LITTLE ROCK — Still on the Hill is not one of those illegal Ozark distilleries that were once hidden away by mountain folks. Rather, the name is that of a folk duo that took their name from their continuing residence in Fayetteville, which is sometimes referred to as “The Hill.”
Founded as a group, Still on the Hill is now a duo, consisting of Kelly Mulhollan on vocals, acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica and tenor ukulele, and Donna Stjerna on vocals, fiddle, cello, mandolin and washboard. Both are songwriters.
“We tour a lot, but we don’t often get to central Arkansas as much as we should,” Mulhollan says. “We’re very honored to get to play for Little Rock Folk Club, which mainly brings in folks from the British Isles, we know. It’s been hard to find an appropriate venue there since the demise of the Acoustic Sounds Cafe, where we sometimes played. We have done shows at the Laman Library in North Little Rock, however.”
The married duo has released six albums in its 16 years together, with the most recent two being wildly different. Ozark: A Celebration in Song is a collection of songs written about unusual characters the two musicians have encountered in their Ozark travels.
The other CD, Red Curtain, contains 12 love songs, all but two of which were originally poems Stjerna wrote to Mulhollan.
“She is a prolific songwriter,” Mulhollan says with a laugh. “She writes a song or two every week and has about 600 or 700 total. She’s been writing me songs on Valentine’s Day for the last 16 years. We don’t run our careers in the most practical way, as we last did a very rootsy album, and then we jumped to a wacky love album.
“Both of us are attracted to eccentric people, as can be heard in such songs on the Ozark album as one about the ghost in the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs and another about Coin Harvey, who tried to build a pyramid structure called Monte Ne outside Rogers. One song, ‘One Good Leg,’ is about my great-grandfather, James Berry, who was an Arkansas governor after the Civil War, where he lost one of his legs. There’s a statue of him on the square in Bentonville, but the statue has two legs.”
The duo’s Ozark CD was made possible by a grant from a Northwest Arkansas TV station. Proceeds from the statewide sales of the album will go to provide banjos, fiddles and guitars to deserving young people in Arkansas, through the organization Play It Again, Arkansas. The album won a Governor’s Folk Life Award, and a documentary film based on it is shown at various times on the AETN network.
Mulhollan is a native of the Beaver Lake area, and Stjerna is from San Francisco.
“I’ve lived everywhere, though, since my dad was a gypsy sign painter,” she says. “I moved to this area 35 years ago and I love this place, thanks to the mountains and the simplicity of the area, although it’s growing faster than we would wish. Kelly and I met when we were both doing session work. I was singing country music covers five hours a night at the Club West in Fayetteville and had only written a couple of songs.
“When I heard Kelly sing his song ‘Ode to Mr. Boze,’ about a fiddle maker from Russellville, well, that song just swept me off my feet, and inspired me so much. Before long, we were virtually inseparable.”
Still on the Hill has taken its repertoire of mostly original songs to festivals in Kerrville, Texas; Winfield, Kan.; and Philadelphia. They also have a children’s show they tour with under the name Toucan Jam. In December, they plan to do a Still on the Hill reunion with musicians Phil Lancaster and John Johnston, originally part of the band.
Still on the Hill
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Little Rock Folk Club, Thomson Hall, Unitarian Universalist Church, 1818 Reservoir Road, Little Rock
Admission: $15; $8 for students with ID; free for accompanied children age 12 and under
(501) 663-0634
www.littlerockfolkclub.org
Weekend, Pages 38 on 10/04/2012