Take six men, get them together every couple of weeks with some light refreshment, give them all an instrument apiece and if you're not careful, you'll get The Long Hill String Band. However, as a band member's wife recently observed, it does keep them off the streets at night, and there are worse vices than a partiality for Old Time Music.

What's Old Time Music you ask? One way of describing it is to take traditional Appalachian tunes and play them the way they used to be played before Bluegrass got hold of them. If this suggests to you off center modal music with unexpected key changes and too many bars to the line- yes, LHSB does some of that, and it sounds pretty authentic too. But along with exploration of Southern Appalachia's crooked musicology, they are equally at home with the unabashedly secular "Ragtime Annie", "Whiskey Before Breakfast" and "Arkansas Traveler". From this you will understand that the Band has eclectic taste, and, while enthusiastic about traditional music, is far from being obsessed by it.