The Wailin’ Jennys

The group began in January 2002 as a one-time performance by three solo singer-songwriters, Moody, Mehta and Cara Luft, at a small guitar shop in Winnipeg. A self-titled EP appeared that year. Their first full album, 40 Days, produced by David Travers-Smith and released in 2004 on Jericho Beach Music in Canada and Red House Records in the United States, mixed Moody’s “One Voice” and “Beautiful Dawn,” Mehta’s “Arlington” and Luft’s “Come All You Sailors” with Neil Young’s “Old Man,” John Hiatt’s “Take It Down” and the traditional “Saucy Sailor” and “The Parting Glass.” It won the 2005 Juno for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Group, and the radio exposure that followed brought them to concert halls in Canada, the United States and beyond.

Luft left after 40 Days, and the singer and fiddler Annabelle Chvostek took her place for Firecracker (2006), again produced by Travers-Smith, on which she sang and played guitar, mandolin and violin and wrote the title song and “The Devil’s Paintbrush Road.” Moving toward alt-country, pop and rock, the album was nominated for a Juno in 2007, won the Folk Alliance award for Contemporary Release of the Year and spent more than a year on Billboard’s charts. Chvostek left in February 2007, and Heather Masse joined that year.

With Masse the trio released Live at the Mauch Chunk Opera House (Red House, 2009), which included “One More Dollar,” “Bold Riley” and “Motherless Child” alongside their own songs and also spent more than a year on Billboard’s bluegrass chart. Bright Morning Stars (True North in Canada, Red House in the United States, 2011), produced by Mark Howard with Travers-Smith, carried songs by all three singers, Masse’s “Bird Song” and “Mona Louise” among them, and the traditional title song; it won the 2012 Juno for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Group.

For their fifteenth year they made Fifteen (Red House, 2017), a set of other writers’ songs recorded the way they sound live, with their longtime accompanists Richard Moody and Adam Dobres. It includes Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers,” Dolly Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” Emmylou Harris’s “Boulder to Birmingham,” Jane Siberry’s “The Valley” and Hank Williams’s “Weary Blues from Waitin’,” and it was nominated for the 2019 Juno for Traditional Roots Album of the Year. Their site describes them as touring while trying out new songs for a studio album to come.