The Be Good Tanyas: How to be good

They've been paid in pot, they play the banjo, they won't bare any flesh... The Be Good Tanyas aren't your average girl-band, says Fiona Sturges

Trish Klein, the singer, guitarist and banjo-player with the Be Good Tanyas, is recalling the first and only time that she attempted to drum up interest in her band. "I went to this big booking agent's office in Vancouver," she remembers. "I had brought our little package with me – a CD with our hand-made cover and some biographies with these silly pictures of us. I got to talking to the receptionist but I got such a chilly vibe from her that I just turned around and left. I didn't even leave the album."

Klein, 26, and her fellow Tanyas Samantha Parton, 30, and Frazey Ford, 29, are sitting over glasses of ginger beer in a London hotel and trying to put into words what drives them. Earlier this year they released Blue Horse, a sombre collection of ballads that takes in old-time country, early American folk, gospel and blues sounds, to widespread critical acclaim.

The trio's music comes with a rustic instinct that harks back to the roots of American folk and country music. Their rich yet rugged harmonies are filtered through centuries-old song-writing sensibilities, and set against a simple backdrop of banjos, fiddles, guitars and mandolin. Alongside their own quite wondrous tunes, the album contains re-workings of standards such as the Creole classic "Lakes of Pontchartrain" and "Oh Susanna", a song that, despite being credited to the composer Stephen Foster in 1847, is thought to have been first sung by minstrel groups in the early 1800s. The sleeve notes come with an excerpt from an Obo Martin McCrory song about a gypsy man whose desire to sing and travel leads him to leave his love behind. As he departs, he exhorts her to "Be good Tanya, Tanya be good" – hence the band's name. A low-key album made on an impossibly low budget, Blue Horse is one of the most beguiling debuts to be heard this year.

They are a band with a singular vision who are almost pathologically averse to self-promotion. Explaining their music goes against their natural instinct and is, to their minds, probably on a par with a visit to the dentist. Of course, they're too polite to say so. Instead, they consider each question thoughtfully – after a long pause they often pitch in at once with their answers.

Pondering the various labels that have been attached to them in recent months, among them alt.country, bluegrass and – horror of all horrors – nu-grass, the trio express their dislike of such categories. "People assume we are an alt.country or bluegrass band because we have a banjo and a mandolin," says Ford. "These songs could just as well be pop songs if there was slightly different instrumentation."

There are few pop musicians, however, who are prepared to trace the course of music as far back as the 1800s. In an era where contemporary bands seem fixated on the sounds of three or four decades ago, the Be Good Tanyas might seem like something of an anomaly. "I was really interested in that Sixties era when I was younger," insists Klein. "But when you're a kid you learn all these old songs. You learn things like 'Oh Susanna' and lots of old hymns. You don't necessarily know where it comes from, but the songs are always familiar to you."

"When you get interested in music there's always this inclination to go back," says Parton. "The further back you go, you realise music becomes more soulful. For me it started with Bob Dylan. My dad had Dylan's record Self Portrait when I was growing up – it had a lot of old songs on it. When I realised these weren't original, it led me to go back in time. I got as far as the 19th century and got stuck there, I guess."

Blue Horse arrives at a time when there is renewed interest in American roots music. Following the unexpected success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? album, the platinum-selling soundtrack to the Coen brothers' film which featured Depression-era roots music and modern bluegrass and the country artists Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, folk is suddenly all the rage.

"It's evolution," states Parton. "There's always been this bluegrass and folk thing. It's been around for ever – it just comes to the surface at different times. It was just getting fashionable again when this Hollywood movie came out that reached audiences around the world. I guess you could say we're lucky with our album, but we certainly didn't plan it this way."

Ford and Parton met eight years ago while tree-planting in the Kootenays outside Vancouver. They were both drawn to the job by their desire to escape the rigours of mainstream life. "I really wanted nothing to do with the corporate agenda or anyone telling me how to think," says Parton. "Tree-planting is ideal for that because you're moving around from bush-camp to bush-camp. You can go there and have conversations with people and realise that they have very little to do with the modern world. It's also an amazing way to find out about music because everyone brings their instruments and gets together at night to play."

Ford met Klein in Nelson, British Columbia, a few years later. They had both enrolled in a music school – "more of a mobile home than a school" – where they honed their art. There they also participated in open-mic nights put on by local artists where anyone, whether they were musicians, poets or writers, could stand up in front of a crowd and perform. "A lot of it was really awful but there's also these incredibly brilliant artists that live there and are totally obscure," says Ford. "You look at them and think, 'You're amazing. You could be the next Joni Mitchell.' But they just want to live in their cabin in the mountains and get to with growing their vegetables. Those performances were nothing to do with ego or about trying to be anything that you weren't. It was just a pure expression of the healing power of music."

The three went their separate ways after the planting season. Ford went travelling to Guatemala before settling back in Montreal, Trish played in a number of bands in Vancouver, and Samantha embarked on a road trip in the US with her dog, eventually settling in New Orleans. A couple of years later, however, they were all back in Vancouver, where they resumed their music sessions.

The extent of their ambition, they claim, was to play festivals in British Columbia and other parts of Canada. Their first experience of working for money was busking outside the Lilith Fair, although they ended up with more pot than hard cash. A year later they got their first festival gig at the Maine Island Folk Festival. "It was the biggest gig we had ever played – it was about 400 people – and we totally bombed," laughs Klein.

That was three summers ago. Since then, they have played festivals across Canada, the United States and Europe. I remark that it's difficult to see how such an unambitious band can fit within an industry more interested in presentation than musical virtuosity. It's not hard to guess what will go through a marketing executive's mind when confronted with the Be Good Tanyas. Here are three smart, attractive women producing sweet sounds and working in a genre that is fast becoming fashionable. "Anyone who tells us to show our asses will be dealt with," growls Trish. "You don't need to worry about us."

"What is happening to us now is very exciting," says Parton. "But sometimes I do get gripped with this anxiety. You suddenly realise that the songs you are writing are songs that a lot of people are going to want to hear. It's not just you in your room anymore. That's scary."

The Be Good Tanyas play Chester Telfords Warehouse, 29 July; Sheffield Memorial Hall, 30 July; Newcastle Live Theatre, 31 July; Manchester University, 1 Aug; Cambridge Folk Festival, 3 and 4 Aug; Birmingham Glee Club, 5 Aug. 'Blue Horse' is out now on Nettwerk