Press Inquiries
ron@dogranchmusicpr.com
benji@dogranchmusicpr.com
Williams Branch Is Hard to Find: Si Kahn’s Songs for Strong Kentucky Women
Eighth-generation East Kentucky musician and Appalachian traditional dancer Carla Gover assembled a remarkable cast of female musicians from Kentucky to record a concept song cycle by Si Kahn situated in southeastern Kentucky. The semi-fictional Walden-Johnson-Jones clan first settled during the early 1800s in and around Williams Branch, which flows into the Cumberland River in Kentucky’s Bell County.
“The idea behind this album is that four generations of women from one Kentucky family tell their own stories in their own voices,” explains Kahn, whose recording career began with 1974’s New Wood on the June Appal label in Gover’s hometown of Whitesburg.
“After chatting with Si for a few years about the best way we might collaborate, we landed on Williams Branch Is Hard to Find,” says eastern Kentucky native Gover. “I’ve never been able to resist a concept album, even now when the very idea seems out of date to so many. This album is not only part of a larger project that Si has to get more of his voluminous catalog out into the world, it’s also the perfect vehicle to highlight the voices of contemporary women singers and musicians in Kentucky. I’m proud to have produced it and performed on it. I hope that it shines a light on Si’s particular genius along with the wealth of talented women in our state.”
Listen to Williams Branch is Hard to Find
Those talented women, besides Carla, include other veterans like Sue Massek of the Reel World String Band and Karly Dawn Milner, as well as younger artists forming the next generation of roots musicians from the Commonwealth, like fiddler Ella Webster and activist songwriter Jeri Katherine Howell.
Kahn continues, “I wrote these songs to honor some of the strong, inspiring women I met in my years working as a labor organizer and folk singer in the region. In making this album, I wanted to highlight the voices of contemporary women singers and musicians in Kentucky.”
Similarly, Carla dedicates her work on Williams Branch Is Hard to Find “to the strong women of Kentucky, past and present, and the amazingly talented and generous singers and musicians who helped me record it.”
Gover’s work has earned her the Merlefest Chris Austin Songwriting Contest and the Kerrville New Folk Award. She has spent three decades making music that speaks to issues both timeless and urgent, including labor, land, and the struggles of mountain communities. Her original songs have been covered by major artists and placed in film and documentary soundtracks, and three of her albums have reached #1 on the Folk Alliance International radio charts.
Si Kahn has spent more than sixty years as a civil rights, union, and community organizer, musician, and author. He has simultaneously had successful careers as a musical theater composer, lyricist, and book writer, and as an internationally recognized songwriter, recording and performing artist.
Williams Branch Is Hard to Find
Song Notes
By Si Kahn
1. Plant a Seed, Write a Song (ft. Jeri Katherine Howell)
After her parents pass, she continues to live on and work the family’s hardscrabble farm. Si wrote this song after hearing Canadian folk singer and artist Lesley Schatz, who really was a farmer, although in Alberta, not Kentucky, talk about her life.
2. Dancing with the Johnson Boys (ft. Maddie Rae Wells)
When they hear the sound of a fiddle coming from Walden Creek, folks on Williams Branch close their shutters and lock their doors.
3. Hear That Sound (ft. Sarah Kate Morgan)
Sometimes when the mist rises in the Eastern Kentucky mountains, it’s so thick you can barely see your hand in front of your face, or what’s lying in the bushes at your feet.
4. Generations (ft. Karly Dawn Milner)
An affirmation of the ties and stories that bind the family’s generations together.
5. Moonshiner’s Daughter (ft. Carla Gover)
Deserted by her husband, this mountain mother takes to moonshining to survive, shaming her 15-year-old daughter, who runs away, only to return years later triumphant.
6. Good Morning, Miss Jones (ft. Maple Harvey)
First in the extended family to go to college, she returns to the holler to teach.
7. Nobody Loves Me Like You Do (ft. Charity Gilbert)
Young lovers lie in bed together as the morning breaks over the mountains.
8. As I Grow Old with You (ft. Sue Massek)
Now old, she reflects lovingly on her long life with her partner.
9. Williams Branch Is Hard to Find (ft. Carla Gover)
Very young, she watches her father turn the tables on an arrogant city-slicker.
10. Drifting (ft. Sarah Kate Morgan)
A tribute to the family’s longtime conjure woman.
11. Queen of the Kitchen, King of the Road (ft. Ella Webster)
She teaches her truck-driving, philandering husband a lesson he’ll never forget.
12. Preacher’s Daughter (ft. Maizie Barrett)
Sometimes the apple really does fall far from the tree.
13. Cold Grey Morning (ft. Jeri Katherine Howell)
A love song for her partner, who’s been forced to go to Detroit to find work.
14. Rifle (ft. Sue Massek)
When her husband comes close to violence against her, she fights fire with fire.
15. Pikeville 1934 (ft. Ella Webster)
As the almost 100-year-old matriarch lies close to death and silent in a Pikeville hospital, her great-granddaughter imagines her great-grandmother’s final offering of love and music.
16. We Say No (ft. Rosie Gardner)
A reclamation of power and love for the land.
17. Fifty Years (ft. Charity Gilbert)
A hopeful, loving vision of the family far into the future, from some of its youngest members.