Since we started our work on Wayfaring Strangers, a particular thread in the musical tapestry continues to galvanize conversation, as a generation of young Black artists retells the story of the banjo. The musical legacies of transatlantic crossings from Scotland and Ireland provided a focal point for this ambitious festival.

The celebration showed how American culture has always evolved through the movement of people who are often forced together by their circumstances. In 2019, Carnegie Hall’s landmark festival, Migrations, the Making of America, held performances and events all across New York City. Bluegrass and Americana music fuel the popularity of the growing I-Grass/Celtigrass genre (Irish-influenced bluegrass). The Transatlantic Sessions television series produced for BBC Scotland and RTÉ Ireland, featuring performances by Scottish, Irish, English, and North American folk roots and country artists, is now critically acclaimed on all shores. Against a backdrop of dramatic social and political reorganization, cultural dialogues across the Atlantic World have gained new momentum. At this particular time, his poetry and activism speak to us, perhaps more than ever, and remind us of the power of words and music. Henderson also wrote about injustice, dignity, equality, international solidarity, and harmony with the natural world. Onward it flows, meandering along a never-ending course.

Whenever the carrying stream appears quiet on the surface, we take comfort in the knowledge that it is, in fact, never still.

His metaphor of the carrying stream, the unknowable source of tradition and creativity, ever flowing and always replenished, is reassuring when performing arts have been stilled by a global pandemic. Reflecting in 2021 on the passage of time since Wayfaring Strangers was first published in 2014, it helps to reach once again for the words of the late Scottish poet, songwriter, and collector Hamish Henderson. Watch for a follow up blog post focused on the accompanying Spotify Wayfaring Strangers playlist that will feature music notes on tracks curated by Fiona Ritchie for this new edition. The New York Times called Wayfaring Strangers upon its publication in 2014 “essential. UNC Press is incredibly pleased to announce the publication of the second edition of Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia by Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr, foreword by Dolly Parton, and with a new afterword by the authors that is excerpted below in its entirety.

Wayfaring Strangers by Dolly Parton