A few years ago, three Oregon musicians and artists started getting together to play and share music, informally calling themselves Diaspora Songs. They are all lovers of country and folk music. They’re also writers and scholars. Dao Strom is a poet, musician, and multimedia artist — she’s the author of the book “Instrument.” Julian Saporiti is a musician and creator of No-No Boy, a songwriting and multimedia project about Asian American history. And Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, musician and Jewish educator — she’s the author of the poetry collection “Fruit Geode.”

All three joined OPB host Jenn Chávez on stage at the Pickathon Experiential Music Festival to sing, play and talk about their work.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez. A few weeks ago, I sat down in front of an audience in a dusty old barn on a farm in Happy Valley. I was there along with thousands of other people to experience the Oregon Cultural phenomenon that is the Pickathon Experiential Music Festival. I was also there to interview three multifaceted and multi-talented artists and friends. Dao Strom is a poet, musician and multimedia artist – she’s the author of the book “Instrument.” Julian Saporiti is a musician and creator of No-No Boy, a songwriting and multimedia project about Asian American history. Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, musician and Jewish educator – she’s the author of the poetry collection “Fruit Geode.” A few years ago, all three of them started getting together to play and share music and they informally call themselves Diaspora Songs. Today, we’ll bring you our whole conversation from Pickathon, including some great live music.

[Applause]

Chávez: So, yeah, like I said, you all refer to this collaboration amongst yourselves as Diaspora Songs, which I think is really lovely. And I’d love to start by asking each of you to kind of share what diaspora means to you and how you’ve been thinking about it lately. Do you want to start, Dao?

Dao Strom: I’ll start. Well, I guess the most straightforward answer is I was born in Vietnam and I came over. I grew up here in California from a very young age so I am a person of diaspora. So the themes of exile and exodus due to these larger forces, geopolitical forces have been a big part of informing the type of work that I write and I make. I was interested in some of the songs that I wrote, coming from that experience. And I think the themes of displacement are the largest part of diaspora, the experience of diaspora that I’m wrestling with, what it means to be someone from somewhere else and what it means to kind of carry this scattered story.

I’ll also throw out that just like as a poet, my nerdy etymology side likes the word diaspora. The “dia” part means a cross or seed and then there’s “spor” which has its root in seeds. So it’s really a word of, between this, but also what is seeded in that being between.

Chávez: That’s beautiful.

Alicia Jo Rabins: So I come to the diaspora through my culture and heritage as a Jewish American. and diaspora has, I think in some ways, a different meaning for the Jewish community, which is that Jewish people live all over the world. And we’re part of so many cultures and societies. And we also have this deep spiritual connection not only to the Holy Land, but also to our texts and traditions that kind of travel with us. So there’s a sense of being part of two cultures at once. Like maybe one’s horizontal and one’s vertical. One goes very, very far back and connects us to our ancestors and then one is a deep rootedness in the places that we live. And the sort of beautiful productive tension between managing those identities is a big part of being Jewish – for a lot of Jews, not for everyone. So that’s my relationship to the diaspora.

Julian Saporiti: When did you guys learn the word diaspora? How old were you? [Laughter] Because for me, I was 27 because I started a master’s program.

Strom: I mean, it might be like that, it probably is something that came with education. It wasn’t something my family talked about.

Rabins: Jews talk about it a lot. [laughter]

Saporiti: That term? Diaspora?

Rabins: It will just be in the title of a 4th grade Hebrew school curriculum.

Saporiti: Wow.

Rabins: Like for sure.

Saporiti: Ahead of the game.

Rabins: Yeah.

Saporiti: I feel. It was this word I never heard of. I grew up in Tennessee and I was a kid in a band. That was my whole life and then I went to grad school. Then it became one of those grad school bingo words that you’d be able to check off at anyone’s paper and stuff like that. So, it’s always felt very top down to me, even though I think the way that we communicate is from a very bottom up or just in the middle sort of conversation, which is I guess what we’re here to do today. As far as what it means to me now, it’s very much attached to hanging out with these two. And I’m also part Vietnamese, like Dao. So a lot of the connection that I had with her at first was, I think, her finding some similarities in the work that we both do as people who sing Americana-ish music, but with a pretty straightforward cultural set of influences and stories behind it.

