It’s always fun discovering new acts, especially ones from our own state. Such is the case with the quintet of Griffin Sherry (guitar and vocals), Max Davis (banjo and vocals), Matt Young (harmonica and mandolin), Matt Baker (mandolin) and Sean McCarthy (bass and vocals) better known as The Ghost of Paul Revere. This Portland-based group will perform at Mainely Brews Saturday and, to that end, a phoner was arranged with McCarthy to learn a little more about the band.

 

Q: Is this going to be The Ghost of Paul Revere’s first Waterville gig?

McCarthy: This will be, actually … yeah.

Q: How long has the band been together?

McCarthy: I believe the middle of this month we’ll be together for about two years now. It started with Griffin — he used to play open-mike nights by himself and he called himself Griffin Sherry and the Ghost of Paul Revere — and then me and Max. We’ve known Griffin for a little over two decades now so we’d go out and watch him play. He’d have us come up and sing harmony on some songs then eventually we just kept on coming up all the time and he’d also have Matt and Matt come up and play mandolin or harmonica on a couple of songs with us and eventually it got to the point where we realized we had something special and we just changed the name to The Ghost of Paul Revere.

Q: Well, when I heard you guys on WCSH-6’s “207” — just heard you play, not seeing the screen — I thought, “Oh, it’s Mumford and Sons!” You can understand how that could happen, right?

McCarthy: Oh, absolutely — definitely, yeah. I think the really big part of our music, something that really makes us recognizable, is the attention we put into the three-part harmonies — that and the banjo also has a pretty unique sound. So when you’ve got the three-part harmonies and you’ve got the banjo and you’ve kind of got almost — I’m not sure it’s actually the same style of music but it’s definitely coming from the same place.

Q: Now I read someplace that you were a “holler” band — what is that?

McCarthy: Well, we’ve been kind of struggling to define the genre of music for ourselves. It’s not quite bluegrass because bluegrass is way more technical than what we do. We thought of calling it “new grass” but that’s not quite right either because we pull a lot from blues and from folk but it’s a little more amped-up to be just regular folk, and it’s especially not blues, so we went with “holler folk” because we do a lot of songs that are based off the old gospel songs and the old field hollers that people used to do working in the fields. So we kind of mixed it all together and holler folk seemed right once we said it.

Q: Is this six-song al

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