Husband and wife Mike Sanyshyn and Tianna Lefebvre, who make up half of the Vancouver-based bluegrass band Jackson Hollow, both got started in the music business when they were young. Lefebvre was fifteen when she had her first recording session. Both were singing and entering contests but didn’t officially meet until they were twenty-one.
“And we’ve been together ever since,” Tianna said. “One day looking through some photos, Mike found a picture that had me singing on stage at a club and him playing the fiddle. The date of the photo was two years before we met.”
Mike said that he had been exposed to bluegrass but was playing more traditional fiddle tunes and entering old-time fiddle competitions. In 2010, they were bitten by the bluegrass bug. A long-time friend invited them to the Wintergrass festival in Bellevue, Washington, saying he had an extra couple of tickets and a hotel room for a friend who had cancelled.
“Whether that was true or not, I don’t know. It could have been his ploy to get us there,” said Sanyshyn, “but we totally fell for it. We fell hard when we got there and couldn’t believe how real it was, and how open the bluegrass community was there, welcoming with open arms. People were down to earth. Even the stars playing there came out to the CD table to say hey.”
That weekend they heard Rhonda Vincent, The Time Jumpers, and Dailey and Vincent, which Mike called an aha moment. “Without all the gimmicks,” Tianna added. “There’s no smoke and mirrors.” The pair say they are happy to have found a branch of music that feels like home.
Both have achieved success in the Canadian country music and bluegrass world, Sanyshyn for his fiddling and Lefebvre for vocals. They formed the band Jackson Hollow around 2015.
“At first we were just getting together with friends, trying the music to see if we could actually do this,” said Tianna. “We went through a few different members and found people that we not only look up to and love as players, but they’re also people we want to be around all the time and enjoy being on the road with.”
Charlie Frie, the bass player, is also a great singer, they say, who joins them on the vocals with his high harmony. Multi-instrumentalist Eric Reed plays guitar, banjo, and dobro. An engineer, Reed also helped the band produce four of the songs on the upcoming album.
Despite the pandemic, 2021 brought some new opportunities for the band. They applied for IBMA’s International Showcase, and while they waited to hear back, they were picked up by Mountain Fever Records out of Virginia. The virtual showcase was recorded in Bryan Adams’ Vancouver Warehouse studio.
The pair had gone to IBMA in 2018 looking for songs. They learned Ricky Skaggs was being inducted that weekend and ended up meeting him at the pre-show event.
Tianna said, “It was our first time, just Mike and I. We didn’t know anybody. Nobody knew us. We can’t wait to get back now that we’re on a different track.”
The band has just released the third single from their first album due out later this year. “Look Who’s Talking Now,” written by a trio of songwriting icons, Melba Montgomery, Jerry Salley, and Leslie Satcher, brings a solid traditional country sound to their repertoire.
Working on the album, Lefebvre said, “We were getting a lot of pitches but none of them were hitting the mark. They were too modern and too country. When we heard that song, we all said, ‘What did we just hear?’ That was a song we couldn’t let go by.”
Montgomery’s son-in-law Shane Barrett pitched that song along with a few others, including “Roses,” a concept song they anticipate being the album’s title track. Running almost four and a half minutes, longer than most songs that get radio play, they hope giving it a prominent place on the project will get it the attention they feel it deserves.
The first two singles from the album have moved up the charts. Travelin’ Heart” reached #10 on the US Bluegrass Today charts, and the second release “Shallow Rivers” also moved up the charts and received exposure on Sirius XM.
In addition to the support of Mountain Fever Records, the band has added a publicist and signed on with the Maverick Cooperative agency, building a team to handle the business aspects so they can concentrate of the creative aspects. That attention has paid off with stunning vocals and solid instrumentals, something the band works to perfect.
They have plans to tour this summer, starting with some regional festivals—the Kluane Mountain 2022 Bluegrass Festival in the Yukon and the Cowichan Valley Bluegrass Festival on the island. They plan to return to IBMA in person and hope to play Nashville soon. As they enter this new chapter in their lives, they say they feel like they are becoming their best selves. Being able to bring their close-knit musical circle of friends, says, Mike, “it means more now than it ever has.”
https://www.jacksonhollowmusic.com