Then what I found really interesting – and I think this is something that’s very scalable out to so many different writers of any kind of words – is that when we’ve sat down with you, Alicia … oh, wow, academically I’ve known there’s a lot of parallels and many of these communities, fraught politics, infighting, travel, displacement, these kinds of things, but some of the personal stories that our songs will get to, whether it’s first person or taking historical subjects. And then, yeah, I think diaspora was just a nice lens. And also found that Doa sort of rescued it into this very beautiful word. I hear the sounds as opposed to the very thick books I once had to read that were called Diasporic blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Chávez: You know, I have to say when you ask that question, when did you first hear this word …

Saporiti: Yeah, when did you first hear that word? [Laughter] Today?

Chávez: No, not today, but I was an adult and I think it was one of those words that you see first when you read it and don’t hear it pronounced. I thought it was pronounced die-a-spora and then I learned how to pronounce it. So it was definitely not a concept that I pronounced correctly.

Saporiti: I kind of like that.

Strom: I think I am still not pronouncing it correctly.

Saporiti: Do you think maybe you’re wrong, Dao?

[Laughter]

Saporiti: Die-a-spora, I like that.

Chávez: So, yeah, it’s a concept that I’ve been able to explore more in adulthood, and as I have a job where I interview people and talk to them about all of their different personal stories and how they overlap. What you’re talking about is exactly the type of lens that I’m interested in as well.

I wanted to ask you, Dao – could you tell us a little bit about how you all met and started playing music together? I’m also curious why this theme of diaspora was something that you all chose to associate with what you’re doing together?

Strom: Yeah. I don’t know a lot of Vietnamese people are also into country music, honestly. So when I happened upon Julian’s music, which I think I just found online, the No-No Boy Project, I was really struck by it, and just what he was doing and writing songs about Asian American history. And then when I did my first song cycle here … the first hybrid work I did, which was called “We Were Meant to be a Gentle People” and I did a song cycle called “East-West.” And it had songs that had to do with the context of diaspora and Vietnamese culture and perspective. Again, it was this weird music thing that I didn’t know other people were doing.

I think about the same time, Alicia was also doing “Girls in Trouble,” but I didn’t learn about her music until much later. So, yeah, that is the reason that I reached out to them initially, just out of not knowing other artists who were working at the same intersections. It seemed like a fun idea to bring us all together and talk and share songs. So that’s how it began.

Saporiti: I thought there were a lot of really interesting commonalities because Dao had been writing these … the one song I think she’s going to play today, like these country songs about our so-called Homeland/Motherland that you don’t hear very much. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. So the country music thing is not a choice; my dad was in that industry. And then I think we got together at Alicia’s house the first time, right? Is that where we met the first time? And we just had this really beautiful around-the-kitchen table and sharing songs. I think Dao had more of a vision than we did, but I think it just opened up at that moment.

Rabins: And like Dao said, we all are really interested in exploring the tension and powerful intersections of our kind of cultures of origin and the world that we live in. And we all love American folk and country music, which is traditionally a very white Christian genre. So there’s something really powerful about stepping into two traditions that are often seen as mutually exclusive and using the great power of music. I think one of them, among many, is that it can just erase boundaries in a really beautiful way, and help us sort of connect and see past the invisible boundaries we like to draw between things. And I feel like that’s a powerful similarity in our work.

Strom: Yeah, I mean, I would also just add something. Part of diaspora just making art from these perspectives … for me, the crossing of boundaries is also like a reaching out to have conversations with other people who are existing in different places in the diaspora is part of the, I guess, reaction, resistance, like building something beyond the forces that divided us.

