BLUE HORSE

The Be Good Tanyas began in the spring of 1999, a group of ramblin’ gals who’d roamed from San Francisco to New Orleans, the Ozarks to the Himalayas.  Their individual, but strangely similar paths led them together; to share songs and stories created from their experiences on the road. 

A mixture of deep country, early American folk, old-tyme jazz, blues and gospel, their sound is reminiscent of a bygone era.  Combining original material with traditional standards, the Tanyas stunning vocals and seamless harmonies, combined with gorgeous acoustic instrumentation results in music that is warm, honest and captivating.

  1. The Littlest Birds
  2. Broken Telephone
  3. Rain and Snow
  4. Lakes of Pontchartrain
  5. Only in the Past
  6. The Coo Coo Bird
  7. Dogsong AKA Sleep Dog Lullaby
  8. Momsong
  9. Don’t You Fall
  10. Up Against the Wall
  11. Oh Susanna
  12. Light Enough to Travel

Released October 13, 2000

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“This is how people have played music for one hundred, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand years,” says singer/guitarist Frazey Ford of The Be Good Tanyas’ debut album, BLUE HORSE. Indeed there are moments on the album that seem to come directly from a time other than our own. Sometimes it seems more likely that The Be Good Tanyas emerged from the pages of a John Steinbeck novel rather than modern-day Vancouver. BLUE HORSE bears the distinct quality of having been around forever, like Tom Joad’s whispering wind, like the tilling of earth, like music itself. And some ways, it has.

Certainly, songs from the album like “The Coo Coo Bird” and “Rain and Snow” predate modern copyright laws. And though Stephen Foster registered “Oh Susanna” under his own name as composer in 1847, earlier versions are known to have been performed by minstrel groups earlier that century. But The Be Good Tanyas are far from mere revivalists.

Frazey Ford, Trish Klein (banjo, guitar, harmony vocals) and Samantha Parton (mandolin, guitar, vocals) have all been making music most of their lives, both together and apart. Their shared history can be traced back several years to Nelson, British Columbia. It is told that while on the tree planting lines of the Canadian Kootenays, Ford and Parton would while away the working day by singing everything from Joni Mitchell to traditional field worker songs. At night the three of them were frequently seen on a local watering hole’s open mike stage jamming mainly jazz and R&B.

They all went their separate ways after the planting season, Ford to Montreal, Klein to Vancouver, and Parton on a road trip with her dog that found her in New Orleans. Throughout all of their travels, music went with them. When all three of them found themselves in Vancouver a few years later they resumed their shared passion for music in weekly living room song sessions. “We all had an interest in old time music, but we had all been playing other kinds of music too,” says Ford. “We were just sharing songs that we loved, from old old country ballads to 1920s gospel and jazz.”