When Emmy Lou Harris appears on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Monday, September 17, she’ll have John Starling & Carolina Star in tow as her special guests. They will be performing a vocal version of Get Up John to help promote the release of her 4 CD box set, Songbird, due out on Rhino on 9/18.

Carolina Star is made up of several original members of Seldom Scene: John Starling on guitar and vocals, Mike Auldridge on dobro and Tom Gray on bass. Rickie Simpkins on fiddle and Jimmy Gaudreau on mandolin round out the band. Their debut CD, Slidin’ Home, featured Emmy Lou as a guest artist, so the guys are returning the favor on Leno next week.

They will recording a spot with her for the BBC next week as well.

Songbird will contain 78 Emmy Lou Harris songs from 1970-2006, plus a DVD with 9 videos. Harris chose each of the tracks which span her long career as a recording artist, including her acclaimed work with Gram Parsons and her later Hot Band era.

See the full track list online.

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno airs at 11:30 p.m. in most NBC markets, immediately following local 11:00 news. Look for Emmy Lou and Carolina Star near the end of the show, closing in on 12:30 p.m.

More great bluegrass radio news for the upcoming football weekend.

The Saturday Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast on WSM will include performances from John Starling & Carolina Star, along with Bobby Osborne, Mike Snider, and Del McCoury. The Whites, Emmy Lou Harris and Vince Gill are also scheduled on Saturday night, so the possibilities are better than average that some interesting combinations will appear on stage.

It seems especially likely that Starling and Harris will sing their duet on In My Hour Of Darkness, which is featured on the upcoming CD from John Starling & Carolina Star, Slidin’ Home, as they are scheduled in the same segments (8:30-9:00, 11:00-11:30) in both the early and late Opry broadcasts.

You can hear the song, one that Emmy Lou co-wrote with Gram Parsons, on the band’s MySpace page, .

For those who can tune in to WSM over the air in the south/central US, you’ll find them at 650 AM, broadcasting from Nashville. If not, you can catch the live WSM audio stream online to hear the program, which runs from 7:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, February 3 (EST).

Emmy Lou, Starling and Del will also appear on tonight’s Friday Opry show (2/2), which is not broadcast. Selections from both the Friday and Saturday shows will be posted in the WSM audio archives page by early next week.

We posted last month about Slidin’ Home, the Rebel release from John Starling & Carolina Star due out on February 20. Assisting John in Carolina Star are fellow original Seldom Scene members Tom Gray and Mike Auldridge, with a guest appearance from Emmy Lou Harris.

The publicist for this new project, Lotos Nile Media, has posted a video interview with both Starling and Harris which includes audio from the new CD, and discussion and remembrances of their early days in the Washington, DC folk and bluegrass music scene, as well as the genesis of their collaboration on Slidin’ Home.

The interview is conducted with George Massenberg, who produced the new CD, as well as several Seldom Scene projects and The Trio CD with Emmy Lou, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt for which he won a Grammy in 1988. Starling speaks quite highly of his experiences with Massenberg.

"George recorded the Seldom Scene’s Act 3 and Old Train, demonstrating to us that a ‚Äòlive’ approach could also sound ‚Äòslick,’ using multi-track recording. As time passed, we, as did others, became addicted to the slick, layered approach offered by multi-track, and strayed from the live studio approach. For the new project, we felt that modern, high resolution digital recording and mixing techniques, a good acoustic environment, and musician practice prior to, not on, recording day, could once again make the process fun for everybody."

Go to the Lotos Nile site to watch the full interview.

You can hear audio samples from Slidin’ Home on the band’s MySpace page, where you will also find their 2007 show dates.

Last month, we posted about Sam Bush appearing on The Tonight Show (with Emmy Lou Harris) in support of his then newly-released CD, Laps In Seven.

I just noticed that someone has made a video of Sam’s Tonight Show performance available on YouTube, for anyone who didn’t catch the show live.