Chávez: Wonderful. Well, thank you all for giving me your origin story. I would love to get into the music. Dao, Julian just said you have a song planned for us. Could you tell us a little bit about what we’re gonna hear, where it came from for you? Anything we should know?

Strom: Yeah, I was going to play a song called “Perfume River” and it’s actually one of the first songs that I wrote, which is more than 20 years ago now. And I was playing music very much in this old roots style, traditional and vain. I was really drawn to a lot of rural gospel music, which we’re also going to play one of those traditional songs later. I thing I noticed I loved about those songs is the storytelling and also … oh, especially with gospel songs, like the themes of exile and the themes of displacement, which I sort of transposed onto my own context of coming from a place that I don’t remember and having this very vague … it’s a concrete place, but it’s also a place that exists on another plane or in imagination. And there’s a ghost memory. And there are also a lot of songs with rivers, roads, hills and just features of nature, so I thought I would put a Vietnamese river into a song. So it’s called “Perfume River “and it takes place somewhere in the war years.

[”Perfume River” playing by Dao Strom]

[Applause]

Chávez: That was beautiful. Thank you so much. I would love if y’all could share – how does that song resonate with you? How does that song hit with you?

Saporiti: I love that one. Before I met Dao, I had been on the Perfume River the one time I’d been back to Vietnam. Me and my brother went back with her in 2013 and she left in ‘67. [It] was the first time she ever went back. And like a lot of Vietnamese people, my aunt will never go back, like people who left in the diaspora.

I had a really beautiful experience of this traditional Vietnamese tourist band – band for tourists, not tourists in Vietnam – playing all these wonderful instruments. And I discovered one of my favorite instruments, called the Dan Bau, that day. So I have this incredible memory of floating along the Perfume River as this like very princely tourist, being played music to by these musicians. And it’s really neat to find that place set so beautifully, and it’s with all this melancholy, and sort of imagined and real nostalgia that country music can do so well – Dao put that into context.

So it’s a really striking thing. I don’t know, when I do concerts, a lot of times there will be Viet people or Asian American people or people from other, keyword, diasporas who will find this kind of meaning that I’m almost overwhelmed by in these songs. And I’ve had concerts where people have known about Alicia’s work because we do kind of similar things, and they’re just hungry for something that speaks beyond the typical stuff that I grew up hearing in Nashville. And I think that’s what that song means to me. It’s very beautiful and it’s a great country song. Yeah. You wouldn’t know she was Vietnamese or anything. Or the Perfume River was anywhere but like Louisiana or something – also where a lot of Vietnamese people are. [laughter] So maybe it is … maybe it’s moved.

Rabins: And for me as someone who didn’t know about the Perfume River before, I’m embarrassed to say – I don’t have this deep background – I feel like it’s such a privilege as a listener to get to step into this form listening to beautiful country music that is such an amazing container for story. Famously, country songs are just like story vehicles. To get to travel to this place that I really don’t know about, and experience this narrative and this history through this incredibly beautiful, pleasurable container, it just feels like getting to take a journey. So yeah, it’s amazing.

Saporiti: Yeah. And it’s a journey not only to a place, but for all of us, a lot of these places are more in our head than anywhere real. And I think that’s the sort of duality of that travel that’s really nice in a song like Dao just played – we’re traveling with Dao wherever she is. I don’t know, you might be on the Perfume River in your head whenever you’re singing that, or you might be thinking of the real one, or a mix of the two. And to be, I think, diasporic – from some communities maybe more than others or depending on your circumstance – is to kind of always be searching. And so rivers are nice for that. You never stop.

Chávez: That is really true. Talking about floating down a river and yeah, very potent image that came through in the music.

Dao: It carries a lot of memories, and a lot of sense of people’s emotions and belonging.

Chávez: Alicia, I loved what you say too about country music being a story vehicle. I love stories. So thank you for sharing that. And actually I want to stick with you because you have a song for us as well. So tell us a little bit about what you’re going to be playing today.

