From WXXI news.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made in 2013, when the United States State Department designated a band from Chicago as cultural ambassadors of the United States through the American Music Abroad and Arts Envoy programs.

The Henhouse Prowlers formed in 2004, and they've brought bluegrass and folk music to 36 countries now.

One of the band members is from the greater Finger Lakes area, and on occasion, fans of the band have emailed us over the years asking us to have them on the show to get these extraordinary stories of their world travels.

So typically we try to track them down, but they're already on the road again, off to Africa or the Middle East or Europe or South America.

Their diplomacy work inspired the creation of the Bluegrass Ambassadors organization, and today we got them there in studio.

They're going to perform some of their music for us today.

And I've been wondering, how do musicians serve as cultural ambassadors?

I've been wondering what kind of reception their music gets in places with very different kinds of musical norms or preference or musicality.

And if you listen to the lyrics throughout their ten studio albums, you might be curious.

After all, they got their State Department post during the Obama administration.

It's fair to wonder if the Trump administration knows about their work.

We'll talk a little bit about that.

The Henhouse Prowlers have written that there is profound value in helping people feel seen, both culturally and personally, and they believe music is an avenue to doing that.

They say diplomacy isn't just for the diplomats.

And I want to meet the band now.

The guy who is the closest to the Rochester roots anyway, Rochester adjacent, is Ben Wright.

He's on banjo and vocals for the hen House Prowlers Home for New York.

That's outside Cortland, New York.

And the other, you also have some Rochester ties as well, right?

Yeah.

So I grew up in Homer, and I when I finished high school, I had an English teacher who was like, you can write, you should go to college.

And, and so we applied to a bunch of schools, and I ended up going to Saint John Fisher.

For a semester.

I got a 0.0.

How do you.

I mean, that seems like really hard to do.

I he's a hard worker.

Yeah, I mean, I wasn't I wasn't ready for school.

It was never I was never ready for school, honestly.

And it was after getting that 0.0.

They offered, they said I could come back on academic probation, and I said no.

And I brought a banjo not too long after that.

And that changed your course, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's great to have you, Ben.

Thank you for being here.

Let me welcome Jake Howard on mandolin and vocals for the Henhouse Prowlers.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks, Evan, I appreciate that.

These guys are all better dressed than me.

By the way, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see that Jon Goldfine is an upright bass and vocals for the band.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

And Chris Dollar on guitar and vocals for The Henhouse Prowlers.

I'm very much so.

We're going to hear a number of songs this hour, and we're really excited to do that.

We've got them all set up in a nearby studio, so you're going to get some live music before we do that, though, you know, this is a band that forms in 2004 and, you know, it's it takes about a decade before you end up becoming U.S.

State Department ambassadors.

And I don't think I mean, I'll go around the table.

I don't think band you start a band thinking, you know, someday, a presidential administration is going to ask us to travel the world bringing music to to people around the world.

Yeah, it was a it was a complete surprise.

You're right.

We'd never could have imagined that we'd get those opportunities.

And they, without a doubt, definitively changed the course of this band.

The what we were doing, where we were going, the music we were writing, everything.

How many studio albums did you have at that point of Jon?

He's our band historian, I think.

I think we had five at that point.

Okay, so I mean, you've been doing it and, you know, you don't need me to tell you.

I mean, I've got a couple of brothers who tried to make music for a living and travel, and it's tough and it's a grind, but nobody I know has ever been called by the State Department.

So how does that contact first happened?

Well, actually, anybody can apply for that.

To do that, it's it's open for any band.

As long as you can kind of show there's some sort of educational value to your set, or at least you can modify it to do so.

But yeah, anyone can do it.

It's.

Yeah.

It's a you're minimizing this.

It's like, well, it's not that big of a deal.

How many cultural ambassador bands are there?

Do we know?

I there's, you know, there's a really deep history behind that.

And so there's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them going back to the jazz ambassadors in the 1950s during the Cold War.

You know what I like to tell it by elevator pitch is Cold War.

Soviet Union was sending ballets and orchestras around the world to have cultural influence, and they were kind of ahead of us, as a country in having this global influence and the united, the State Department, there's actually a record of this meeting where they sat down and said, how are we going to respond to this?

And what are we going to send for the rest of the world to see?

And at the time, it was the 1950s.

They sent Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, the the founders and the most important jazz musicians ever.

And that's and what happened was those tours were so successful that diplomats were like, these guys are better diplomats than we are.

Like the State Department woke up to the power of music, and that programing has continued to this day.

You know, not to be tried.

I wonder if the weight of that history, you know, is on your mind when you 2013 happens and you get the thumbs up from the State Department.

