Alastair Whitehead

He met the band’s mandolin player Adrian Gross and guitarist Darryl Poulsen in the music program at Humber College in Toronto, and the three jammed with the banjo player Frank Evans before Evans enrolled there too. He brought a love of Maritime folk music with him. The four built their sound at a weekly pub gig while at Humber and launched the Slocan Ramblers after graduating in 2011.

On the first album, Shaking Down the Acorns (2012), he sang the lead on the Corin Raymond and Jonathan Byrd song “The Law and Lonesome.” Coffee Creek (2015) gave him more room: he bowed the bass on songs such as “Rambling Sailor,” took solos on “April’s Waltz” and “Mississippi Shore,” played banjo on some tracks, and wrote and sang “Elk River”; he also wrote “Angeline.” On Queen City Jubilee (2018), produced by Chris Coole, he sang “First Train in the Morning” and “Makin’ Home.” By then the band was playing up to 200 dates a year in Canada, the United States and Britain, and Queen City Jubilee was nominated for the Juno Award for Traditional Roots Album of the Year in 2019; in 2020 the IBMA named the Slocan Ramblers Band of the Year in its Momentum Awards.

By January 2021, when the band recorded Up the Hill and Through the Fog, Charles James had taken over on bass.