The Be Good Tanyas
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The Be Good Tanyas are a Canadian traditional music group, whose influences include folk, country, and bluegrass. Formed in British Columbia, the group comprises three women:
- Frazey Ford (guitar, vocals),
- Samantha Parton (guitar, mandolin, banjo, vocals), and
- Trish Klein (guitar, banjo, vocals).
Folk artist Jolie Holland is a former member of The Be Good Tanyas.
The style of music they perform is sometimes referred to as alt-country, but more often today as Americana.
The Be Good Tanyas played their first concerts in Vancouver in the late 1990s. In 2000 they embarked on a North American tour that ran from Vancouver to New Orleans, before returning to British Columbia to record their first album Blue Horse with producer Garth Futcher. The record, which combines old-time music standards such as "Oh! Susanna" and "The Lakes of Pontchartrain" with self-penned songs like The Littlest Birds (sing the prettiest songs), was well received in the folk-roots movement and highly praised[citation needed] for the quality of the harmony vocals and the mixture of the new and the traditional in the instrumentation. Helped by the popularity of Americana at the time of its release, it also achieved a modest amount of crossover success in college radio.[citation needed]
The second album, Chinatown, followed in 2003. Their third album, Hello Love, was released on October 10th, 2006.
The Tanyas gained some U.S. exposure when the Showtime series The L Word selected one of their songs, "In Spite of All the Damage I've Done," for inclusion in the series' soundtrack. A live version of "In My Time of Dying" was also cited in the third episode of the third season, in which Frazey Ford featured as a nun and played the song in the opening sequence. The band's music has also been included in the Showtime series 'Weeds' and the CTV series Eleventh Hour in a similar role, and in the feature film Because of Winn Dixie.
After the release of the first two Be Good Tanyas albums, Trish Klein collaborated with Alison Russell under the band name Po' Girl, a project that resulted in two albums: Po' Girl and Vagabond Lullabies. Allison Russell's subsequent project was dubbed Salt.