Emma Donovan reunites with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for Take Me to the River at Hamer Hall this NAIDOC Week.
For Emma Donovan, it has never been a question of if she would make and perform music, but which style of music would best represent her during different periods of her life.
Donovan, a Gumbaynggirr and Yamatji woman, has been performing since she was a child, starting out in her family’s country band, The Donovans, alongside her mother Agnes, her five uncles, and her grandparents, Micko and Aileen. She later co-founded the harmonising folk band Stiff Gins with Kaleena Briggs and Nardi Simpson, and released her solo debut, Changes, in 2004.
Emma Donovan x MSO: Take Me to the River
- Friday 10 July
- Hamer Hall
- Tickets here
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Donovan then entered a decade-long partnership with funk and neo-soul combo The Putbacks, which gave rise to the AIR and Music Victoria Award-winning albums, Dawn, Crossover, and Under These Streets. Donovan returned to her country music roots on her 2024 solo album Til My Song is Done, which featured guest appearances from Liz Stringer and Paul Kelly.
Donovan – who frequently collaborated with the late Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter and has also released songs with Kee’ahn, The Teskey Brothers and Radical Son – now finds herself in another moment of personal and artistic transition. After more than a decade in Melbourne, Donovan has moved back to Gumbaynggirr Country and is raising her kids in Nambucca Heads.
“Mum is originally from this way,” Donovan says, chatting to Beat over the phone. “It’s good just being in the valley around fam since last year. We’re loving it. I’m not going to have to put up with another Melbourne winter ever again.”
The significance of Donovan’s move back to her mother’s Country is reflected in the content of her new show, Take Me to the River, which revolves around soul classics by the likes of Al Green, Ann Peebles, Bill Withers, Aretha Franklin, and Archie Roach. She’ll perform Take Me to the River with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at Hamer Hall on Friday 10 July.
“I just kind of pocketed some of my favourite classic soul tunes,” Donovan says. “It’s a little bit different for me, doing the cover thing, but my little spin on it all is just extending my story again, my connection to them songs, what they mean to me.”
The show includes many songs that audiences will be intimately familiar with, such as the titular Al Green song, Ann Peebles’ I Can’t Stand the Rain, and the oft-interpreted Here Comes the Sun and Blowin’ in the Wind. But Donovan has also selected some deeper cuts from the soul songbook.
“I do some back to back of people’s tunes,” she says. “Like, probably a lot of people would know I Can’t Stand The Rain, but there’s another really awesome [Ann Peebles] song, that I should have wrote, called Do I Need You. It’s one of my favourite tunes, with my story all the time about relationship, sacrifice, and trying to come out strong.”
Donovan has released studio recordings of Do I Need You, Take Me to the River, and Bill Withers’ Grandma’s Hands. Her connection to these songs goes deep.
“Take Me to the River, it reminds me a lot of an Archie Roach song called Get Back to the Land,” she says.
“In the verses, he’s talking about relationships and where to go when he’s troubled. He talks about going back to the land, and that’s where I kind of land with a song like Take Me to the River. I think, not just for Aboriginal Mob, outside the Aboriginal community [too], I think a lot of people are looking for that sense of sustainable life outside of big cities.”
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Withers’ Grandma’s Hands is another song that mirrors Donovan’s own story.
“I’m going back on memory there, just talking about all the strong nanas that I always had,” she says. “Like, Blackfellas never really grew up with the one nan, we always claim the sister or claim all these other nans. So I talk a little bit about family connections.”
During the performance at Hamer Hall, Donovan will share stories about her relationships with the songs on the setlist, and the stage design will also be representative of this moment in her life.
“I yarn a lot in this show, because there’s a lot about the connection to the songs,” she says. “Some of the venues have been really beautiful, like theatrical style, so we present the show with some nice footage, images from the Nambucca Valley, like all the rivers and the connections that way, as well as me yarning about what songs mean to me about going back to Country.”
All the details of Emma Donovan’s MSO collaboration Take Me to the River can be found here.
This article was made in partnership with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
