On a Sunday afternoon in 1941, a young Kentucky artist named Harlan Hubbard climbed the steps of an apartment building on Clifton Avenue in Cincinnati with a violin case in one sweating hand and César Franck's Violin Sonata in A Major tucked under his arm. He had been invited there by a librarian he had met at the reference desk of the Cincinnati Public Library's fine arts department. Her name was Anna Eikenhout, and she thought the two of them might play music well together. She was right. More than forty years later, Hubbard would say of his wife, "Anna was a wonderful accompanist. She never lost her place, and she never lost me."
That first afternoon of chamber music is the emotional seed of an unusual evening coming to Frankfort this fall. On October 23, 2026, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., First United Methodist Church at 211 Washington Street will host "A Celebration of Harlan Hubbard," pairing a talk on the first full biography of the artist and writer with a live performance of a piano trio written in his and Anna's honor. Louisville composer Daniel Gilliam's Piano Trio No. 2, "Payne Hollow," will be played by members of the NouLou Chamber Players on violin, cello, and piano. The event is free and requires no registration. It is sponsored by the Frankfort Arts Foundation, Liberty Hall, and PSPL.
The Hubbards are a particular kind of Kentucky legend: famous largely by word of mouth, revered by the people who find them, and easy to summarize badly. Harlan was born in Bellevue in 1900; his father died when he was seven, and he spent part of his childhood in the Bronx, where two older brothers had gone to work. He studied briefly at the National Academy of Design, returned to Kentucky with his mother, and later enrolled at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, though he never finished a degree, giving up on formal instruction to find his own way. Anna, a Grand Rapids native from a Dutch family, graduated with honors from Ohio State University and taught German and French before taking the library job in Cincinnati.
What they did with their lives after that is the part that has kept generations of readers fascinated. The couple built a shantyboat and drifted down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, living on the water and off very little, an experiment in deliberate simplicity that Harlan chronicled in his 1953 book Shantyboat. They eventually settled at Payne Hollow, a hand-built homestead on the Ohio River near Milton, Kentucky, where they grew food, made art, played music, and lived, as Harlan put it, on the "fringe of society." The only ways in were a mile-long foot trail through the woods or a boat up from the river. Friends and strangers made the trek anyway. Bob Canida, who first visited as a young man in 1972, told Cincinnati Magazine, "You left feeling there was something inherently good and different here."
Harlan died in 1988. In the decades since, he has become something close to a secular patron saint for Kentuckians interested in art, adventure, and environmentalism, a homegrown heir to the Transcendentalist tradition who is often mentioned in the same breath as Thoreau. But the full story of how he got there, and of the partnership at its center, had not been told at book length until Jessica K. Whitehead's Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2025. Whitehead, a Kentucky historian, worked from journals, letters, paintings, manuscripts, and sketches to trace the distinct phases of Hubbard's life and to connect the restless young man who yearned for travel with the confident, intentional figure of Payne Hollow.
The music on the Frankfort program grew directly out of that research. Gilliam and Whitehead had known each other for years, and their casual conversations about the Hubbards' shantyboat years, the house at Payne Hollow, and the music the couple played together eventually turned into a commission. "I was initially fascinated with their life on a shantyboat," Gilliam said in a Q&A with Whitehead. "It seemed like an impossible feat through the lens of a 21st century, smart-phone laden lifestyle we all live." But it was learning that the Hubbards were musicians themselves that unlocked the piece. "My mind started imagining what that could have sounded like, felt like, looked like."
The trio received its premiere at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville in February 2025, at the launch event for Driftwood, where Whitehead spoke about the biography and the first three movements were performed by NouLou's Heather Thomas on violin and Cecilia Huerta-Lauf on cello, with pianist Sebastian Chang. NouLou later recorded the complete work, releasing it in October 2025. The ensemble, founded in 2016 and co-directed by Laura De St. Croix and Cecilia Huerta-Lauf, brings together what it describes as Louisville's elite classical musicians with a mission of making chamber music outside the traditional concert hall, in salons, museums, breweries, and historic houses. The group's debut album, Cellostatus, featuring three cello concerti it commissioned, came out in May 2025.
Gilliam, born in 1978, is a Louisville composer whose work has been commissioned and performed by the Louisville Orchestra, Kentucky Shakespeare, the Louisville Ballet, the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts, pianist Lara Downes, and the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony, among others. He was an associate composer at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2020, working with Jennifer Higdon, and a resident at Copland House in 2017. His Payne Hollow trio is conceived, in the ensemble's description, as an attempt at a musical portrait, in four movements, of the Hubbards' life at Payne Hollow from winter through autumn.
That seasonal architecture is of a piece with the source material. Harlan Hubbard's journals return again and again to the close observation of weather, light, and the turning year. "I rejoice in the winter landscape, cut to essentials," he wrote on December 8, 1954. "Earth and sky are more closely joined." Seven years later to the day, he noted, "Another clear morning. Orion is my clock." Gilliam's trio takes up that sensibility, translating a life of deliberate attention into the interplay of three instruments, which is, in its way, the same thing the Hubbards were doing on Clifton Avenue in 1941.
For anyone who has read Shantyboat or made the hike down to Payne Hollow, the Frankfort evening offers something rare: a chance to hear that quiet life rendered in sound, with the biographer's research as context. For everyone else, it is an introduction to a pair of Kentuckians who chose to live on very little and left behind a great deal. The program runs one hour, in a downtown Frankfort church, and there is no ticket to buy and no list to join. You simply show up.