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The Richards Family Bible may dress like the Amish and deadpan covers of 100-year-old American songs, but the trio also throws a heckuva back-porch bash. All serious music-makers with a semi-comic sense of irony, this relatively new act has found a niche and fills it out nicely by reviving historical folk tunes for new audiences.
It doesn't take much to saturate a room with hearty renditions of traditional American music. Each of the three members of The Richards Family Bible contributes rousing harmonies from rural America as they sing about Jesus and poor boys and nickels in the jukebox. Beneath, only an acoustic guitar, tambourine, and snare drum tag along.
The naive simplicity of early 20th-century songs does not detract from their appeal. Simplicity often translates into timelessness, and there is no denying the archaic catchiness of this nation's first pop music. It's the same kind of boot-stomping, pre-radio, hootenanny fare that earned the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack platinum status eight times over.
Like that film's Soggy Bottom Boys, The Richards Family Bible has a slyly humorous bent.
Burgh Sounds photo"Here's a song in the key of G," said Bradly Richards for the third or fourth time of the night on Friday, in gentle acknowledgement of the songs' — shall we say— consistent arrangements. The show was a fundraising event for Hello Bully, the pit bull rescue organization, and, as proud pit bull owners themselves, the group had no trouble soliciting support for the cause. As "Sister Rogers" bemoaned the heat on the stage and removed her necktie and shirtsleeves ("Sometimes it's proper to take off a necktie when its warm"), she revealed her Hello Bully T-shirt beneath, engaging the band in an ongoing, sketch-comedy routine of depression-era prudence and shameless charity-hawking.
But there was no kidding about the music itself. The Richards Family Bible has mastered their music. No matter how quick or loud the group began a number, they always found a way to kick it up a notch when the time was right. Their most successful and most frequently used trick was to suddenly stop playing music as they continued to sing in rich, three-part harmony, before coming right back in, as if nothing had happened. If the audience's spontaneous outbursts of clapping-in-rhythm was any measure, it was kick in the seat that worked every time.
The Richards Family Bible are not trendy in the least. But it would be wrong to say that this group is unoriginal or uninspired just because they work with an intentionally-dated sound. In fact, it is the precisely the durable and vernacular nature of the songs that suggest we all thank the Bible that someone is still making this kind of music.
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