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mrsrcbinscn · 5 years ago

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Franny Robinson HC Infodump #4: Country and Bluegrass Music

hi, I’ll finally do a writeup on her work in jazz next but I’m in a country mood and was INSPIRED so oops country first

Word count: 2486

Dara & Danny

In 1991, Daniel Maitland (fc: Martin Sensmeier), an Indigenous Alaskan kid, moved from Alaska to Payne Lake, Georgia, with his parents and older and younger sisters after his father got a job opportunity in Atlanta, a reasonable commute away. Daniel spent two years being musical rivals with Franny Framagucci before he proposed they just combine their talents and perform together at talent shows and the county fair. The two were inseparable, musically, until Franny went to college at NYU and Daniel went to East Tennessee State.

They remained friends throughout college and reunited during winter and summer breaks to play together locally. Daniel was in Franny’s wedding party. He’s Wilbur’s godfather and is ‘Uncle Dan’, they’ve always remained close. They would write songs together usually through an internet connection except for when they could travel to write in person.

In 2009, Daniel once again was the one who suggested they officially collaborate. That’s when the bluegrass-country-traditional southern/Appalachian folk duo was born. They have released 9 albums together since they started releasing music under Dara & Danny.

One album, titled Molly’s Church, is almost entirely songs from the hymnal of the Church of the Nazarene in their hometown in Georgia, which was the church their friend Molly attended before her death. It was a “fuck you” response to them having received backlash from certain gatekeepers for a video of them singing Hank Williams’ I Saw The Light going viral. They were pissed two non-Christians were getting praise for performing the song. (Franny is a Buddhist and Daniel is an Indigenous Alaskan with traditional spiritual beliefs).

To the backlash, Franny said, and announced the dropping of this album on an Instagram Live Q & A, “It’s funny. Like. Christmas is such a part of mainstream American culture. I celebrate Christmas, my non-religious Maori husband celebrates Christmas, are y’all mad about that too? Christianity is so deeply woven into American culture and the history of American music, like I just -- its wild y’all are so mad. And because I like to poke an angry bear, our new album, Molly’s Church [...] and what really gets me is like - just because I ain’t Christian, don’t mean I’m ignorant about it either. I’m from the Bible Belt, y’all. I did go to church with my little friends some Sunday mornin’s as a child if I had a sleepover at their house. [...] One of my best friends, the lovely, talented, beautiful, late Molly Vaughn, who we named the album after, was a devout Christian. When I would cry, she’d always sing It Is Well With My Soul to me and play with my hair. You can’t tell me that because I’m not a Christian, that song ain’t special to me. I think of that song whenever I’m going through a hard time and my heart is at peace because at its core it's a song about looking at your situation and making peace with it, and finding the strength to move on to hopefully better days. At her husband’s request, I sang Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing at her funeral, okay? Like- [pause for annoyed exhaling] to suggest we have nothing but respect for these beautiful hymns is insulting. [...] Insulting not just to us, but to the hymns. They’re so beautiful that they have made an emotional impact on two non-Christian musicians. I think that’s wonderful and speaks to how lucky we are to live in a time where all sorts of sorts are able to learn from and share with each other. But that’s just us, I guess.

Every song on Molly’s Church has a special memory attached to it for either myself or Daniel, or in the case of Be Thou My Vision, it was Molly’s favorite hymn ever. We couldn’t name an album of hymns after her and not put that on it.”

The track list is as follows: [Spotify playlist]

I couldn’t find a folksy or bluegrassy version of Be Thou My Vision, which. I’m ANGRY about. Because when I was a practicing Nazarene Christian it was my favorite hymn, and I still find it beautiful but.

Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing

How Great Thou Art

Dwelling In Beulah Land

Be Thou My Vision

It Is Well With My Soul

I Saw The Light

Victory In Jesus

Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory

Holy, Holy, Holy

Another album, titled Something’s Rotten in The Sticks is purposely very dark. It’s largely covers of murder ballads and sad traditional folk songs from the American South and Appalachian Mountains, featuring original songs and covers of songs that explore the darker sides of more modern rural life like the opioid crisis, unemployment, poor education, poverty with no social safety nets, and more.

Franny openly admits that she wrote the original songs from a place of immense privilege. In an Instagram Live Q&A about the album she said, “These aren’t my exact lived experiences. But I feel like I have some right to talk about these stories because these are the things happening to my people, the good people of the town that took my mother in when she was a twenty-something year old refugee, and then helped raise me. I buried my first friend thanks to the Sacklers (the family whose pharma company produces oxycontin, who purposely spread misinformation about how its a safe drug and who pret-ty much engineered the opioid epidemic) in 1998. I just last month buried one of my best friends since elementary school after three narcan shots couldn’t save them.

