Work the Cumberland mines and ride a doomed locomotive at this week’s bluegrass-themed edition of the free Red Dirt Concert Series at the Posse Grounds Pavilion. Opening act Banjo Joe and Danielle will take the stage at 5 p.m. on Friday, May 24, followed by the Los-Angeles area progressive bluegrass band The Storytellers.

The Storytellers

“One of the reasons we call ourselves The Storytellers is that we are principally concerned with the songs and the stories of the songs,” vocalist and bassist Lance Frantzich said of what he described as an “outlaw hippie bluegrass show.” “That’s not limited to the lyrical story, but the musical story as well. So we really try to attend deftly to the small, important details of the musical and lyrical storytelling so that we capture the essence of the song.”

To achieve this, The Storytellers use three-part harmony and tight rhythms and rely on solos and musical chemistry to convey their stories.

“By the time the song ends, we and the audience have essentially lived the story,” Frantzich said “We’ve been betrayed by a lover. We’ve been on the front lines of war … We try to bring these stories home. In this way our shows are more than just concerts. So for the person who wants to come and dance and shake their bones, they can experience our music on that level too, and it’s going to be more than satisfying … We really do draw from the great storytellers like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bill Monroe, Doc Watson and Jerry Garcia. We’re really coming from that tradition, but with a modern sensibility.”

About a third of The Storytellers’ musical catalog is made up of Grateful Dead covers, with the occasional Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen thrown in the mix.

The group will also be showing off their Dead bona fides the following day on Saturday, May 25, at the fifth annual Grateful Festival in Flagstaff and headlining the 43rd annual Prescott Bluegrass Festival on Saturday, June 22.

“We are not traditional; there are a few elements that make us progressive,” Frantzich said. ”We’re more like jam grass, or jazz grass. There are lots of elements of jazz that we bring into our arrangements … We want to make sure that bluegrass music is around for years to come. So we hope to bring in the newer generation of people to introduce them to this kind of music and our way that we play the music, our instrumentation and our arrangements, and just the way that we interpret the music has turned on a lot of people already … Why we call ourselves progressive bluegrass is [because] we’re trying to bring more people into the music.”

Banjo Joe and Danielle

Banjo Joe and Danielle typically split their selections between bluegrass classics such as “High on the Mountain” and “Old Mountain Dew” and original songs.

“We’ve been together for 14 years, been sweethearts for a long time, and I’ve been a banjo player for almost 20 years,” “Banjo” Joe McCamish said. “About three years ago, we decided to convert this bus and [Danielle Hartline] decided to learn upright bass so we could form this duet and travel around and play music together.”

Hartline described an invitation to see a performance by McCamish’s previous group, the Whistle Pigs, at Crazy Joe’s Fish House in Illinois as what set their relationship in motion, with the duo being “pretty much inseparable ever since.”

“When I first got into banjo, it was in my 20s, and I met street performers from New Orleans that were bluegrass players, and they came up to Carbondale in southern Illinois for the summer to get out of the heat,” Banjo Joe said. “I’d go back to New Orleans and just seeing that raw, acoustic street performance of old bluegrass music … I met a few of these street musicians and learned the chops … and watched them make a lot of money in their tip buckets. That kind of roots, you don’t need a manager or booking agent, you’re just putting yourself out there on the street. That was my early influence in this type of music and then getting into the original bluegrass [of] Bill Monroe and all the branches of the bluegrass tree that came out of his band.”

The spring Red Dirt Concert Series will wrap up next week on Friday, May 31. The fall series will return on Friday, Sept. 6, with Sophia Rankin and The Sound with Steen.