Uncle Earl

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country songs of peach pie and unspoken love. But their joint effort as Uncle Earl is something else again — folk music in the old sense of the word. Their brand-new CD offers half a dozen mostly grim traditional songs, durable numbers by Utah Phillips and Woody Guthrie, some gospel hymns, and one original number each by Serrapere and Groves.

It's been quite a while since something like that has been heard in this town. The Ann Arbor Folk Festival always used to include one traditional British or American ensemble among the singer-songwriters, satirists, guitar gods, punk-Celts, feminist thinkers, bluegrass virtuosi, and other unclassifiable originals that make up what's less and less often called folk music today. This year there was Doc Watson, who knows his way around the oral tradition. But when was the last time young musicians dipped their feet in the cold stream of traditional balladry?

A measure of the increasing national renown of both Serrapere and Groves is that they landed the help of contemporary bluegrass stalwarts Sally Van Meter and Laurie Lewis in making the Uncle Earl album. The result is a fantastic sound with spare, distinctive instrumental textures produced through the use of various unusual stringed instruments like the Hardanger fiddle. Uncle Earl's appearance at the Ark on Sunday, February 17, won't feature these national stars, but the group has now been expanded to a full-time trio by the addition of Tahmineh Gueramy, a guest vocalist on the CD.