"OH, DO YOU REMEMBER sweet Betsey from Pike? Who crossed the wide prairie with her lover, Ike?"

As the 19th century folk song "Sweet Betsey From Pike" continues, for the next 15 verses Betsey and Ike traverse the country to California to take part in the fabled Gold Rush.

For musician Eric Brace, the tune is more than a middle school history lesson — it served as the muse for his folk opera, "Hangtown Dancehall."

"I was born in Northern California in a town called Placerville, which was right in the heart of where the Gold Rush happened," Brace saidd. "When I was a kid, it was just part of the whole mythology of growing up — we'd go and pretend to pan for gold when we'd be on family picnics, but as I got older, I realized I didn't know much about it."

The former Washington Post writer and frontman of once-local band Last Train Home — many of its members, including Brace, have left the area for Nashville, Tenn. — once wrote a story for the Post's Travel section on the Gold Rush country. The tales he uncovered were rich and varied, and as Brace began to write a song about James Marshall, who first discovered gold in California, he began to think about other outlets for these stories.

Brace said he had been throwing around the idea of a folk opera for about five years and began actively working on it about a year ago. In collaboration with Washington, D.C.-based songwriter Karl Straub, the duo has completed a collection of six songs that will premiere at Strathmore on Wednesday. Brace said he hopes the final work will have between 15 and 20 songs. "We'll probably get those done before the end of the year, since we seem to be on a roll right now," he said.

Combining elements of traditional American opera along the lines of George Gershwin, Broadway musicals and period music from the 1840s, the structure of "Hangtown Dancehall" required some serious research. Brace said he looked at "people like Gershwin, who put together song cycles, and classic musicals like 'Oklahoma!' and 'Annie Get Your Gun' and even 'The Wizard of Oz' — there's a story, but then there are songs that push it on. I'm also doing research into folk songs of the time, so in a way, we're trying to combine those things."

Writing an opera is significantly different than writing country rock tunes, which Brace is most accustomed to doing with Last Train Home.

"In Last Train Home, the songs I write knowing they're going to be Last Train Home songs," he said. "They're mostly coming from my point of view, while in 'Hangtown Dancehall,' I'm trying to tell a story that's outside of me. ... From a singer-songwriter point of view, it's always easier to write about yourself — 'I went to the coffeeshop and I'm worried about this and that.'"

As Brace and Straub work to complete the opera, they've had to explore some trad and modern methods of composing together.

"Whenever I'm in town, I'll go over to his house for few hours, and then a lot of talking and singing songs to each other over the phone. We're trying to get very high tech and do some MP3 files and e-mail those back and forth. We haven't been too successful in figuring that out, but we're working on that," Brace said with a laugh.

» The Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike, Rockville; Wed., 7:30 p.m., $15; 301-581-5200. (Grosvenor-Strathmore)

Written by Express contributor Katherine Silkaitis
Photo by Matthew Worden

Posted by Express at 8:14 AM on December 5, 2007
Tagged in Entertainment , Grosvenor , Maryland , Music , Top Stories