Shall We Hope

Just when you think the cultural lodestone of America's Civil War has given up every drop of blood it could offer, along comes banjo maestro Tony Trischka's Shall We Hope. Over a dozen years in the making, Trischka's magnum opus comprises songs and narration inspired by the 75th anniversary celebration (in 1938) of the battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest military engagement ever waged on American soil. Essentially a rumination on the consequences of war, the project features a cast of luminaries including Michael Daves, Guy Davis, John Lithgow, Maura O'Connell, Abigail Washburn, Phoebe Hunt, Brian O'Donovan and the Violent Femmes.

From the sublime introductory chambergrass setting of ‘This Favored Land’, highlighted by Hunt's exquisitely southern articulation, to the martial gaiety of ‘Big Round Top March’ paired with the fatefully grim ‘Drummer Boys’, the latter sung and spoken by O'Donovan (father of Aoife); from the harrowing plight of the black slave interpreted by the incomparable Catherine Russell in ‘Carry Me Over the Sea’ to Lithgow's moving rendition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's remarks at the Gettysburg anniversary ceremony, Shall We Hope renders with lyrical grace and harmonic resonance the tragic nature of the human species, thereby instilling hope, however faint, for its salvation.