Dillon Hodges, Mandy Mccauley and Heidi Feek have won the 2024 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Original Song for the theme song of the PBS show “Reconnecting Roots,” “We’re Home.”
Reconnecting Roots is a PBS TV show about American History, and McCauley and Firekid–Feek and Hodges’ stage name–take songs and reimagine them for the show.
“We look at the last 110 years of progress in America and what’s good about it, what’s bad about it and what we might should change,” said McCauley. “At the end of every episode, we take a public domain song and we rethink it for the hearts, minds and ears of today.”
McCauley said that they’ve taken songs like “Home on the Range” and looked at what needed to change.
“What lyrics should we lose and should we change the structure of this? Should we change the melody?” she said. “We’re just trying to, you know, take the songs of the American fabric and just rethink them and revibe them, and it kind of works.”
The song “We’re Home,” which won them the Emmy awards, was originally taken from the poem: “America the Beautiful.”
“I think we all can agree that America’s history is complicated, and so is its music. But it is home to us and we can own the ugly and we can own the beautiful, but it’s still home. So let’s make it beautiful and try to embody all of that within a melody.”
From UNA, Middle Tennessee State University and Belmont University, the trio have been working together for almost ten years. McCauley and Feek have been friends long before Firekid came into the picture.
“Yes, we actually started together first for a film called Josephine,” Mandy McCauley said. “[Feek] was this music supervisor on it and we came in and recorded uh two songs together and [Feek] and I have been friends for way longer than that, maybe 20 years, and then I don’t know how long her and Dylan have known each other, but now they’re married and they live in Florence.”
The trio was stunned when they realized they were nominated for the award, she said. She was the only one able to attend, as Feek and Hodges had a show to play in Nashville.
“Well, first of all, I didn’t really understand what was happening,” McCauley said. “I thought we were like, nominated for like, a local one, like it was like a news station or something. So I was like, wait a minute, like the big ones. So I was just a little bit confused, but I was like, wow, okay, this is kind of a big deal, that’s cool.”
According to McCauley, nominees don’t know who wins until they open the envelope on the awards night.