Rabins: So I’m going to stand up because I’m using a loop pedal, so you’ll hear me play the violin many times over myself. And this is from my project “Girls in Trouble” – that both of my art fellow artists have mentioned a couple of times – which is a song cycle about stories of women in the Torah. Sometimes I think it’s a double diaspora because Jewish culture is not the primary culture. And then within traditional Jewish culture, women’s culture is not the primary culture. So I think one of the things I love about this project is being like, what if this was at the center? What if this wasn’t kind of an alternate version of normal reality, but for every person our lives are at the center? So to sort of step into that story and inhabit it.

This particular song is about a character from Torah who’s not even really in the Torah, she’s double, triple diaspora. She’s what we call apocryphal, which means her name doesn’t really appear in there. But there’s a legend connected to the Torah that we’ve kept alive for thousands of years about this character named Lilith who is like a first Eve. And she’s been sort of championed by a lot of other kinds of countercultures since then. But she probably comes from ancient Sumerian winged demoness.

If you read carefully in the book of Genesis, there’s two creation stories. In one, the man and woman are made as one and then split apart. Then the second one, God creates Adam and then Eve comes out of Adam’s rib or side. So there’s one interpretive tradition that they’re actually two different women. They’re not two versions of the same story, but that this was a sequential occurrence. And that first woman was named Lilith. Because she was made as half of an equal whole, she thought she should get an equal vote, an equal say and be equal to Adam.

[Laughter]

Chávez: Go figure.

Rabins: And they’re kind of a little bit specific, but she demands certain things in bed that she wants. He’s like, no, because they actually talked about sex in the ancient world. So according to this legend, Adam is totally overwhelmed by Lilith’s sense of entitlement to equality. Adam complains to God. God is like, you’re totally right. What was I thinking? Sorry. [Laughter]

Lilith gets banished where she becomes this whirling kind of demoness as flying out there. And then God does like a “take two” with the part of Adam’s body and creates Eve so that she will always know she’s subservient. So, of course, that’s only one of many, many, many ways you can read Genesis, but I kind of love that tradition. And when the Talmud is talking about that first creation story, where man and woman were made as one and then split – which Plato also talks about – the Talmud uses the Greek word “androgenous” to describe this being beyond gender.

I love the idea that maybe if we kind of go deep enough into ourselves, there is a place in us where we are this original being, where we are whole, equal, open and not all divided into binaries. So this is my love song and the voice of Lilith, thinking maybe it was a real love story to Adam, but he was just not ready for her 3,000 years ago or whenever that legend was supposed to happen. So it’s in her voice and it’s called “We Are Androgynous.”

[”We Are Androgynous” playing by Alicia Jo Rabins]

We are androgynous double-faced beings,

one looking forward and one looking back. Formed in the light of the throne in the sky, we are never alone and we never die.

Two forms of dust, of the one and the many; a vapor to moisten them both into clay. Two hands to form us, to guide us and shape us, until we are ready to walk away.

We are, we are, we are, we are, we are, we are.

We are androgynous double-faced beings, torn from each other and rendered in two. Two flaming swords guard the garden of Eden, but I won’t go back there without you.

[Applause]

Chávez: Wow, y’all are killing it right now. Do you know how many loops you had going total by the end of the song?

Rabins: Maybe like eight or so.

Chávez: Wow.

Saporiti: What percentage of the time do you have to restart? [Laughter]

Rabins: I shouldn’t say the secret on the radio, but I’m going to. So every other loop song that I’ve ever written, I start from scratch because I compose those other songs in a way that gives me a little leeway at the end. But this particular song is like dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt, and there’s no way I could actually make that reliably. So this one, I spent a long time recording one perfect loop and I stored it. So the very first loop of plucking is actually loop number two in my loop pedal.

[Laughter]

Saporiti: Behind the scenes?

Rabins: Yeah.

