Chatham County Line crosses boundaries of traditional bluegrass

Four guys. Four instruments. Four voices.

Chatham County Line is a band based on acoustic instrumentation.

Not just any instruments: guitar, mandolin, fiddle, pedal steel, upright bass, banjo and, in rare instances, the band will accompany their string parts with piano and harmonica.

The guys are minimalists, and in an effort to stay true to the real essence of their recorded material, their live show is very stripped down. It's representative of what the group's four albums sound like.

"There's no gimmicks," said Dave Wilson. "There's no 'American Idol' pitch correction. There's no drum machine.

"I think in this day and age, when there's so much technology in popular music, that people find great relief in coming to our shows."

In the past few years, the band — Chandler Holt, Greg Reading, John Teer and Wilson — have performed hundreds of shows all across America and throughout Europe.

In spite of their enhanced musicianship, coupled with the experience of having played together as a band, Chatham County Line still continues to challenge one another musically.

Those trials and tribulations, according to Wilson, come about naturally.

"In this forum we know what we want to have happen when we touch the strings," Wilson said. "There (are) definitely limitations with what you're presented with, but I think the joy of this band is using those limitations to create something new."

A quick listen to their catalog and it's easy to discern that Chatham County Line has, in fact, stayed true to their traditional instrumentation while, at the same time, yielding to the influences of other genres, such as gospel, country, rock, pop and Americana in an earnest effort to further expand the group's roots sound.

That's definitely something it achieved with the new album "IV," which happens to be a more pop-flavored effort than past projects.

The group co-wrote a few tracks in what Wilson called a "loose jam style" with longtime friends Zeke Hutchins and Jay Brown, who happened to be on a break from touring with Tift Merritt. After a one album break, the band also worked with record producer Chris Stamey (Alejando Escovedo/Whiskeytown), who brought in critically heralded Caitlyn Carey to sing harmonies.

"We let him have a little more influence," said Wilson, who estimated that Stamey worked in excess of 500 hours on the album.

"Kind of listened a little more to his crazy ideas as they came along, which ended up being a great thing," Wilson said.

Although there was one point in which the band felt the need to speak up and nix his idea. Stamey added some shakers and percussion parts to "Country Boy/City Boy," which turned it into a Jimmy Buffett-like song and, as expected, the guys made him remove all of that from the final mix.

In any case, while recording in a church-turned-studio — Echo Mountain — in Asheville, N.C., Stamey's insistence to experiment with the song "Chip of a Star" eventually led an apprehensive Wilson to pick up an electric guitar and plug it in.

"It's one of my favorite parts of the song," said Wilson. "It kind of sounds like an oboe. It's a weird kind of happy accident that happened."

Actually the group's entire career, if you will, belies the description of being an accident.

With no intentions of developing a career, the band originally formed more as a social gathering and, you could say, as an excuse for some friends to get together and drink beer at their band house in Raleigh.

The group went from sounding like a 1946 archetypal bluegrass band — a la Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys — to letting other influences such as Steve Earle, The Jayhawks and James Hunter creep into what was initially more of a traditional sounding group.

They put out three records — "Speed of the Whippoorwill" (May 2006), "Route 23" (February 2005) and "Chatham County Line" (June 2003) — before "IV" that are equally as strong, and a huge part of the band's identity.

Amid tour plans the band hopes to record a studio album in the fall, for which they've already written 20 to 25 songs.

The group is scheduling a string of hometown gigs in Raleigh with the anticipation of recording their first full-length live album chronicling their entire career.

Keith Ryan Cartwright is a Colorado-based freelance entertainment journalist.