The building blocks of American Railroad began at artist retreats and site visits across the nation—to the Standing Rock Reservation, New York City, and San Francisco (CA)—where artists engaged in historical and cultural research, which informed the overall storytelling and musical direction. The process also included a series of open workshops, titled Train Station Trios, held in Sacramento (CA), New York City, and Springdale (AR). These culminated in informal, hour-long performances with trios of Silkroad musicians and local scholars, featuring new music inspired by the railroad’s impact on that particular area. 

The music on the American Railroad tours comes from these workshops as well as additional research by Silkroad artists and collaborators. Commissions have included Rhiannon Giddens’s arrangement of “Swannanoa Tunnel / Steel-Driving Man,” combining a song written by wrongfully imprisoned Black men and women who unwillingly risked their lives building the Swannanoa Tunnel in North Carolina with a popular traditional tune about the folk hero John Henry who beat the steam drill with his hammer, only to die of a burst heart; Grammy Award-winning vocalist and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s “Have You Seen My Man?,” telling the imagined story of a woman walking slowly along a train track, joined by generations of wanderers who cannot ride the train though it was built by their labor; Wu Man’s “Rainy Day,” which features her instrument, the pipa, with the banjo and voice to reflect the emotions of Chinese wives and mothers who miss their husbands and sons working on the railroad across the Pacific Ocean; Haruka Fujii’s “Tamping Song,” celebrating the Japanese immigrant contribution to the railroad, particularly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; and Maeve Gilchrist’s “Far Down Far,” which shines light on the tensions between Catholic and Protestant communities within Irish railroad workers.

Select stops along the American Railroad tours are complemented by education and community engagement activities, including residencies at universities comprising guest lectures, panel discussions, master classes, and open rehearsals; and public programs that allow audiences of all ages to engage more deeply with local railroad history.