North Country Girls Know Their Roots, But Don’t Call it Bluegrass
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, June 2007
Samantha Parton can claim no relation to the Queen of Dollywood, but she does cite the curvaceous country legend as one of her earliest musical influences.
“I watched a lot of The Dolly Parton Show when I was little, and Hee Haw,” she says with a chuckle. “I’m not joking, either. I’m totally serious. I was just obsessed with country music as a kid, even though my knowledge of it was limited.”
It wasn’t exactly the typical sort of preoccupation for a young Canadian girl growing up in the heyday of Bryan Adams, but Sam Parton’s affinity for traditional Americana music would prove to be considerably more than a fleeting childhood curiosity.
By the late 1990s, her aesthetic tastes had matured (Neil Young, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams), her talents had been honed (vocals, guitar, piano, mandolin, and banjo), and her circle of like-minded friends had grown to include fellow Canadians Frazey Ford and Trish Klein, as well as a transplanted Texan by the name of Jolie Holland.
Holland eventually took flight on her successful solo career, but the rest of the girls solidified themselves as Vancouver’s finest “American” folk trio, The Be Good Tanyas.
Ostensibly, Parton, Ford (vocals, guitar), and Klein (guitar, banjo, harmonica, vocals) might seem like staunch traditionalists, mining their melodies and wardrobes from various tattered pages of Appalachian folklore. In reality, though, all three women have highly modern sensibilities, and their songwriting never fails to achieve an intriguing balance between old and new.
“I think we all have a desire to be original in our writing,” Parton explains, “and yet, we’re also really conscious of paying homage to the past. There’s some beautiful structure in old folk, but I was never interested in learning all of those traditional styles, and I’m still not. I wish I was, but it just doesn’t stick with me. I’m not interested in learning ‘bluegrass mandolin’ or ‘old-time banjo’ so much— it’s more that I want to incorporate those sounds into my own songwriting. I think that’s the great thing about the Be Good Tanyas. We all have that. None of us are ever like, ‘It’s not old-timey enough!’ We’re all songwriters, first, who appreciate the elements of old country and blues and folk music and like to weave it into our songwriting.”
Still, it hasn’t always been easy for the band to avoid pigeonholing from the media, whether it means getting labeled as a novelty girl group or, worse yet, a bluegrass band.
“We always get called a bluegrass band,” Parton says with a hint of frustration, “and we’re always telling people we are not at all bluegrass. But, you know, people’s frame of reference for a mandolin, banjo, and guitar is bluegrass.”
Despite the genre obstacles, the Tanyas have remained relatively true to their original approach over three acclaimed albums-- splitting up songwriting duties, arranging some of the loveliest harmonies in recent memory, and bowing to folk conventions as lyrical guides, rather than rules.
“I love simple rhymes,” Parton says, “and I love the mysticism of a lot of traditional songs. So I think I’m always aware of those things when I write, and I respect it, and I want it to come through.”
At the same time, however, Parton has occasionally sidestepped simplicity in favor of far more personal and emotional subject matter, most notably on “Song For R.,” a haunting piano ballad from 2006’s Hello Love LP, in which the singer laments the pain suffered by her drug addicted brother.
“I think it was sort of brave to put that song on the album, or to even let myself write that song,” she admits. “But it happened really quickly. At home, I play a lot of piano. I sit down and do a lot of sort of cathartic piano playing and writing. It’s the instrument I feel most attuned to, and I think the piano really brought that song out of me. I was just messing around with that chord structure on an out-of-tune piano, and that song just sort of popped out. It was definitely going to a deeper place for me, songwriting wise. I was like, ‘Wow, OK, Sam, let’s go there.’ I felt like it was such an important song to me personally, that it had to go on the album.”
For Parton, the experience of recording Hello Love was a far cry from that of the Be Good Tanyas’ 2001 debut, Blue Horse.
“When we made the first record, it was basically just for fun,” she explains. “It started out as a recording project for a classroom of students at a production school. That’s how a lot of the first album was made. You know, we didn’t really intend on putting out an album. We certainly didn’t think that it would be released all over the world, and that people in Iraq would be hearing it, which they are! It’s really strange. So I think we take ourselves a little more seriously now-- not in a bad way, but we’re just more conscious of the fact that what we’re doing is valid, that we’re going to be heard. It’s both exciting and intimidating.”
While they might not have anticipated the fanbase that has grown around them in recent years, the Tanyas appeal is easy to understand. Aside from Ford’s bluesy croon, Klein’s deft musicianship, and Parton’s harmonic instincts, the group is also offering a reminder of something that nostalgic folks will always flock to.
“Well, I can only speak for myself, but I’d like to think the rest of the world feels this way, too,” Parton says. “I just crave an honest sound. This music is very comforting to people. Women singing harmonies together is very comforting. And it’s a cyclical thing, too. People lose their sense of the past, and they realize they still need that. We need a connection to the past, and when we get away from it, it’s got to come back around again. You have got to have that touchstone.”
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