Most Civil War stories get told through the men who fought. “Songs From The Knoxville Project” is built around the women who didn’t — the ones who crossed rivers and dodged soldiers on their own, with only a handwritten family account to prove it happened.
IF YOU GO
Angela Easterling and Brandon Turner, Monday, July 13, 6:30–7:30 p.m., Central Rappahannock Regional Library, 1201 Caroline St., Fredericksburg.
Angela Easterling’s new album, “Songs From The Knoxville Project,” tells the story of her family’s arduous journey from Hendersonville in western North Carolina to East Tennessee during the Civil War.
The album, which will be released Sept. 25, draws on the handwritten account of Mary, daughter of Easterling’s great-great-great grandmother, Narcissus Middleton. Easterling’s father shared the original handwritten document with her, which was also published in a Hendersonville newspaper.
Narcissus gathered her 10 children — including a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, plus two babies who had to be carried — and set out on foot across the mountains between North Carolina and Tennessee. The journey took two and a half weeks. They survived it, Easterling said, only because they had no other choice: the Confederate government refused the family provisions once word got out that the men had deserted.
“A few years back, I decided that I would try to write a musical about it because I have a background in theater. I’ve always loved musical theater,” Easterling said. “But I never really thought of myself as a person that could write a musical.”
Easterling has written close to 30 songs for “Songs From The Knoxville Project,” but the new album includes just 12 of them. By her own account, the album is closer to a teaser for a larger work — she describes the full project as, at its core, an Appalachian folk musical she’d eventually like to see fully staged, with a cast that includes children, soldiers, and other characters. Easterling is joined on the album by her musical partner and husband, Brandon Turner, the couple’s three children, and additional musical guests to create a cast of different voices to bring the story to life.
Angela Easterling’s new album will be released in September. (Photo by Sandlin Gaither)
The plot involves men in Easterling’s family who left their home in North Carolina to covertly join Union loyalists in Knoxville. Following them later, the women and children in the family had to make their way east on their own, facing dangers including crossing multiple rivers and evading Confederate soldiers.
One of the most moving songs on the album, “Nolichucky River,” describes the dangerous crossing the women and children took with the help of a Black woman in a canoe, who came to their aid at great personal risk. Elizabeth McCorvey sings the part of the Black guide and also plays banjo and fiddle. The song includes an unusual instrument: a South American wooden frog that simulates a frog croaking.
Another song, “Look for Red,” written as a duet with Americana artist Will Kimbrough, tells of the Red Strings — a real secret network of Union loyalists in the South who signaled their allegiance with a red cord at the wrist or a scrap of red fabric in a window. Some historians trace the name back to the Book of Joshua, in which Rahab hangs a red cord from her window as a signal to be spared. Easterling weaves that biblical echo into the song’s sense of hidden danger and fragile hope.
Turner contributed the frog sounds and an assortment of acoustic and electric guitar sounds to the album.
“There’s several different acoustic guitars, and there’s even an electric guitar that gets hidden a lot of the time in the back doing what a synthesizer would do, and some pedal steel-type parts,” Turner said. “We were able to do that by using the electric as sort of a background instrument with a lot of delay on it and some volume swells and that sort of stuff.
“[Angela] would describe to me the type of sounds she wanted. She’d give me that singer-songwriter-type interpretation of the sound she wanted to hear, and then it would be up to me to try to figure out how to technically come up with that. There’s bluegrass banjo on there, as well as an open-back clawhammer-type banjo. And then there’s at least one resonator guitar.”
Joining Turner on the album are Sam Kruer, upright bass; Matt Purinton, mandolin; Robert Gowan, fiddle; and Ian Guthrie, who also produced the album, on bass.
Turner also sings the part of a nefarious Confederate soldier who threatens the women in the song “Lady So Fine.”
“It rides that line of being creepy and, like, ‘Oh, I was just kidding,'” Easterling said. “I mean, every woman, I think, is going to be able to relate to that. And the whole thing really is interesting in that a lot of times we don’t get a woman’s view of history, so this is a nice change.”
“Rejoicing As I Go” is in the style of a traditional upbeat gospel song and features the duo Admiral Radio (Becca Smith and Coty Hoover).
The music on “Songs From The Knoxville Project” ranges from bluegrass to Celtic to period music from the Civil War. “Can We Go Home” features Audrey Neel and Molly Johnson from The Wilder Flower, a western North Carolina bluegrass trio.
“I listened to the soundtrack of the Ken Burns documentary, so I kind of had that stuff in my head before I started writing,” Easterling said.
Easterling and Turner will perform selections from “Songs From The Knoxville Project” along with songs from their previous six albums as part of the Music on the Steps series at the downtown library on Monday, July 13.
