Tim O’Brien and Abigail Washburn

The Mountain Music Project was a film and companion CD produced in 2009 by the Virginia multi-instrumentalist Danny Knicely, Tara Linhardt and Jacob Penchansky; Knicely is the musical director of the nonprofit of the same name. On this Civil War–era song, arranged by Knicely from tradition, O’Brien sings and plays mandola and Washburn sings, over the sarangi, a Nepali fiddle, played by Buddhiman Gandharba and the madal, a drum, played by Manoj Gandharba, with Knicely on fiddle and guitar, Mark Schatz on bass and Curtis Burch on Dobro. Knicely produced, arranged and mixed the track, which was recorded by Knicely, Penchansky and Sanjeev Monga.

When the earthquake struck Nepal, Knicely found that many of the Nepali musicians he had worked with had lost their homes, and he and Linhardt wanted to help. O’Brien and his partner Jan Fabricius issued the track in their Short Order Sessions series of downloads, numbering it SOS-08.1 after the quake’s reported magnitude, with the support of Washburn and City Hall Records, and all the proceeds went to We Help Nepal, a relief and development organization working in the country.