga Patrician, Senior Broker and for WVLP, Walt Redinger of Paragon Investments So we may continue to bring you Art in the Air We rely on you, our listeners and underwriters, for ongoing financial support If you're looking to support Art in the Air we have information on our website at breck.com.au where you can find out how to become a supporter or underwriter of our program in whatever amount you are able and like I say every week, don't give till it hurts give till it feels good and you'll feel so good about supporting Art on the Air If you're interested in being a guest or send us information about your arts, arts-related event or exhibit please email us at aota.com that's aota.com or contact us through our Facebook page Your hosts were Larry Breckner and Esther Golden and we invite you back next week for another episode of Art on the Air Aloha everyone, have a splendid week Art on the Air