Reeltime Travelers

The mandolin player Thomas Sneed, from Oklahoma, and the singer and guitarist Martha Scanlan, from Minnesota, met at the University of Montana and came to Tennessee in 1997, when Sneed took a job at ETSU’s Center for Appalachian Studies. The banjo player Roy Andrade, who grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and the fiddler Heidi Andrade moved near ETSU for its country music program in 1999 and met Scanlan and Sneed in their first week in town. The guitarist Brandon Story, who had grown up with southern gospel music, met Sneed and Andrade through folklore work at the university and joined in December 2001, making the band a five-piece. Several members also recorded oral histories of older Tennessee musicians with state grants, and the band played with the fiddler Ralph Blizard and twice a year at the Carter Family Fold in Virginia.

Their first album was Reeltime Oldtime String Band Music, and the second, Livin’ Reeltime, Thinkin’ Old-Time, came out in 2002, both on Yodel-Ay-Hee. That year, with the band working full time in its third year, they played the Bean Blossom and Grand Targhee festivals and an International Bluegrass Music Association showcase, and Scanlan won first place in the bluegrass category of the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest. Story also wrote songs, and others in the band contributed instrumentals and lyrics. When T Bone Burnett went looking for players who understood the music of Cold Mountain, he chose the Reeltime Travelers along with Dirk Powell and Tim Eriksen; the band recorded “Like a Songbird That Has Fallen,” by Bob Neuwirth and Burnett, which opens the soundtrack album after Jack White’s “Wayfaring Stranger.”

By 2013 Roy Andrade and Sneed were touring as the New Reeltime Travelers with the fiddler Betse Ellis, the singer Carol Elizabeth Jones, the multi-instrumentalist Ben Winship and the bassist Eric Thorin. Andrade by then ran ETSU’s old-time music program.