You know that history we I it's funny, I didn't necessarily at the time we learned by doing it and like there was we were playing in Kenya once and the backstage there was a photograph of Louis Armstrong playing the same stage we were on.

And that's when it starts to hit you.

You know, you're like, oh my God, like, we're a dinky bluegrass band from Chicago.

And here's Louis Armstrong doing the same thing we did, you know?

But obviously you're not a dinky bluegrass band because, because you got approved and whose idea in the band wasn't to even to go for it.

It was our original fiddle player who even at the time, wasn't even in the band anymore.

He was still kind of working for the band as like our lawyer, you know, because he had gone to law school, law school.

So he was like doing business management stuff for us still, but, he encouraged us to apply.

And we were like, sure, whatever.

Let's apply.

I mean, like, you apply that.

You think you're going to get accepted.

Well, next thing you know, we got we got they they called us to do a live audition.

At the time they would pick like out of all the applicants, they would pick like 40 bands to do live auditions.

So we wound up because of our tour schedule, we did our live audition in San Francisco, and it was a really, really stressful audition.

Like, there's all these stiff diplomats watching you.

No one's applauding or barely even smiling.

And, you know, and we thought the audition was over and we kind of felt relieved and kind of felt like, oh, that was an experience, you know, didn't expect to hear back from them.

And I remember a couple weeks later, I was at the park walking my dogs, and I got a text from Ben texting the whole band.

Guys, we got, American music abroad, and I screamed.

I remember when I found out, like, I literally screamed and my downstairs neighbors texted me were like, you okay?

What was the first tour you guys went on?

What was the.

So we were in West Africa that first tour.

So that was Mauritania.

Niger, Congo-Brazzaville and Liberia.

I, I'm, you know, again, I, I don't know how much, you know, going in, but probably you have a lot to learn about the places you're going on a trip like that, right?

I mean, probably your first trip.

Can you for those in the band who were there, can you just briefly describe what that first experience is like abroad?

You're you're repping the United States, you're bringing music to places that might not have a whole lot of bluegrass experience.

I mean, man, I remember getting off the airplane in Congo and the smell of West Africa hit me and like, it's a totally different than anything you experience.

And I remember that was like the first step that we took.

And like you remember, we got like kind of handled in the airport where they, they put because you're a diplomat and they take you to the front of the line for visas.

And we're feeling really weird because we're the only white guys that are being brought to the front of the line.

And like, it's it's a weird.

The whole thing is strange.

Yeah.

Yeah, just the whole it it's such, such a different mindset, like just everything, the smells, the sights, the you really get hit by the the poverty in a lot of those places, too.

Like, it's just you just being surrounded by it.

It is just something we can't even fathom here.

And I remember, thinking this at times like.

And we're really spoiled in America, you know, and I remember coming back from that first tour thinking, man, I don't want to.

I can't complain about anything.

Seeing the the way that, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the poverty that we came across there and, and people were just that's just how they live and they're happy.

And it makes you kind of think that, you know, for for people who are hungry.

I mean, someday you may be hungry and everyone's expression is you kind of get that nice segway there.

We're going know it's actually too early.

We're going to get there.

There's music to come.

There's, there's there's music here.

And we're going to get to this music in just a moment.

So last bit of questions.

And this first round here with The Henhouse Prowlers, who are our guests in studio Ben.

Wright.

Jon Goldfine, Jake Howard, Chris Dollar, all with us here.

It's one thing to say, okay, now you're a diplomat, but do they give you a specific set of instructions?

I mean, or is it just, hey, you're going to play at these places.

Do you know why you're playing?

Do you know what you're hoping to accomplish?

Yeah.

I mean, they give us a general sense of what's going on, but those tours are all different with some similar components to them.

And so there will be a public performance, but there will also be like visits to see an orphanage or schools.

There usually is, a party at the ambassador's house for all the diplomats in the country to come and trade business cards.

But that's not why we're going.

That's part of the job.

We we go to, like, to experience the, the culture and to absorb some of the music and to have these for us.

What were life changing experiences?

But also we've realized that coming home is a big part of those tours and coming home and actually giving people in America firsthand context about these places that they may only read about in the news and stuff.

I mean, almost may rarely read it.

Right?

Exactly.

In some cases.

Yeah, absolutely.

Can you describe one story that that pop, maybe you've had so many on the road, 36 countries you've been in so far, but just give our listeners one example of a story of an experience that you go, I can't believe we're having this experience.

I mean, that first tour, there was a day where they in Mauritania, which is in the Sahara desert, we got a caravan of vehicles, and they filled them up with generators and speakers and microphones, and we drove out into the Sahara desert to a village called Boga, which you can look up on the map in Mauritania.

It's in the heart of the Sahara.

And we pulled into this village and started setting up on and what turned out to be a bus stop made by the European Union for this tiny little town.

And there was nobody.

And when they set the equipment up, we started sound checking.

People started appearing on the tops of the dunes, and it went from absolutely nobody to about 1500 people in about 20 minutes because they heard the sound check.

There was no getting the word out.

That was that was it.

And we played it.

And in this town in the middle of the Sahara to a bunch of West African people.

And the what's amazing about those opportunities is that they they Paris up with local musicians.

And so I was just looking through photos from that tour and I remembered some of the guys who got up and played with us, and we just figured out how to make music with these guys right there and then.

Awesome.

You know what?

It's really amazing stuff.

Listeners, if you want to check out some of their work, they're in a number of places.

It's the Henhouse Prowlers.

And, we should also mention again, the nonprofit work.

So, guys, where do you want people to find more of the work, more of the music, etc.?

You can find our nonprofit work at Bluegrass ambassadors.org.

Org, or just our, regular dinky bluegrass follies at henhouse prowlers.com and house prowlers.com.

You guys ready to head down and give us the first tune?

So the first song they're going to sing is, called Look Up to the Sky.

They're going to head down and perform it now.

And what we'll do is we're going to listen to that.

When we come back from break.

We're going to talk to them about that tune, and there's more music to come.

We've got multiple songs from this band that once again, if you're just joining us, this has been kind of years in the making because the Henhouse Prowlers there, they got some Rochester roots, as you heard from Ben Wright.

He's from the Cortland area.

He's from Homer, New York.

Went to school briefly.

Saint John Fisher, now University.

He's not that not the highest achieving Saint John Fisher student in history might be the lowest, but, but has, plenty of Rochester roots as well.

And this is a band that is now based in Chicago.

They're they're Chicagoans.

They formed in 2004.

Over the years there, their fans would tell us they're coming through or this is a chance.

Like if they're kind of come to Rochester, you got to get them.

But they're hard to get because they travel the world 36 different countries.

In fact, I was asking the band when they got here, are you actually playing in Rochester?

I mean, you're here for the show.

And they said, well, we're in Maine tomorrow, the state of Maine, Portland, Maine tomorrow.

That's close enough when you travel of 36 different countries in five continents, Rochester to to Portland, Maine is it's maybe not that far, but, they're here for for this audience.

They're here for this show.

And so we are really thrilled to have them.

We've got a crew down in the, in the second studio where you're going to hear them now, and I will go ahead and kick it to Henhouse Prowlers for them to play look up to the sky.

To get you to.

I don't know what comes after live in my life anyway.

Go higher.

Still good amount.

And, for us to get away.

Tomorrow.

We don't worry much about you around here anymore.

All I know is I want you here for the duration.

Anyway.

That's.

You're back.

Boo!

Tell us to move.

Our bus leaves today.

Tomorrow?

We know very much about you around here anymore.

By that highway.

And ride with the whiskey and the ride will cherish the night.

That sun will rise and that fire will subside.

Be good.

Then your eyes look up to the sky.

I don't know how it's come to that.

We'll be home now.

Any day.

But my.

I won't care where we'll ever stay.

As long as I'm with you today.

Hey, to morrow we don't worry much about you round here anymore.

Oh.

That highway and the ride with whiskey and a, will cherish the night.

I pray that sun will rise up and find us on the side of in your eyes.

Look up to the smile.

That's the henhouse.

Prowlers performing live for connections.

We're going to come back from this only break.

Continue talking to this band.

Not only a bluegrass band, but the creators of the Bluegrass Ambassadors organization.

They are technically American diplomats since 2013, traveling to 36 different countries so far, bringing American music and culture around the world.

They're in Rochester today for this show.

More with them next.

Coming up in our second hour connection, Summer sessions is looking at the United States economy this week and this hour, we revisit a conversation with economist Kent Gardner.

He had a chance to sit down and review his own biases when it comes to tariffs and other economic ideas that the Trump administration has put into policy.

Was he surprised by anything that happened in the last year?

Did he change his mind on anything?

We'll talk to economist Kent Gardner next hour.

Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Mary Carey Solar Center, supporting residents to become active members of the community, from developing life skills to gaining independence.

Mary Carey, Yola center transforming lives of people with disabilities.

More online at Mary Carey, ola.org.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson, Ben Wright, Jake Howard, Jon Goldfine, Chris Dollar, all from The Henhouse Prowlers with us.

And you just heard us heard their, their song and look up to the sky.

Who's the lyricist on that song, by the way?

Oh.

That's me.

There you go.

The first line of the song is, I don't know what comes after this.

What are you talking about?

That's right.

Yeah.

So when I wrote that song, me and my wife were very much at sort of a a crossroads of what was next in life.

We weren't quite ready to start a family, and we didn't want to just, you know, go get jobs and do that.

So we, we, had a, we had a van from, my, the previous band.

I was in our old band van I purchased from ourselves.

And, we went we went across the country for about two months.

And that's what most of this song was about, is the decision or the the journey to make that decision.

And then kind of the second half is just us coming back.

I'm 47, and I find that there are times in my life now where I've almost overtly asked myself, like, is this like a chapter ending?

Is this?

And but it's hard to know it in the moment, and especially if it's something that you have loved or have had affection for, and that can go for all kinds of different things, can be places you've lived, can be jobs you've done.

It could be avocations, it could be musical careers.

And life is quite a poignant and and difficult like that because sometimes it hits you hard and sometimes you don't know that it's over until you kind of look around and go, I think, I think this is done right.

No one's there telling you, yeah, there's no narration.

Yeah, yeah.

So what what did that time on the road do for you?

Well, really, it it, it kind of solidified that we don't want the, the typical path that was paved for us, or, you know, the things that maybe the family was telling us to do or people in our lives were pushing us to do.

And it really kind of helped us, like, make our own decisions together as a couple.

And, and now, you know, she supports me as I go on the road about 100 days a year.

And she's a business owner, too.

So she's extremely busy working on a flower farm out.

And, you're, Bloomington, where I live.

So, I mean, that's a lot of a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of love.

And I know you.

I'm sure you appreciate that.

This is it's had ten studio albums.

How many studio albums, guys?

Is that right?

Yeah.

Are you working on another?

There's a secret one we don't share anymore because it's so bad.

That's right.

Because it was so bad.

Well, I was the first one.

Yeah, it's it's only available on our, website.

It's.

Some of us had nothing to do with very, very high.

Very high.

Yeah.

I mean, me and Jake, we're clearly.

Yeah.

Jake's gone.

I don't want my name attached.

I don't either.

Hey, but that's the progress of music, right?

I mean, like, come on, nobody who's who's written a book looks back at the first 5000 words and goes, look at that prose.

How beautiful.

Yeah.

Right.

You go like, thank God there's an editor.

But, are you working on another right now?

We're about to be working on another.

Yeah.

We're starting to.

Well, Geez, I what is it, middle of September?

We're going to be getting together with, with our producer, Stephen Merchant from Dark Shadow Recording and, laying down, not laying down, just selecting the songs for the next album.

So, there's a cool new thing that if you just take part of your work and you just put it in soon.

No, that could just do that for you.

If that's what you like.

Like you don't have to do anything anymore.

Isn't that cool?

It's.

It's all right.

It's.

Yeah.

Come on.

I mean, like, look, I, I know that I have been a curmudgeon about I, but I hear the work that you guys do and I think, like, I don't know that I want anything but human beings creating the art in my life.

You guys want to dissuade me from that viewpoint?

I mean, I, I don't I have thoughts on this about AI and art and I think there's there a place for it.

I honestly, I'm, I'm at the thought of like, if that connects you closer to some form of art and it allows you to be creative, I can't say that's not good for some people, but I know as us as a band, it's really important that we're the songwriters, that we take ownership and the image that we're sending out to the world and what we want to say.

I think we have stuff to say, and as humans, we want to say it, so I can't hey, I can't say that it's the worst thing for some people, but for us, it's really important that we're the driving force behind it.

I would say that's a very diplomatic way.

But to your point, though, about wanting to, you're the ones creating the music, the lyric, the message, the meaning.

A lot of the obviously a lot of the studio work is original work.

Most of your work is original work, but some of what you do is, well, it kind of crosses into different genres.

And in a moment we're going to hear Mambo Sudan.

And I want you guys to tee this up.

So what are we going to hear next from you.

All right then we're we're going to tag team this okay.

So we need a context for why we're performing these kind of songs.

They're not traditionally bluegrass songs.

And we've discovered that traveling to different countries that we that we've traveled to, you can't show up and play bluegrass music and expect people to be like, oh, yeah, I get this.

Like, this is really hip.

This is cool because they don't have no context.

Absolutely none.

So if you show up with a song that we, we often try to sing in a language that we're visiting.

So if you can sing in that language and share a song that they know, all of a sudden they have a connection to the banjo and to the guitar and mandolin and upright bass.

They can have this overview of like, oh, bluegrass can kind of cover something that I know how cool is that?

And that's an instant conversation starter.

And the reason we picked the specific song we're going to play next.

So we just got back from a tour of Europe.

