Intense Travelin’ Music: The Dolly Ranchers

December 2000

By Kate Winslow

“It’s great when people ask me what I do,” says Sarah-Jane Moody, “and I can say I’m a clown and I sing in a band.” Strangely enough, she is being quite literal: Moody is lead singer for the Dolly Ranchers, an all-girl band made up of vagabonds, wanderers, and clowns that is loosely affiliated with the all-woman One Railroad Circus.

Citing influences as disparate as Tom Waits, the Velvet Underground, Lucinda Williams, Patti Smith, Freakwater, Utah Phillips, and Loretta Lynn, the Dolly Ranchers create spare country music that’s a little ragged around the edges, but delicate at heart. Their twing-twangy roots sound is punctuated by Moody’s distinctive, vaudevillean nasal delivery and hardcore lyrics (“I don’t trust her, but I will fuck her,” she spews on “You Still Linger”). Throughout, there’s an energetic, highwire edge to the music.

Many of the Ranchers’ songs stem from guitarist Marisa Anderson and Moody’s years of roving—these are songs about traveling, literally or figuratively. “Our truest audience is travelers, bikers, the underdogs,” Moody says. “It’s a hard audience because they move around.” But then, so do the Ranchers. Founding members Moody and Anderson met on the road 10 years ago, hooking up now and again to work on songs when their travels brought them together. Three years ago, they settled in Durango to pay more attention to their music, and Auntflo—which would later mutate into the Dolly Ranchers—was born. Soon they moved on to Santa Fe, where they rounded out the band with singer Amy Bertucci and bassist Maria Fabulosa. They recently self-released Ten O’clock Bird on their own Chaos Kitchen label.

“The sound now is more of what I had in mind,” says Anderson. “Amy is doing second vocals and her role is growing. It’s not harmony, but more part singing or old-time gospel singing.” And Moody lauds Fabulosa (how could you not with a name like that?): “Because we don’t have a drum or a rhythm guitar, it helps Marisa a lot to have some backbone. When Maria joined we gave her 40 songs and said, Okay we have shows in two weeks—learn them. And she did, no problem.”

Anderson now lives in Portland, Oregon, so the quartet’s wandering ways continue. They get together every couple of months either in Portland or Santa Fe, cram for a week, and then do a few shows. “We practice really hard when we get together, but maybe that’s a good thing about me moving,” Anderson says. “We have time to have a life and have a job and then when we get together, there’s an incredible focus…. When you play with people, there’s the surface level of the music, then there’s the level of I’ll-watch-your-back-if-you’ll-watch-mine. That level is a lot more intuitive and hard to shake. With that in place, it’s easy to get back to where we were.”

The Dolly Ranchers say it wasn’t a conscious decision to become an all-girl band. “It’s not women’s music—I hate that pigeonhole,” Anderson says. “But it has a lot to do with women being good at what they do…. In more traditional forms or rootsy music, women are still the singers and men still play the guitar. And I think that’s bullshit.”