Ramblers Choice

Sisk and his cousin Tim Massey had played together since their teens in the family band Dreamin’ Creek, and in late 1994 they met the guitarist Wyatt Rice and started Wyatt Rice & Santa Cruz, with Elmer Burchett on banjo; Massey learned upright bass for that band, which made one album, Picture in a Tear, for Rounder. In August 1997 Sisk, Massey and Burchett left Rice, wanting to stay with a traditional sound while he leaned toward more progressive music, and formed their own group with Alan Perdue on mandolin and Jim Van Cleve on fiddle. They played a couple of shows as Straight Ahead before learning that a Michigan jazz band already had the name. Rounder ran an online contest to rename them, drawing more than 800 entries, and they settled on Rambler’s Choice.

Sounds of the Mountains was finished in October 1997, but technical delays held it back until 13 October 1998. Massey and the Lonesome River Band’s Ronnie Bowman wrote most of it; Burchett and Sisk’s father, Harry Sisk Sr., who wrote the title song, supplied the rest, and Sisk, though already known as a songwriter for the Lonesome River Band, had none of his own songs on it. Its twelve tracks run from “Enough on My Mind” and “Mama’s Flowers” to “Shotgun Slade” and “Poor Rambler.”

By the time the record appeared the lineup had changed: Van Cleve left in November 1997, going to Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver and then Mountain Heart, and Burchett left in April 1998 to play with Dale Ann Bradley and Coon Creek; Perdue’s brother Sandy took over the banjo. The band made no second album and had broken up by about 2001, when Sisk went to Lost & Found, and its former members went on to bands including Mountain Heart, IIIrd Tyme Out and Continental Divide. After BlueRidge ended in 2006, Sisk and Massey re-formed the band, which recorded for Rebel from 2008 as Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice.