You can hear the joy, young and clear.
It vibrates off the strings, and rings like a chapel bell in Abby’s voice.
This musical exuberance has carried four players far and wide, from City Pier in Port Angeles to barn dances in Sequim to Seattle’s Northwest Folklife Festival — and back home again for one last show.
Abby Mae & the Homeschool Boys, a band that first offered its revved-up folk and gospel on Thanksgiving weekend 2009, has reached its home stretch.
Fortunately for the group’s fans, Abby Mae’s last local show, 7 p.m. Saturday at Olympic Cellars, is a CD-release celebration. Abby Mae & the Homeschool Boys’ self-titled, seven-song record, funded by those fans through a Kickstarter.com campaign, will go on sale just as the band members go their separate ways.
This is the third CD; the first was simply “EP 1” in 2010 and the second, “Wade in the Water” from 2011, has sold like mad over the past year and is still available via www.AbbyMaeand theHomeschoolBoys.com.
On Saturday night, the quartet will do what they have done for the past 32 months: pour souls, strings and full-throated passion into what they call “old-timey” music.
It’s on their new record in various forms: the original “Run Away Ladies,” Iron and Wine’s “Naked As We Came” and a couple of traditionally flavored fiddle tunes, “Drunken Drowsy King Joey” and “28 Red Apples Walk.”
There’s “Strip It Down,” a love ballad by banjo player and guitarist David Rivers, and “Sally Cole,” an original murder ballad ironically named after a friend of the band.
The Ola Belle Reed song “I’ve Endured,” with a bit of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” embedded, is here too, with Abby Latson’s heavenward vocals and Joey Gish’s singing fiddle.
Rivers, the producer and arranger of this recording, also invited in Erin Hennessey, a teenage fiddle phenomenon from Port Angeles, as well as three local gospel singers: his father Michael Rivers, Greg Bondy and Dan Cobb.
And though Abby Mae’s performances are coming to an end, the opportunity to enjoy the band’s live shows is not.
As soon as the new CD becomes available Saturday, nine live tracks will be downloadable via www.BandCamp.com, Rivers promised.
The set of raw recordings, titled “Bootlegs,” starts with three songs recorded last summer at Gilbert Cellars in Yakima; next come three from Port Angeles’ Snowgrass festival this past winter and finally three at Studio Bob, the Port Angeles event space, in May.
These nine “are like the progression of our band,” said Rivers, who has been Abby Mae & the Homeschool Boys’ principal songwriter, manager and promoter.
Rivers, 26, grew up in Port Angeles and went off to Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music, just like his father Michael, founder of the Peninsula Men’s Gospel Singers, did a couple of decades earlier.
The younger Rivers, now well-known for his guitar, banjo, vocals and wit, brought Abby Mae & the Homeschool Boys together for their first gig at Wine on the Waterfront in Port Angeles on Nov. 27, 2009.
He then took the band from small, local stages to major festivals across the region, where fans, from youngsters on up, cheered and stomped for Abby Mae’s renditions of the traditional “Cluck Old Hen,” the Beatles’ “Come Together,” Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “Jackson,” that sassy one made famous by Johnny and June Carter Cash.
At Wintergrass in Bellevue this past February, the band hit a fresh pinnacle, and joined a lineup that included Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder and Tim O’Brien as well as bluegrass groups from Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
“We were in disbelief,” Rivers recalls.
As Abby Mae disbands, he sums up his feelings with one word: thankful.
“That defines everything the band has been about,” he says, “the friendships, the community response.”
Latson, who has been singing pretty much since she could talk, feels the same.
“None of this could ever have happened,” she said, without the love and support that came via encouraging words, spoken offstage, backstage and onstage.
At 23, Latson is embarking on a new musical endeavor: Standing on Shoulders. It’s an acoustic folk duo composed of Latson and her sweetheart, Dillan Witherow; they’re to take the Lavender Festival’s Fir Street Fair stage at 11 a.m. this Sunday as well as the Clallam County Fair stage the evening of Aug. 16.
“Standing on Shoulders is going to be spectacular,” said Rivers.
As for the other Homeschool Boys, Gish is headed for Western Washington University this fall; bassist Hayden Pomeroy is moving to Port Townsend and plans to work as a studio musician and form a new band, the Good Machine, with Port Angeles singer Cole Gibson.
Rivers, besides working two jobs, also plans to develop new musical frontiers. He’s taking time and care to choose them.
The foursome’s last CD, meantime, is quintessential Abby Mae: frolicsome, sweet and sultry by turns.
“We had so much fun recording it,” said Latson. When they did “Run Away Ladies,” though, she was having trouble getting into the song.
“So to help me smile and laugh,” she recalls, “David, Joey and Hayden all started dancing where I could see them. If ever I had trouble laughing since then, the thought of three homeschool boys interpretive dancing to ‘Run Away Ladies’ cured it.”
