Drawing from roots music and Southern stories steeped in the supernatural, the Pine Hill Haints coined their own term “Alabama ghost country” for a sound that draws in honky tonk, rockabilly, folk, and bluegrass. The group channels the South’s musical heritage while applying a sharp, lively modern perspective, delivering rock & roll intensity through acoustic instruments, musical saws, washtubs, and washboards. Their creative stride became evident on the 2007 album Ghost Dance, their recording approach advanced further with 2014’s The Magik Sound of the Pine Hill Haints, and they doubled their output in 2021 via the releases 13 and The Song Companion of a Lone Star Cowboy.
Vocalist Jamie Barrier grew up accompanying his grandfather to neighborhood hootenannies that introduced him to Alabama’s musical customs. He later strengthened his singing by practicing in the Pine Hill Cemetery and, while still in elementary school, started a boisterous rockabilly group called the Wednesdays. That outfit issued multiple albums during the 2000s, yet Barrier launched the Pine Hill Haints in 1998 as a separate venture whose rotating members eventually settled into a core lineup of Matt Bakula on washtub bass and banjo, Ben Rhyne on snare drum, and Jamie’s wife Katie Barrier on washboard and mandolin.
The Pine Hill Haints placed their first three full-lengths, a 12" vinyl, and several split albums on Barrier’s Arkam Records before Calvin Johnson, founder of K Records, offered to record their next project, You Bury Your Hate in a Shallow Grave, at no cost. Portland’s LELP label issued that album as well as the subsequent EP Pine Hill Haints Meet Clampitt, Gaddis & Buck. After returning to Arkam for 2005’s Those Who Wander, the band signed with K Records and delivered the twenty-track lo-fi collection Ghost Dance in November 2007. The following year they headed to Florence, Alabama, to work at Black Owl Trading Co., resulting in To Win or to Lose, their second K Records release, which appeared in summer 2009. The label continued to issue their work with 2011’s Welcome to the Midnight Opry, 2014’s The Magik Sounds of the Pine Hill Haints, and assorted EPs and split releases. Smoke, their first album without Bakula or Rhyne, came out on Arkam in 2017. In 2021 they resumed recording activity, issuing 13 on Arkam in January—regarded as their thirteenth album—and The Song Companion of a Lone Star Cowboy on Single Lock Records that May.