Strom: Well, one thing I was thinking about while Alicia was talking [was] just this whole idea of the theme of a separation. I feel like that is a really key theme that I ponder a lot, too, sort of. And I feel like your song is sort of questioning, going back to what was before that paradigm of separation and division as our origin story. And I feel like that’s crucial for me. There’s also a separation myth in the Vietnamese origin tale. TAnd then the themes of separation sort of resonate with North-South division and exodus and exile. And I feel like it’s at the source of all the world’s problems, really, like this paradigm of separation being necessary. Yeah, so it really moves me and I resonate with that line of questioning.

Saporiti: Yeah, I think, jumping off what Dao is saying with your song, and then a lot of what you write about too, there’s mythology, there’s origins, there’s mothers. I certainly get at that too, having a Vietnamese mom. And I think what’s interesting, when I was listening back again now, and maybe thinking about current events and all the history that Dao and I have lived through or studied with our culture, it’s that kind of betrayal prime by your own people sometimes that stabs you the deepest. It’s like the enemy that you were once one with. And that’s like a really difficult thing to reckon with, which I think that such an upbeat poppy tune does very well.

I would just love a maybe point of the author’s clarification about how you end it lyrically, how you turn it. Where are we ending? Where are we starting? Where are we taking people with the lyric? And then that last lyric – I don’t want to go back to the garden – but with you, where is that coming from? Because I have an interpretation, but it might be …

Rabins: It’s funny. When I write, I don’t necessarily think that intellectually about it, but if I was going to analyze it as a listener/composer/writer … I loved so much what you, Dao, said about these separation myths in the way that I think it’s also an essential human thing. And we do live in a world where we have to balance, we can’t just unify infinitely, right? There is a separation, like we’re each in our own bodies and yet there’s so much more than that separation.

I feel like there’s a hopefulness at the end of that song. It’s kind of a song about healing and it’s also a song about how healing is also about interdependence, right? So there’s a lot of angry Lilith interpretations, and that’s actually the traditional kind of Jewish interpretation and even Christian, that she becomes this enemy. I wanted to have her be like, but no, we both lose out when we don’t get to see ourselves in each other and recognize that we’re part of a larger oneness, and I can’t be fully myself if you can’t be full you either. So it’s not like, screw you Adam, I’m taking over the garden now. It’s like, until you’re ready to inhabit the garden in this sort of healed way, I actually can’t quite be there either and we all need each other.

Chávez: Julian, you have a song for us as well. Tell us a little bit about it and what we should know before listening.

Saporiti: I’m going to do a little medley. I sort of have stopped touring so much and have been hanging out at a local arboretum playing music recently. I just did a concert there yesterday and these two will do one next month under the redwood trees, it’s very beautiful. Within one of my songs that is very much from a first person speaking to the Vietnamese diaspora … which is a very cut into project where a lot of us South Vietnamese – the first gen, like my mom – are very conservative like Trump voters, very hyper capitalists, anti-communist for some historical reasons. And then myself, who finds myself interacting with concepts of communism and socialism, maybe too frequently for someone of my bloodline. It’s like that kind of conversation.

But within that, I set this poem by … I guess everyone’s from the diaspora, but he’s not particularly marginalized. There was this poet named Robert Service and he wrote “The Cremation of Sam McGee” that I had to study as a middle school kid. But he was the poet of the Yukon and in his first collection, “The Songs of a Sourdough,” or something like that, he wrote this incredible poem called “The Tramps.” I played it yesterday. I just started playing it and Alicia said she really liked it. I want to play it again so she could have a recording, so I didn’t have to record on my iphone. So using this for utility. [Laughter]

Chávez: Great. I’m glad we can provide.

Saporiti: We’re going to end with a cover of an old folk song. And this is a poem I set to music. So it’s very much in that tradition, but it’s a song of a wanderer. The first level I found it on was as a boy whose band had just broken up. And it’s about wandering the road, being a tramp, just kind of going along and all how you can live such a dirty, beautiful life when you’re young and then your back hurts kind of thing. [Laughter] That’s the lyric more or less.

