Appalachia’s a lot bigger than most people figure, because the southern ranges from the Carolinas to West Virginia get most of the historical and cultural attention. But when Emily Scott Robinson arrived in tiny Hurley, NY on the banks of the Ashokan Reservoir, she had a batch of songs, including one called “Appalachia,” and she was in the perfect place to record them.
“So the Appalachian Trail goes through that area,” Robinson says in Episode 352 of The String. “I am just the kind of person who wants to make a record in a place that feels older than me, and we made this record at Dreamland studio in Kingston, which is close to Woodstock. It's an old church (from) the 1880s, and what I like so much about the recording room is it's the same old wood floors. It hasn't been overly polished or overly renovated - the warmth of that space and the thickness of the air in the room and the stained glass.”
Robinson, an acclaimed singer-songwriter working on her third album for Oh Boy Records, had been invited to the old country church by Josh Kaufman, the in-demand producer and musician who’s been on a roll with his folk trio Bonny Light Horseman and a new Grammy Award for helming last year’s Best Folk Album from I’m With Her. But all that took her by surprise.
“I had just assumed that Josh Kaufman was way too busy or expensive or cool to say yes to my project,” Emily says. But when Oh Boy sent him demos and put in the ask, he was fully on board, provided she could travel up to his backyard to work. “As soon as we started talking about the record, I realized we had a similar way of working in the studio. He said, ‘You know, the way I like to work is we just get in there, and you play the song, and we just start wandering around the room and experimenting and playing. And when we find it, we'll know.”
She says his ability to play pretty much any instrument among the studio’s antique collection made him a kind of one-man-band, but there were a couple other musicians at work: fiddler/cellist Duncan Wickel, Annie Nero on upright bass, and songwriter Lizzy Ross on harmony vocals. The record, Emily says, “feels intimate in the way that I wanted it to, but also mystical and spacey and gorgeous in the way I'd hoped, so working with Josh was everything I could have ever hoped for.”
Beyond its refined esthetics, Appalachia (that song would become the title track) lures us in with abundant empathy and with heavy human concerns backlit with hope. That sentinel song was inspired by the countless acts of service and kindness and mutual aid that western North Carolina - a place she used to call home - witnessed in the wake of Hurricane Helene in 2024. “Bless It All,” one she wrote early as she felt an album coming on, overflows with gratitude for gifts micro and macro, the daily bread and the sublime promise, much as the opener “Hymn For The Unholy” ruminates on the cycles of life with a melody fit for a little mountain church. Robinson tackles gentrification, dislocation and preserving community in the lighter song “Dirtbag Saloon,” lending the album a country strain that helps keep it grounded.
“The Time For Flowers,” one that I ask about, has a special backstory, because it’s the song that landed her a slot on Oh Boy, the iconic boutique Nashville label launched by John Prine. Prine’s son Jody Whelan, who runs the label, caught it on Instagram and reached out, giving Robinson an invaluable platform. The song is about an encounter between a young woman and an old one, who passes on hard-won wisdom about enduring strife and chaos, an unmistakable allusion to the here and now. “That song was always bigger than me,” she tells us. “It grew legs and it found people, and it helped people find me. And it's been really remarkable, it's journey.”
I close the hour with a song that spins tragedy into beauty, a portrait of dementia called “Time Traveler.” I decided that if I’m gonna cry over this one, you should have that chance as well.
During an hour at WMOT’s East Nashville studio, we talk about Emily’s journey from singing covers to writing her own material (inspired by a Nanci Griffith show in Durham, NC) and what followed as she felt the calling of the sung word and the road. She released her first recording exactly ten years ago, and with her second album Traveling Mercies in 2019, she got on the radar of folks who love a warm voice and a confident guide to the well-lived life.
She also talks insightfully about studying her art form - both the writing and putting on a show that leaves people feeling moved and fulfilled - with the likes of Amy Speace and Mary Guauthier.
“Mary's real teaching was: you have things that you've been through in your life that only you can tell and you need to find those things, and that's what you start with,” Robinson says, recalling a workshop where she realized she was hiding her truths rather than plainly expressing them. “Years later, when I went again, and I had written more about my actual life, that's when I got really nerdy into the song construction. But the thing about the song construction is that it doesn't matter if you haven't found the heart of what you're going to write about.”
John Paul White joins Emily for the song "Cast Iron Heart" from the album Appalachia.