Rural Southern folks and the problems they face are dear to my heart. [...] I know how lucky I am to have grown up in the rural south and ended up where I am today, in the privileged position I am in. [...] And I see the way people in the cities talk to and about these people and it’s fucking gross. You know nothing about these people and what their lives are like, and what they care about and worry about. I have always been proud to be Southern, just as I’m proud to be Cambodian. [...] Rural poor folks are the kindest, most loving, most resilient people, and I am not ashamed that I came from that.

This album… so our last album, Prodigal Children of Clayton County, Georgia, was a love letter to and about our hometown and the people of the rural south. This album is more of a ‘we see you.’ And it's also, I hope, an accessible way to start explaining the problems our people face to city elites that look down their noses at them. Like, I hope people can say in response to “I just don’t understand these people”, “hey, go listen to I Grabbed A Banjo (And You, The Pills), then talk to me.”

Daniel said in that same Q & A, “I was born in Alaska, I met Franny when I moved to her hometown in Georgia, in middle school, and we began playing music together in high school. I live in the Appalachian Mountains now, I studied Bluegrass and Old Time music at East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City. Now, I’m -- I’ve been lucky enough to make a living out of the music I love, but you know- like I said. I live in the Appalachian mountains, in Kentucky, in a rural area. I never left the rural south, since I came here, this has been my home. We’re privileged now, but had a few stars aligned differently, our high school friends’ lives would have been ours. We love the people of this region. Like Franny said, we both have two groups of people we are passionate about amplifying and equipped to amplify. Mine are our struggling rural folks, and Indigenous voices, and Franny don’t ever shut up about Cambodian or the rural south.”

“I really fucking don’t.” Franny quipped.

The track list is as follows: [Spotify link, the first 8 tracks are the songs they covered on the album and the rest are songs that fit the vibe of the original songs to give y’all a picture]

Knoxville Girl

I Grabbed A Banjo (And You, The Pills), an original song about the opioid epidemic that’s killed many of Franny and Daniel’s high school friends

Troubles, traditional folk song as popularized by Kilby Snow and Anna & Elizabeth

Red Dirt Girl (Emmylou Harris cover)

But I Ain't A Milton Boy/Girl , an original song about how in Milton (a bougie rich people part of Georgia) kids go to college and become doctors and lawyers while people from the song narrators’ town don’t bother learning to solve for X because all that waits for them is army recruiters, the power company, or the unemployment line [the male narrator, Daniel], and the female narrator [Franny] sings about how she was a smart girl who held her first baby when she was a baby herself, married two bad men she thought were good, and now she sells her ADHD pills to college kids to buy groceries, and how their high school aspirations crumbled easily, and the chorus is literally just narrators fantasizing about a decent standard of living and having decent opportunities and then going, “But I ain’t a Milton boy/girl, and that’s why I’m cryin’ today”

Deportee (Woody Guthrie song as covered by Dolly Parton)

Savannah, a song Franny wrote about the time her brother drove her down to Savannah when she got pregnant in high school so she could have an abortion three hours from home, where nobody local to them would be out front shouting at people needing abortions

Poor Folks Town (Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton cover, instrumentation is modified to be a little melancholy to fit the rest of the album, but it is still a markedly happier song than the rest of the album except for Rich Kid Clothes)

Don’t Put Whiskey In My Water, an original song about a man nine years sober almost falling off the wagon when he’s laid off ahead of his teenage daughter’s high school graduation, including the line ‘don’t worry about Ole Miss, we’ll figure it out, somehow we always do, smart little girl like you can’t die in this town’

Don’t Take Your Guns To Town (Johnny Cash cover)

Pretty Polly

Down In The Willow Garden

Rich Kid Clothes, original song about a brother and sister super jazzed about their “new” clothes, hand-me-downs from the rich kids of the house their mama cleans, happiest song on the album

Health Insurance, an original song from the perspective of three different people, on in each verse, either dying or seriously suffering from solvable medical issues but because healthcare in America is trash they either can’t get help, or are going bankrupt trying to, that’s incredibly sarcastic including lyrics like ‘and I know I deserve to die for not having had a rich great-grandaddy, and who wants to see their daughter graduate college anyway’ , one of those sad songs with joyful instrumentation

Another album! Is titled The Rise And Fall of Jenny and Jamie, and is a concept album meant to be listened from start to finish that tells the story of a couple that falls in love, gets married, has a very dysfunctional marriage, and ultimately divorces. Think the energy of Alpha Desperation March by The Mountain Goats, and the entire Tallahasee album but especially No Children. The Dara & Danny album is a little less dark because the last few songs, about divorce, are like...happy.