But I also thought of it within the context of the song I’m putting it in called “Tell Hanoi I Love Her,” which is very much about being Southern twice over, having two civil wars to reckon with, being very cut in half, thinking about my mom’s cohort and all these especially young men soldiers and stuff like that who were in battle together and then they and their families oftentimes had to then go across the sea together. And yeah, how you can layer on this concept, whether it’s, you’ve had to serve in the military, or just sort of a vagabond, or an artist, or a juggler, or a musician or whatever, the tiredness that eventually comes.

Also, having talked to people in Dao and I’s community a lot for my academic work, how beautiful memories were made even in the darkest places, like refugee camps or being stuck on islands or boats and stuff like that. Because you’re still young and you’re still with your friends. Some of them died, but some of them didn’t and they’re still human. And that’s the duality of it. So yeah, we’ll do this a little medley.

[”Tell Hanoi I Love Her” and “The Tramps” medley playing by No-No Boy]

Jenny’s mother in the nail salon

Bedazzled star-spangled t-shirt, tiger mom

Saw the flag on my hat, told me to take it off

Tell Hanoi I love her

I keep no grudge against some Old World kin

Not lettin’ go, now that’s the bodhisattva’s sin

I named my Chrysler after Ho Chi Minh

Tell Hanoi I love her

Can you recall, dear comrade, when we tramped God’s land together,

And we sang the old, old Earth’s-song for our youth was very sweet;

When we drank and fought and lusted, as we mocked that tie and tether,

Along the road to Anywhere, the wide world at our feet –

Along the road to Anywhere, when each day had its story;

When time was yet a vassal, and life’s jest was still unstale;

When peace unfathomed filled our hearts as, bathed in amber glory,

Along the road to Anywhere we watched the sunsets pale?

Alas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster;

This hunger, want, and weariness, yet O we loved it so!

As on we traveled exultantly, and no man was our master,

And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as, swinging heel and toe,

We tramped the road to Anywhere, that magic road to Anywhere,

That tragic road to Anywhere, such dear, dim years ago.

Twice southern with two civil wars

A fool to think that this place could ever be yours.

The in between, that’s what you must explore

Tell Hanoi I love her.

[Applause]

Chávez: Yes. The vibe in here is so good right now. [Laughter] Oh, this is beautiful.

So, Alicia, you mentioned that you encourage him to play one of those songs. What are your thoughts on the music he just played?

Rabins: I’m such a fan of both of these artists. [Laughter] It’s just so special to be a killer kind of country folk/indie musician and a true scholar, and storyteller as well. When those things line up, as they do in these two artists, I feel so held when I’m experiencing this music. Then I love the idea that you’re also bringing in just this poem in English that’s centering it all in this universal feeling that we all share, especially as we get older. Certainly musicians, just being like, well, I can’t quit, maybe not want to quit tour like I used to, and looking back fondly, but also accepting the change. I think there’s something about that with this kind of long view diaspora thing, too. How do you gracefully and thoughtfully let things be what they are, explore them, tell the stories and also not shrivel up in it? Like remain a generous spirit.

Chávez: What about you, Dao?

Strom: Well, just building off of that, that’s something I definitely feel from Julian’s music and a generosity of spirit and of storytelling. And even if you listen to the lyrics, there’s really heavy stuff in there. Jillian has the ability to tell these stories in a way – I don’t want to say levity – but it’s like there is something that I’m able to receive without, I guess, being really depressed.

Saporiti: The depression is like the layer after the concert when you get home and maybe you’re singing along and you say, “Oh, what was … Oh no.”

[Laughter]

Strom: Yeah. But I’ll also say with things like this, the character of sorrow is a big character of Vietnamese experience and Vietnamese culture. And there is a genre of music, especially pre-1975, that has this particular tenor of sorrow that is informed by the war and people living through this experience. And it’s definitely something that’s carried by that first generation and into the subsequent generations. It is this inherited feeling. There are a lot of people in my mother’s generation who sit around listening to these old songs and sort of steeping in this nostalgia.