We were in the Netherlands, in Norway, and we have a long standing relationship with a festival in Rotterdam called the Rotterdam Bluegrass Festival.

And, we have been playing there off and on for a decade and became very close to the guy who runs it, and his name is Hito, and he is on our Bluegrass Ambassadors board.

And so he has showed his support for what we do and really believes in it.

And about a year ago, we were talking about the ways of the world and wondering if there was anything that we could do, about this kind of shifts that are going on.

And, and we were like, we could do whatever we have in our power.

And he, he said, well, I want to book you guys at the festival.

And what can you do?

At the festival that's Bluegrass Ambassadors, hopefully unites people.

It's the festival is in a neighborhood that is extremely diverse.

And he wants everybody in the neighborhood to feel welcomed, not just bluegrass fans.

And so we built this multi-day program where we kind of riffed on, like, what can we do?

And, we went into schools and worked with kids.

We did several really heavy duty collaborations.

But we also, while he and I were talking, there was a in the news in Rotterdam.

There was a lot of negative press about this boat that's, in the harbor there.

Rotterdam is one of the great port cities of the world.

There's a boat called the cilia.

And the silly is an old cruise ship that has been repurposed to house, immigrants that are waiting for refugee status.

And I said, what if we go to that boat?

And he was like, well, he sent me an article, and it was like, it's unsafe, it's unsanitary.

And I was he was like, we'll go see it.

And they went and visited and turned out on the boat.

There was this cultural officer on the boat who, like, was a musician, and she read about us and was like, oh my gosh.

And we paired up with this band called The Knee Monitors, who are a Dutch band that does a bunch of music from the Middle East, which is where our strength isn't.

We don't put we put a lot of music from Africa, Central Asia, and they play a lot from the Middle East.

And we went on the boat and tried to put on a show that addressed as many people musically as we could on the boat.

And like, what's crazy is that there was a, a really good newspaper from the Netherlands that wrote an article about our show and everything we did, and they said something that hit me harder than anything I had thought of.

They said they said, well, it makes sense that the bluegrass musicians went to the boat because bluegrass music was always singing about longing for home and who's longing for home?

A home.

But the people on a boat waiting for refugee status?

Well, yeah.

And I was like, well, there's there's why we did this.

And, but, you know, it just it felt like the right thing to do because we have this music and we see what it does when we play it for people.

And so that's there's a lot of Sudanese people on the boat and we learn this song.

And so this is Mambo Sudan.

Yeah.

So why don't you guys head down to the studio now?

They'll head down to the studio and get ready to perform.

And I'll remind our listeners, if you're just joining us again, this is, this hour is flying by.

We're listening to live music from Henhouse Prowlers.

This hour.

We're actually just getting a taste of what they do, both as musicians in their own right, but also as, American ambassadors.

They are cultural ambassadors.

Back in 2013, during the second term of the Obama administration, they were accepted to be musical cultural ambassadors through the State Department.

And as they may mentioned earlier in this hour, that is not a new thing that's been going on since the 1950s, kind of as a way to to, kind of a soft power or an exercise of diplomacy as, the United States saw some of our competitors around the world doing that kind of thing.

And so it's been going on since the 50s, and now you've got bands from different genres who travel and Henhouse Prowlerss have been to 36 different countries.

They bring their music and as you heard how they do it, it's not just their music, it's kind of a cultural exchange.

And they seek to build these relationships and understanding around the world.

And it's sanctioned through the State Department, and it is still sanctioned through the State Department with the Trump administration.

So it's very, very interesting.

Let's listen now as they perform Mambo Sudan.

By.

Under the pseudonym Mambo for Keoni.

Vat.

Welcome, honey.

I like my long hobby.

Hum.

I'm.

I'm motor Sudanese.

I'm I'm I'm over at Keoni.

I play my my Honda mambo up my I come from my my my mom.

Hey, I'm.

I'm on my thumb.

I'm gonna soon.

I need one more.

I'm, But, you know, I mean, I'm I'm I'm I'm fluffy.

Keoni.

I love you, too.

I come on, like my little honey.

My my my my.

From the Sudan.

My mother.

Keoni.

Love, love.

And even the hard rock is my mother.

Mother figure, like, like, like the mom.

Oh, my mom, my mother.

So, like, my mom.

Oh, like I'm my mama.

Mama.

I'm.

I'm for the soul of the, Oh, my oh, my mom.

Henhouse Prowlers live here at Iron Connections performing Mambo Sudan.

That's a classic Sudanese song by Siad Khalifa from the 1950s that they adapted into a bluegrass arrangement after learning it through their cultural exchange work there.

A band from Chicago that formed in 2004, and since 2013 they have been sanctioned through the U.S.

State Department as cultural ambassadors around the world.

And so they're joining us here not because they're in Rochester for a show, but because they're on connections.

Their next show is in Maine tomorrow, Portland, Maine tomorrow.

Right around the corner from Rochester is everybody knows really appreciated that.

Guys.

They're back in the studio with us now here.

And so you gave us a taste for sort of the why of it.

Now, can you give me a sense now that we've heard it?

I think what you are demonstrating, if I could just put it this way, is how remarkable it is when, there's so many different sort of languages of music around the world.

But when you blend them together, it is amazing.

I thought that was really, really amazing.

And I would love to hear just briefly how that is received.

When you attempt something that is kind of daring like that, what would you say?

Speaking a different language.

We, all of us, we don't speak different languages.

Or at least if we do, it's not great.

Yeah.

And, we learn all of this phonetically.

So we listen to the lyrics, we kind of write down what we think it sounds like.

And I think just that effort, making the effort to try to share someone's language with them and sing it back to them.

And it sounds ridiculous.

I know we sound, our accents are, dare I say, horrible.

They're not that they're far from perfect.

They're not that they're far from perfect.

But I think it's that effort that's the big deal.

And it's just like an instant icebreaker.

It just, like, knocks down any walls that might exist between you and these people that you've never met before and don't share any language with.

Yeah, people lose their minds.

I mean, that's the truth is they just.

They can't believe it.

And then they come rushing up to us after the show, and they're like, they start talking to us in their language.

And we're like, you know, sorry, sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

No.

Really, really remarkable.

I'm glad you chose that song as one of the three.

We've got one more coming from the band here.

Tess writes to ask, how do you travel?

How are you getting to Maine?

Where do you eat and sleep?

How do you stay healthy?

Do you have like have a place for us to stay there?

We're looking.

There's plenty of space in the studio.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of room.

Just like.

What's the answer for Tess?

We we travel in a van.

It's a big van.

Yeah, it's a good sized van.

It's comfortable.

And, that's how we travel around the states.

Obviously, we don't drive it across the ocean, but, yeah, there's.

There's four of us, but we're a team of six.

We've got a sound engineer and a tour manager standing by waiting for us to mess up.

And usually we say in hotels, so and I and I, the key thing that that that person asked was how do you stay healthy in my mind?

And that's something we are constantly working on and some days are better than others.

Sleep is one of the most important things you can get.

And we got none of that last night.

And yeah, yeah, you would not know it in your performance.

I'll give you that.

Thank you.

But, Tess, thank you.

And this is a good time to remind test and others.

HenhouseProwlers.com is the website.

And tell the audience more about what the Bluegrass Ambassadors organization is.

Guys.

So Bluegrass ambassadors is our nonprofit.

It's like the sister organization of the band.

Both Bluegrass Ambassadors and Henhouse Prowlers would not exist without each other.

And that is a really important thing to us.

We recognize that songwriting and performing at a high level is makes the Bluegrass Ambassadors stuff really valuable to, But Bluegrass Ambassadors is us taking what we learned from the State Department on so many different levels from doing that work and applying it both here in the States and abroad.

And really, like there's these every time we do these tours, we get this sense of like, man, we all we did was see these people.

All we did was like reflect them selves back at them.

And that is the core of everything we do, whether we're working with fourth graders in Shelby, North Carolina, or college students in in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

If we can reflect a little bit of them back at them, the connection is effortless after that.

And it can people get online to learn more about the ambassadors organization?

Yeah, the Bluegrass ambassadors.org, and all our socials.

And there's translations of some of the songs that we sing on there, which is, which is always good for us.

English speakers love of translations and bluegrass ambassadors.org to learn more.

There.

Now, as we tee up, the last song we're going to hear, this is going to be an acapella arrangement.

And I have to ask, guys, 2013 The State Department, it's the Obama administration.

Second term.

They say, yeah, you guys really fit.

Well, like we want you to be cultural ambassadors.

We want you to travel the world.

We want you to take your music, and we want you to rep the United States and build these relationships and build goodwill.

And, you know, at that time you had five studio albums out.

You got five more.

You know, you've got things to say about the world that we're about to hear in this final song called gospel and review.

And when I first heard Gospel in Review, I thought, And they are still cultural ambassadors under the Trump administration.

So the I guess I just have to ask you, does the Trump administration know that you exist?

It's a good question.

I I'm not really sure.

Like, I mean, the State Department's still working with you, right?

Yeah.

But like, does everybody know each other?

They're like, for sure, the answer is no.

Yeah.

There's a diplomat from from the Rochester area who we've talked to a number of times who actually spent a lot of his career in Africa.

And he said, there's a lot of inertia.