Daniel, who had been divorced twice by the time they wrote the songs for that album, said “There is nothing sad about ending a marriage you’re miserable in or don’t want anymore. The two songs about the divorce, they’re happy because our characters are happy to be done with each other. It isn’t Tammy Wynette spelling D-I-V-O-R-C-E and lamenting the end of her marriage, instead, Jenny and Jamie realize their marriage is toxic not just for the other person, but for themself, and they’re relieved to not be married anymore.

Notable Dara & Danny performances and accomplishments:

They cover Whiskey Lullaby at many shows they do. A video from a 2016 show went semi-viral, and fans of the duo will show it as an example of “Peak Dara & Danny”

Nominated for the 2019 Grammy Award for Best American Roots Song, as the duo Dara & Danny, but ultimately Brandi Carlile won for ‘The Joke’

Franny was absolutely thrilled for her. She STANS Brandi Carlile and has written songs with her before.

In the post-Grammys interview, the interview asked Franny if she was disappointed and she was like “I would pay Brandi Carlile to punch me in the face, so no.”

The clip of Franny saying that went viral and embarrassed poor Wilbur

“To be honest, when I saw The Joke was nominated, I didn’t even bother writing a speech. Daniel and I were both just thrilled to be considered to be like, at her level.”

Nominated for the 2019 Grammy Award for Best American Roots Performance, as Dara & Danny, and again lost to “The Joke”, but again, did not care at all

Won the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album as Dara & Danny, their fifth nomination in the category and second win

Nominated as Dara & Danny in the category Vocal Duo of The Year at the 2019 CMA awards.

Nominated for IBMA Album of the Year in 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018

Won the 2019 IBMA for Album of the Year

Won the 2019 IBMA for Song of the Year

Franny is the first person of Cambodian descent to win a Grammy, an ASCAP award, an IBMA, or be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame

Daniel is the first Alaskan Native to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame

Solo work

Franny’s used bluegrass-folk style music to write songs about the experiences of her mother and other relatives under the Khmer Rouge and in the civil conflict that preceded it. It leans a little away from #pure bluegrass but it includes mandolin, banjo, and even some traditional Cambodian instruments. It’s this blend of bluegrass instrumentation and traditional Cambodian instruments that on paper sounds like “Franny you’re crazy” but in practice its fuckin’ lit, y’all.

It’s as genius as The Hu, that Mongolian band that was like “what is we play metal music with guitars and a drum set and TRADITIONAL MONGOLIAN INSTRUMENTS?” Lit.

She did an entire album, Franny Sor Robinson Covers Kitty Wells [playlist] and that album gained Franny a ton of street cred in the country/bluegrass industry. She got a lot of respect for her Kitty Wells covers.

She’s released three solo albums of folksy-bluegrass-country style music that is original music she wrote the lyrics and music for.

Three solo albums, the Kitty Wells cover album, and nine Dara & Danny albums makes twelve country-bluegrass albums total Franny’s released, not counting featured artist appearances on other albums.

Notable Franny Sor Robinson awards, performances, and accomplishments in the country music sphere:

Franny sang ‘Born To Fly’ with Sara Evans once

Franny loves that song, it came out in 2000, when she was in college at NYU, and it was a staple song of hers to perform at any gigs she did in college

The day the United States legalized same-sex marriage, Franny was a supporting solo act for a friend of hers and she was like “I don’t know a better way to celebrate than by taking one of my favorite country love songs and making it better. And by that I mean gay.” By this point she’d been out as bisexual for years. So she sang Brad Paisley’s She’s Everything

Franny’s always kept the pronouns the same in songs she covers, so if it was a man’s song about a woman she’s always kept it about a “she.” Her cover of She Thinks I Still Care by George Jones was an instant hit when it was released on one of her solo albums

At an event honoring Randy Travis, Franny performed his hit Deeper Than The Holler for him

She also got to sing I Told You So with him once at another occasion and she damn near died

At the final show of George Strait’s final tour, Franny sang Carried Away with him and almost cried he is one of her!!! Idols!!! and during his encore, she joined him and all of the other special guests of the final concert to sing All My Exes Live In Texas

She’s been awarded and recognized by various organizations for the furthering of Asian-Americans in the arts in general, in music, and empowerment for both her work in jazz and country umbrella music

She’s performed at and been nominated for CMA awrds, ACM awards, and Americana Music Honors & Awards

She’s won Americana Music Awards

When challenged to prove she could yodel she fuckin got right up and sang Hank Williams’ Long Gone Lonesome Blues and nailed all the very technical yodeling, and its a thing she’s like, Known for doing, so she will perform it live pretty often

#&&...hc

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