Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
A Whole Different Hill
Sunday concert takes listeners from Arctic to Ozarks
This is a most unusual Still on the Hill presentation,” Kelly Mulhollan begins. “It’s been really hard to communicate to people how different this is.”
The program he’s talking about takes place Sunday at the Fayetteville Public Library as part of the Mountain Street Stage summer concert series. But the roots of it reach back to Donna Stjerna Mulhollan’s ancestors, reindeer herders living near the Arctic Circle in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia. Commonly called “Laplanders,” they prefer the term “Sami” or “Saami,” she explains, adding that their culture has been endangered since a cultural “cleansing” in the early 1700s “burned their shamanic drums and shut down their music and their religion.”
Mulhollan says that as his wife learned more about her ancestry, “she went wild and started writing songs spontaneously and put together this whole fabulous show,” which will make its public debut on Sunday.
“We’ve been doing it just for fun for friends, and it’s been moving people to tears,” he says. “So we decided this would be a fun place to unveil it for the wider audience.”
That hourlong set will be followed by a second hourlong set of classic Still on the Hill tunes about the Ozarks, “so we’ve been calling it ‘Still on the Hill Explores Their Roots From the Arctic to the Ozarks’,” Donna Mulhollan says. “From my Arctic roots to Kelly’s Ozark roots — and it’s kind of timely to say ‘hey, this is a cool thing to dig into where we’re from.’”