The bluegrass/string band Steep Canyon Rangers has played extensively with actor, comedian and adept banjo player Steve Martin, the actor known mostly as a comedian.
Paul McCartney also sang backup vocals on the band’s 2011 Rare Bird Alert album. The band also won a Grammy Award and played at Carnegie Hall, Royal Festival Hall in London, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits and the Grand Ole Opry.
It’s not doub these were thrilling experiences.
But each time the band comes to the Lowcountry, as it will for a show at the Windjammer on Aug. 27, the members of Steep Canyon Rangers still get a kick out of the trip.
“We love playing in Charleston,” upright bassist Barrett Smith said in a recent Charleston City Paper interview. “We’ve got a few decades at this point of playing there.”
The band was founded in Asheville, N.C., in 2000, and Smith, who joined Steep Canyon Rangers in 2018, describes the relationship between Asheville and Charleston as something of a cultural siblinghood — two Southeastern cities that have influenced each other while developing distinctly different personalities.
“It’s like coming to a different kind of cultural center of our region,” he said. “That’s really important.”
That makes the Windjammer a particularly fitting stop for a band that has spent its career figuring out how to balance its roots with its restless musical instincts.
Steep Canyon Rangers’ latest album, Next Act, finds it leaning back toward those roots. After years of incorporating electric instruments, drums and a broader Americana-rock sound, the band decided it was time to reconnect with the bluegrass and string-band music at its core.
“The feeling was, ‘It’s time to get back to what we started with,’ ” Smith said.
That meant stripping things down at times, including putting the band around a single microphone and even having its drummer switch to dobro and guitar.
But don’t expect Steep Canyon Rangers to suddenly turn the Windjammer into a hushed listening room. Smith knows perfectly well what sort of atmosphere awaits on that outdoor stage in Isle of Palms.
“We’re going to really lean into the upbeat stuff, and there might even be drums onstage at some point,” he said. “But I guarantee at some point, even at that show, there will be moments where it’s just one microphone set up.”
The group has been playing together long enough to change direction almost telepathically, whether that means abandoning a planned run of mellow songs because the crowd is ready to party or suddenly altering the instrumentation.
“We’re products of the Grateful Dead in that way,” Smith said.
That chemistry becomes particularly important when Steep Canyon Rangers starts improvising. It’s not an individual taking a solo. The entire band collectively decides to take a song somewhere it has never gone before.
“We get a kick out of finishing each other’s sentences, musically,” he said.
The band’s newest member, singer and guitarist Aaron Burdett, has brought a new dimension to that chemistry. Burdett replaced co-founding singer and guitarist Woody Platt, who left in 2022 to spend more time with his family after more than two decades on the road.
Those aren’t easy shoes to fill, but Smith has nothing but praise for how Burdett has contributed to the band.
“It’s a daunting task taking on the repertoire,” Smith said. “But he has weathered the storm and now it’s like he’s been here forever, which is awesome. He’s a prolific writer and he’s a great singer who gives us another gear that we didn’t really have before.”
And of course, as the previous “New Guy” in the band, Smith was able to give Burdett some pointers.
“I really made a point in the beginning to help Aaron with things,” he said. “And that help was mostly me saying, ‘I get it. This stuff is really complicated. Don’t worry about it, you’ll get it. You just have to repeat it a bunch of times, and it’ll be second nature.’ ”
Burdett’s arrival happily coincided with the band’s move from having one main singer to using bluegrass-style group vocals.
“He really reinforced this departure from a traditional band with a lead singer and spokesman to spreading the vocals around like the Band or the Grateful Dead or the Eagles,” Smith said. “Shifting that focus has been really exciting.”
“Keeping things fresh is vital,” he added. “The band is like a shark that keeps moving in the water.”
The good news for Charleston is that the shark still likes swimming back here every now and then.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Doors open at 6 p.m. Aug. 27, The Windjammer, 1008 Ocean Boulevard, Isle of Palms. Tickets are $30.
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