Music Features

According to the liner notes of their debut disc, Shout Monah, the Haints get their curious name from a southern word for a spirit or ghost. And while the three members of the band aren’t yet ready to haunt, their music draws deep inspiration from long-gone musicians of the U.S. southeast and Midwest states—fiddlers such as the late Melvin Wine from Copen, West Virginia.

“I learned a great deal of my old-time fiddling from him in the last five years of his life,” says Victoria-born Erynn Marshall, reached in Galax, Virginia, where she recently became program manager of the Blue Ridge Music Center. “He’d played his whole life and was still a great player, and a remarkable person. He was illiterate but incredibly intelligent—and generous. I used to always stay with him.”

A shared love of the immensely rich song, ballad, and fiddle-tune traditions of the Appalachians brought the Haints together three years ago. Marshall was living in Gibsons, B.C., at the time, and guitarist Pharis Romero was singing and playing with Victoria quintet Outlaw Social. The pair met and jammed together at camps, parties, and festivals, and promised to create an old-time string band—if they could find a banjo player, in particular one able to alternate between clawhammer and three-finger styles. Enter banjo wizard and luthier Jason Romero from Arcata, California, who joined the duo to create the Haints, married Pharis, and moved to B.C.

The Haints—who are currently touring with Georgia singer-songwriter Carl Jones—dug deep for the material on Shout Monah. “Low Bonnie” is a version of the ancient ballad “Young Hunting”. And according to Marshall, “Old Christmas Morning” dates back to a solo-fiddle tradition and refers to “the older date for Christmas, January 6. It’s one of the oldest-sounding tunes I know. I learned it from an archive recording of French Carpenter.

“I’m an old soul, and I have a love for archaic melodies,” she continues. “When I would visit a lot of older fiddlers and singers, one of the things they talked about was the ‘dwells’ in the music, where they would hang on to notes in the melody like unaccompanied ballad singers. These people had almost no descriptive terms for their music, but that’s one. And ‘Old Christmas Morning’ has long dwells.”

It’s the tune Marshall played when she won the fiddle competition at the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, Virginia, in 2008—the first non-American to do so. Shout Monah also includes a soulful, swinging rendition of the classic “Milwaukee Blues”, based on archival recordings of Roy Harvey and Jess Milton, and Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers.

“Charlie Poole was the wild man of North Carolina,” Marshall says. “He didn’t live that long but he recorded a lot—and had great stories of moonshine. I remember reading that the cops came to get him once and said, ‘Consider yourself under arrest.’ Charlie said, ‘Consider, hell!’, broke a banjo over the head of the police officer, and escaped. We’re much better-natured than that.”

The Haints play St. James Hall on Wednesday (January 20).