The Be Good Tanyas fuse vintage folk, country, and blues through close-knit vocal harmonies and classic fingerstyle guitar work. Listeners have often likened the Vancouver-based trio to earlier artists in a similar vein, notably Gillian Welch and Iris DeMent. The band’s origins trace to Samantha Parton’s return to Vancouver after several years of guitar-driven travels that took her through the American South and left a lasting imprint on her playing. She and Jolie Holland started the project together before inviting Frazey Ford and Trish Klein to join; Parton had first encountered both women during a tree-planting stint in Nelson, British Columbia, where Ford and the Winnipeg-raised Klein had already become acquainted at Selkirk Music School. The four performed together publicly for the first time in 1999, busking near the Lilith Fair site in Vancouver, and soon progressed to sets at local secondhand shops and cafés. After Holland’s departure the remaining three members began touring across Canada and issued their first album, Blue Horse, in 2001. The lighthearted follow-up Chinatown arrived two years later, and Hello Love appeared in 2006, featuring interpretations of songs by Neil Young, Mississippi John Hurt, and Prince. The group entered an official hiatus in 2008 that lasted until they reunited for a show at the 2011 Winnipeg Folk Festival; the next year brought Collection, a retrospective that added two previously unreleased tracks.
