Whitetop Mountain Band "Loafer's Dream" (Mountain Roads Recordings)

In the past few months, I reviewed a CD of parlor music with the title of Before Bluegrass. That description kept rolling through my mind with my first exposure to the Whitetop Mountain Band. Their sound from the Virginia mountains would certainly qualify as rural and rustic sounds — long before bluegrass ever rolled around.

The family band from Whitetop, Va., showcases what it does best on Loafer’s Dream, a new CD on the Mountain Roads Recordings label. And, what the band does is pure mountain music from the Appalachian Mountains. Yes, pure, even though a few of the tunes, including the instrumental title cut, are originals. But, there’s a heaping pile of the traditional inside the CD’s wrapper.

Tracing its origins to band founder Albert Hash in the 1940s, The Whitetop group definitely fits the description of family band. Thornton Spencer, the current patriarch, joined Hash’s band as a twin fiddler in the 1970s. Spencer’s wife, Emily, became the group’s banjo player. In today’s version, Thornton Spencer is the main main fiddler and his wife Emily plays clawhammer banjo and contributes a great deal of the lead vocals. They are joined by their daughter Martha on guitar, banjo, fiddle, bass and vocals. Rounding out the group are Jackson Cunningham on mandolin and Debbie Bramer on bass.

Small wonder that the family aggregation is well known in its rustic part of the country. It’s one of the most popular square dance bands in the eastern Appalachians — and the CD is a testament to that fame with some time-worn fiddle classics, including “Liberty,” “Sally Ann” and “Devil’s Dream.” True to the band’s old-timey nature, even the new, self-penned fiddle numbers such as the title cut come across sounding like they’ve been played in barn dances around the country for better than a century.

The same goes for the vocals, which, incidentally, are, taken as a whole, some pretty sweet stuff, ala mountain air. It’s difficult to sort the ancient from the new. A personal favorite is the old gospel classic, “Drifting Too Far From the Shore.”

And, speaking of drifting, the Whitetop Mountain Band is not guilty of drifting too far from the melody in its instrumental work. Members play it straight, but very, very adequately.

Make no mistake, the Whitetop Mountain Band is not merely a family whose fame barely stretches beyond their neighborhood in mountainous Virginia. They are well known and respected for keeping the tradition of pure mountain music alive. The group has performed at The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, National Folklife Festival, World Music Institute in New York City, Carter Family Festival, Dock Boggs Festival, Ola Belle Reed Festival and Merlefest. They are also known as educators with their efforts to take their music into school systems, a step members hope will keep their musical heritage and traditions alive and well.

If you’re a fan of mountain music and the way things were before bluegrass, Loafer’s Dream provides a pleasant journey back to that era. If you’re a died-in-the-wool bluegrass fanatic, there are still many things to enjoy and appreciate on the CD. It can be obtained through the group’s Web site, http://whitetopmountainband.tripod.com.