And even when administrations change, a lot of the career diplomats and workers stay.

Yeah.

And so that has just continued on with the change of administrations, the Biden administration, the Trump administration.

You guys keep doing it, right.

Yeah, yeah.

And I you know, we I, we we have from the beginning, I remember turning to Jon, getting on a flight to Niger on that first tour and saying to him, My God, Jon, for the first time in my life, I'm proud to be an American because we had just seen three different embassies do their jobs, and I had no idea what that even meant until we were there.

And I continue to feel that way about diplomats.

I know that things are changing.

This isn't the first time that, presidents come in.

Administration has come in and stirred things up.

And I do think that I understand why some people are leaving.

I wish they weren't being called.

But I understand why some people are leaving, but I. I also really respect the people that are staying because that is what they when they take that test and sign up to become a diplomat, they sign a piece of paper that says, I'm here no matter who's the administration.

Yes.

Yeah.

And, and that's, that's how we had to look at this, too.

And, you know, we we don't want to be told that we're not going to do this anymore because of things we've said or done, but we're not going to change who we are either.

And so we're going to Brazil next month to Sao Paulo and playing a big festival, and that's totally funded by the State Department.

They continue to support us, and we continue to go and do this work that is so important to us.

Well, gospel in Review.

Who wrote this one?

I did okay, teared up briefly and then well, let's listen.

So we were in Saudi Arabia, and we had a day off.

And they took us to the National Museum in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia is a very different place than the United States.

And, that includes their museums.

It's from a totally different world view.

And there's a timeline that's about two stories tall in the museum.

The history of Islam.

I mean, like 50 different languages.

And I was following the one in English, reading all these names.

And I couldn't pronounce from the history of Islam until there was a name that I absolutely could pronounce.

And that was Jesus Christ.

And that was I had no idea that Jesus was a prophet in Islam.

And it really struck me in that place in that time, just this kind of sense of like, commonality, common humanity, you know?

Well, no, it's interesting because my first take on hearing the song is like, this is a rebuke of prosperity gospel.

This is a rebuke of posing as a religious person when you are not interested in truly doing the hard work of charity and kindness.

And I want to hear it from you guys here.

So why don't you head down to the studio?

And the song is called Gospel in Review.

It's an acapella arrangement.

Who's the who's the low and the what's the lowest baritone?

That's you.

Okay, well, of course Chris Dollar's going to be the low voice that you hear.

But you're going to hear them all.

And, you can learn a lot more at hen House prowlers.com.

You can find out more about their ambassador organization, the Bluegrass Ambassadors at Bluegrass ambassadors.org.

They're from Chicago.

But Ben Wright, who is one of the ones you've been hearing on banjo and vocals, is from the greater Finger Lakes area and gets back around here sometimes.

But there you have been in 36 different countries, Brazil next month as, representing the U.S.

State Department since 2013.

So it's a really, really remarkable set up there, down there.

Now we're going to listen to this third and final song here again, gospel and review from the Henhouse Prowlers.

And then they're going to come back here and we'll wrap up.

We got about just about nine minutes left with the band here.

And then they'll be off on to Portland, Maine and then South America.

We didn't ask where they're going next, by the way, but they're here now.

And let's listen to gospel and review from folk.

See, there was a man named Jesus in that.

There is little doubt that he had a way of thinking every person should try out.

And, long after this man's words across the land began to spread, influential men of power started twisting what he said.

Don't judge your neighbor unless you're looking in the mirror.

It doesn't matter one bit if they didn't come from here.

Feed the hungry.

You might be hungry one day to.

Not every person on this planet is as fortunate as you know.

It's 2000 years later and some say it's getting worse.

These men are only getting louder and increasingly perverse.

So let's take a moment to make sure it's not all misconstrued because it never has to go back to a subject and review.

Don't judge your neighbor unless you're looking in the mirror.

It doesn't matter one bit if they didn't come from here.

Feed the hungry.

You might be hungry one day.

Do not every person on this planet is as fortunate as you?

You don't have to be a Christian to take on this point of view.

Let us not forget that Jesus is a muslim prophet too.

Did you know that's really true?

You can be a Hindu, Catholic or through, but you don't even have to believe in a higher power God.

Don't judge your neighbor unless you're looking in the mirror.

It doesn't matter.

One that you say didn't come from here.

Feed the hungry.

You might be hungry one day to not every person on this planet is as fortunate as you.

Now, as this sun comes to a close and we all go along our ways, it's important to remember there are coming better days.

If we all just take a moment to remember what is best.

We are all just human beings.

No one's better than the race.

A ten house prowlers gospel and review an acapella arrangement.

They're going to come back down and join me in the studio to close out the hour.

If you're just joining us, they've performed three of their songs now for us, they've been performing around the world as ambassadors for the U.S.

State Department since 2013.

And so when you think about that, 2013 was the second term of the administration, then you got Trump one, Biden, Trump two.

And that is a song that, I think guys, as they, as they get back to the studio, here's what I think.

I think you should perform that song at the white House.

What do you think?

You wrote it, Ben.

Come on, what do you think?

I don't what I think I love about the reception of that song is that we've only once had somebody get angry at us about it.

What was the context of the anger?

It was we were at a festival in North Carolina, and a woman came up to us and said she was like, you were my favorite band until you sing that song.

And and I was like, well, what happened?

And she said, there's just no way that Jesus is a muslim prophet and and, you know, and so, like, we just had to agree to disagree.

Yeah.

But other than that, like, that's just somebody who's hot.

So I thought you were going to say she was going to say, this is some left wing version of Jesus.

This is, you know, a political statement.

She was upset that you invoked Jesus's relation to Islam.

Yeah.

I yeah, it was I don't remember where conversation it was.

It doesn't matter.

I feel like I feel like most people can get behind that song.

And because that's the reception we've gotten from it, like if you're, if you're a believer.

Yeah.

I was going to say if you, if you have an argument with that song, I don't know what to tell you.

I mean, if you can be you can be not religious.

You can be very religious.

We all agree that those words are how we should be treated.

It's a review of the gospel.

It is.

And we we were at a festival in Arizona once where the promoter had asked us not to play that song.

And we like we were like, we lost sleep over, like, what are we going to do?

We?

It was two days we were performing, so we all went back to the hotel that night and talked about it, and we decided to do it the next day.

And you should have seen the line at the merch table for people wanting to buy that the record.

And and he apologized.

He came up and said somebody had told me that there was words in that song that were hateful against Jesus.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Wow.

Misinformed.

Yeah.

I'm misinformed.

But but what is what does that say about this sort of weird cultural moment we're in when if all you did was read the lyrics of that song, maybe this is a tribute to the guy who wrote the song.

Maybe this means you've you've done something special with it, because in a way, it's this anodyne, obviously.

Like, yeah, obvious.

Whether you're whether you're Christian or not, whether you're an atheist or not.

Like, this is like, yes, you know, you might not be you might be hungry one day.

Someone might you might need someone, but the fact that it plays as controversial to some ears is reflective of the cultural moment we're in.

I think that's really telling.

But it means I think you've written something powerful.

Well, thanks.

I think that it's an up we continue to find and seek out opportunities to communicate across that gap.

And I think that song has given us our opportunity to do that, and I'm grateful for it, because there isn't a lot of communication across that gap right now.

I don't disagree with that.

Yeah, I think you're right.

So I know about our last 90s or so guys we've had loved this hour with Ben, right?

And Jake Howard and Jon Goldfine and Chris Dollar.

What have we missed here?

What do you want the audience to take away as we talk to henhouse dollars, and especially understanding your work as ambassadors around the world?

Well, let me start before we get any further, our manager gave me this piece of paper that I. She wanted someone to read.

Go for.

We have shows coming up.

Do it.

We're going to be in booth at the opera house at Boothbay Harbor in Maine.

We're going to be the stone church in Balboa, Vermont.

The next day.

That's on, the 31st.

No, the 30th, the 31st for the Bluegrass Fest.

And when camp Pennsylvania the next night will be a groove and New York City, and then that Sunday night, August 2nd, we're at Club Passim in Boston.

You can find our newsletter tour dates all through our website.

It's all one tank drives here, guys.

One time traveling Rochester for you.

All the mileage you put on, you know, have you done this before?

Yeah.

And it's HenhouseProwlers.com.

You can find it.

Is there a place that you want people to find the music?

If they're going to stream it and find it, where do you want them to get it?

Probably Spotify, Apple Music Spotify is where everybody looks I know it's just like that.

You can always get our album off our store.

That's true.

The best place to get it is at prowlers.com.

Okay.

And, and I just want to thank you for making the time because it was a couple of years ago that folks were reaching out to us, and we almost made it work then.

And I know truly how busy you are.

But for the work that you're doing, literally around the world and around this country, it's not easy to get you, and we're glad that we did.

It's really been an outstanding hour.

I wish we had more time, but you are welcome to come back anytime.

Come perform, hang out, talk.

Thanks for doing it.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, that's the Henhouse Prowlers.

And those guys are the founders of the Bluegrass ambassadors.

Bluegrass ambassadors, dot org henhouse prowlers, dot com.

Ben Wright, Jake Howard, Jon Goldfine, Chris Dollar.

More connections in the moment.

And.

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