So it’s really interesting. I can’t quite articulate it, but there’s something about music that lets us sit in that emotion that’s a place beyond the rhetoric that there’s so many political arguments that are rife with. So that’s how I feel when I listen to Julian’s music.

Saporiti: Yeah, I think just whenever we sit down, the three of us, it’s fun, first and foremost. We don’t leave crying, because that’s not sustainable. And I think that is something that’s good to extrapolate when you’re having these … everyone’s in these larger cultural conversations that are very dark right now about things that have happened forever. We’re just way more aware, and everyone has a microphone and a phone now, so it’s all everything all at once.

I think the joy that we feel when we get together talking about pretty heavy stuff, to say the least, speaks truth to a lot of what I found on more of the researcher side. When I was doing all my grad school work and talking to all these people who lived through these horrible American and Trans-Pacific histories and stuff, [I found] that through suffering, people still have dualities and multiplicities. And I think the last song that you did is very upbeat and literally talking about duality and the androgyny of it all. It’s also very informative, like the hope at the end of it.

And sometimes, like you said, Dao, my lyrics, if you actually listen to them, I think if you just read them, they’d be a lot darker than the music attached to it. But that’s sort of why this works because you want people to sit with songs and then maybe feel something. But these people didn’t suffer 100% all the time. That’s doing a disservice to their agency. There was life, happiness and humanness that’s found today for people living in camps, on boats or wherever, like the historical people sing about. And that’s something that you have to give credit to and also take instruction from. If someone can have 99% of their agency taken away and still find joy and play music, or love or whatever, that’s a really important thing for those of us who have all that agency to keep in mind.

Rabins: And I think that also goes back to our shared love of the music of the Southeastern U.S. and the sort of folk and country music, and there’s nothing happier than a really good sad song.

Chávez: That’s true.

Rabins: And some of the most amazing songs that people sit around and sing are these really wild murder ballads if you listen to it, but it’s actually healing. Like Dao was saying, to be able to contain these intense feelings that we all share no matter what our background is and take a really heavy feeling, put it in a beautiful container and experience it in time together, and then sort of move through it.

Chávez: Well, with that, I would love to hear this one last song you all have. I know that this is a traditional song. Why have you decided to play the song for us today?

Strom: Well, really, it’s a great song.

Chávez: That’s enough of a reason.

Strom: This song is over 200 years old. I don’t think it’s known who exactly wrote it. And it came from somewhere else probably also. But it’s one of the first songs that I learned that sort of drew me into this genre of music. And it’s a song about exile and longing, religious, but you can transpose that, too. It’s called “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger.”

[”I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger” playing by Diaspora Songs – Dao Strom, Alicia Jo Rabins and Julian Saporiti]

I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger

Traveling through this world of woe

And there is no sickness, no toil or danger

In that bright world to which I’ll go

I’m going there to meet my father

I’m going there no more to roam

I’m only going over Jordan

I’m only going over home

I know dark clouds will gather ‘round me

I know my way is rough and steep

Yet beauteous fields lie just beyond me

Where weary eyes no more shall weep

I’m going there to see my mother

She said she’d meet me when I came

I’m only going over Jordan

I’m only going over home

I’ll soon be free of every every trial

This foam will rest beneath the sod

I’ll drop the cross of self denial

And enter on my great reward

I am going down to make my maker

She shed her precious blood for me

I’m only going over Jordan

I’m only going over home

[Applause]

Chávez: That was Julian Saporiti, Dao Strom and Alicia Jo Rabins recorded live at Pickathon a few weeks ago. If you want to hear a slightly longer version of that interview, check out The Evergreen, a weekly podcast that I happen to host for OPB. You can find it on the NPR App on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, right alongside the Think Out Loud podcast.

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