Just as you left Uncle Dave Macon Days last month needing more banjo music than ever to keep in your woodshed and not tell anyone you’re feeding, Lebanon old-time band, The Gallinippers, come through with their debut album of traditionals titled Carve that Possum. And it will be more than happy to accompany you on the long road home.

Lead by Wayne (Buddy) Ingram, founder of the Middle Tennessee Banjo Institute, Carve that Possum was released early this summer through the band’s own independent label and has the sound of Tennessee old-time music at its grittiest. Never straying from the traditional form, Ingram and company, with instruments comfortably in lap, deliver solidity through and through the 13 tracks with close to perfect examples of what the genre has to offer in straight jug-driven barn dance tunes, blues and old-time minstrel songs.

First of the three is the staple jug and banjo-powered barn dance sound Carve that Possum serves up in such tunes as “Bound to Ride”, with Buddy Ingram’s voice inviting you along with one of folk music’s most common themes of a carefree, wayward traveler. Another, “Old Joe”, the leading song on the album, boasts a similar promenade rhythm while Ingram’s wife Lisa supplies the washboard licks around the rear of the song. Also, Michael Defosche, one of the band’s many fiddle players, shows off a couple of old-time rags with a guitar and jug humming that can get you moving.

A second sound sought on Carve that Possum is the Southern blues plucked with songs such as “If I Die a Railroad Man”, emphasizing its sorrow lyrically over Buddy Ingram’s clawhammer picking and Josh Smith’s bass heavy accompaniment on guitar, as well as “Bring It With You When You Come”, which shows its sluggish blues within the music while the musical structure overlaps into the third sound of Carve that Possum.

The Gallinippers’ old-time minstrel sound is commonly heard in old vaudeville bands and reoccurring nowadays in a lot of New Orleans-based string musicians’ acts. It emphasizes the clunky, mid-paced marches they play with Lisa Ingram’s pump organ over the moaning fiddle of other Gallinipper fiddlers William See or Kevin Martin, along with a rhythmic Banjolin (banjo-mandolin hybrid) and/or the linear picking of a mandolin. They achieve the sound on a few songs including the title track, “Carve that Possum”, an old traditional song Dave Macon was known to play.

If you’re in the mood to find them playing live again, The Gallinippers are scheduled every night this year at the Wilson County Fair August 12-20 in Lebanon, Tenn. At Macon Days, they pulled up in an old rusted Ford flatbed as a stage with a giant wooden sign leaned against the side reading, “Performing Live” below their names, sounding just as good as they are in the studio. Don’t be surprised if that’s what they do come fair time in Wilson County.