SEATED round one microphone in the traditional old-time style, the Foghorn Stringband have every appearance of some kind of folklore factory, guitar-strumming arm moving as steady as a piston, banjo, fiddle and mandolin dovetailing with rustic precision.
Here endeth any hints at mechanization, however. This Oregon-based quintet - double bassist Brian Bagdonas stands behine the others, laying into his lines with an angular physicality - play with a strong, human heartbeat and genuine passion for their music.
Their songs and fiddle tunes are born from the human experience, some soold they went over to America from these islands with Virginia's colonisers, others from a more recent century but with the same venerable-sounding qualities.
Hobos dying in boxcars, cheating lovers, valleys flooded for hydroelectric progress and hangovers from the American Civil War, or what a Georgian such as banjoist P.T. Grover still refers to as "the war of Northern Aggression" - these are far from cheery blues. Yet there's a stoicism and honesty to the Foghorner's singing of them that's uplifting as any hymn.
The much-covered gospel standard, Father Along, will appear later. Before that, though, there's plenty of time to marvel at the synchronicity of picking and bowing, the thick thrust of a beat that must bring the square dances it's designed for back home instantly to life, and the emotional tug of Stephen "Sammy" Lind's fiddling.
In an encore that departed, just for once, from the teamwork that makes them special, Lind demonstrated solo fiddle skills that had all the skirling, bagpipe-like effects of a ghostly, centuries-old lament before the band revved up for one final stour-raising hoe-down.
