Ramble on A Muddy Marsh worth mucking through BY SAM PFEIFLE

Listening to Greetings from Area Code 207, Volume 2 the other day, on the way back from the Red Sox game, I was struck by how long ago 2001 seems now. Listen to the Greg Goodwill song, "Your Own Thing." It’s way ahead of its time. Now every band from Franz Ferdinand to the Killers to the Hives is playing that same garagey rock sound on commercial radio. But where’s Greg? According to his site, he’s holed up recording with Joe Brien and musicians Tim Meyers (drums), Todd Fisk (bass), and Wow’s Andrew Russell (guitar). Of course, the site is still talking about Volume 2 like it’s new, so take that with a grain of salt. (And, yes, I could have called Greg, but that’s not really the point here.)

Spencer Albee was still calling himself Frankenstein back then, too, and his collaboration with Darien Brahms, "All This Time," is phenomenal. So is Sara Cox’s haunting "Sticking (Not Stuck)," the song that closes the disc and got me stuck on her in the first place. And how about Cerberus Shoal’s "Sweetie"? When are they going to record a whole album of that kind of material?

Floating non-descriptly amongst all those heavyweights is a song that still reaches out and grabs you by the scruff of the neck when it pops up like a muskrat from the reeds, following Matt Robbins’s instrumental ditty, "Lazy Breakdown": Ten bars of winsome banjo give way to lonesome vocals, "Daddy dug a hole in the mountainside/ Quarter mile deep, and 10 feet wide/ Breaking his back for the daily load/ Digging up coal for the old railroad."

It’s the best bluegrass song on a compilation that also saw Jerks of Grass kick "Whitewater" in the teeth, and it’s by the Muddy Marsh Ramblers, a band that’s been playing Granny’s Burritos and the Bramhall Pub so long that you’ve probably started taking them for granted. Yes, "The Old Railroad" is just good enough to make you pull out GFAC, Vol. 1 and take a listen to "Above the Timberline," a song from 2000 that, thanks to the timelessness of bluegrass, sounds just as fresh today as it did when the Ramblers’ Scott Conley penned it.

Both songs are reminders that the Muddy Marsh Ramblers have never felt the need to contemporize bluegrass. They don’t speed it up. They don’t jazz it up. They don’t pop it up, and they don’t feel the need to prop it up. They’re comfortable in its warm confines, in its traditions that reach back to the days when Bill Monroe took old-timey music and put his stamp on it, his Bluegrass Boys coming to define a sound that’s been good enough for four generations of bands to keep on replicating it.

So, bluegrass fans, and fans of local music in general, should rejoice in Ramblers’ newly released debut album — self-titled, with 10 original tunes, no less, along with interpretations of Bill Monroe’s "Rawhide," Carter and Stanley’s "Think of What You’ve Done," and the downright ancient "Grandfather’s Clock," which they bang out in double-time for the last verse.

Yes, new versions of Conley’s "The Old Railroad" and "Above the Timberline" are here. The first doesn’t quite have the pathos of the first recording, but the harmonies are sharper and so are the leads. The second is a real treat. The father of bassist Rebecca Conley, nee Boothby, Bob Boothby, used to play in White Mountain Bluegrass, and so became friendly with another player, fiddler Bill Sage, who was an actual Bluegrass Boy and one of Del McCoury’s Dixie Pals. The Ramblers were lucky enough, then, to record two tunes with Sage, in Bob Boothby’s kitchen, before Sage passed away in 2002.

His fiddle on "Timberline" makes all the difference in the world. It’s not as chunky as you might think, many more notes in one bow stroke than you’d expect. Combined with the spot-on harmony in the chorus — starting with the building "wellllllll," and finishing with the Grizzly Adams "I’m almost out of time/ The fire’s getting dim/ There’s more wolves than bullets/ I can feel them closing in" — it makes for a just-plain awesome bluegrass song. Plus, Jon Wyman’s mastering makes it so you can’t ever really tell a difference between the kitchen session (which also includes the Conley-penned waltz "Lovesick Blues Again," where Sage again shines) and the studio stuff. Although the studio stuff was recorded live, with no overdubs, anyway.

That’s why you might hear some "jazz" in a guitar solo on guitarist Craig Hensley’s "Melissa," but it’s also what makes the synced-up guitar leads on "Grandfather’s Clock" so impressive and makes mandolinist Shawn Davis’s Celtic "Yankee Peddler" sound so genuine and in the moment.

The real treat here, however, is that Conley has once again written a song that’s a classic from the first listen. His voice on the lead is clear as crystal, an angel speaking the "Devil’s Whisper": "His blood ran slow on that cold hard stone/ His head came apart, as his body lay prone/ She could hear the Devil whisper in her mind/ Telling her to do it, she struck him from behind/ She filled his clothes with shale and pushed him in the quarry/ Black water so deep, she shouldn’t have to worry." Eric Pariseau’s banjo provides the perfect mood, reveling in the minor key, while fills and riffs pop all over the place in the background.

It’s dark and haunting in the tradition of "In the Pines" or "O Death," and just the kind of tune that some band will cover 50 years from now and not know who wrote it. In bluegrass, that’s a good thing.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com

The Muddy Marsh Ramblers play Hermit Island Campground, in Bath, on Wednesday, Aug. 25. Call (207) 443-2101.