Uncle Earl's homecoming

continued

plaintive, delicate music. He shuffled uncomfortably on the sidelines after gigs as fans asked, "So, which one of you has an uncle Earl?"

In fact, Uncle Earl is an old-time string band that features neither uncles nor anyone remotely named Earl. Today, Groves, now based in Colorado, is the only original member of the group. She's joined now by three fine, seasoned women — Kristin Andreassen (guitar, clogging, ukulele, and vocals), Rayna Gellert (fiddle and vocals), and Abigail Washburn (banjo and vocals) — who love this music deeply and play it with passion. In this quartet's capable hands, everything old is scrubbed fresh. With rainwater.

Heaven knows how they managed it, amid their increasingly international touring schedule, but a black crow on a clothesline tells me that Uncle Earl's newest album, Waterloo, Tennessee (Rounder Records), was made in about two weeks last fall at a luxurious live-in studio in the rolling hills outside of Nashville. Aside from the joy of unfettered, fully supported creativity (beautifully manifested in the four tracks I heard), the G'Earls got their first taste of actual obsequiousness: a crew of bowing, scraping interns who insisted on washing their white fluffy robes every day.