Be Good Tanyas are riding the bluegrass wave, writes Brian Boyd.

A lot of bands go back to the '60s for inspiration, and the Canadian trio Be Good Tanyas are no exception - but for them it's the 1860s. Their unique bluegrass sound, which harks backs to the roots of American folk and country music - all banjos, mandolins and fiddles - is, though, the most up-to-date sound you can hear, judging by the huge acclaim heaped on them in just the last 12 months.

Radio DJs from John Peel to Terry Wogan can't get enough of their rustic sounds, and both Q and Mojo magazines hailed their début work, Blue Horse, as one of the albums of 2002. It's all very endearing stuff, the band have got by with no professional hype, just the quality of their music and their songwriting. Just don't get them confused with any of the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou pack - "it's nothing to do with us", they say, and don't have the temerity to jauntily refer to their sound as "nu-grass" - they've heard that gag before, quite a few times and don't care for it that much.

"People just look at our instruments and go 'alt.country' or 'neo-traditional folk' or something with 'bluegrass' in it" says Samantha Parton from the group, "but we actually believe that the songs could just as well be pop songs if there was a slightly different instrumentation."

The band are Trish Klein, Samantha Parton and Frazey Ford, all Canadian and all multi-instrumentalists. "Playing music for the sake of playing music is what we have in common," says Parton. "We all have very different musical backgrounds - Frazey used to be in a trip-hop band, Trish used to be in a soul/funk band and I spent a bit of time walking around the US with a spoken word punk poet while also being in a country music side project called The Illegitimate Daughters of Johnny Cash."

The three first met, hanging around in the mountains in British Columbia - they worked as tree-planters, mainly to avoid the hassles of mainstream life. "It was just us dropping out of the corporate agenda," says Parton, "and tree-planting is ideal for that because you can move around from camp to camp and you meet people who have very little to do with the modern world - it's also a great way to learn about music because people bring along a whole range of instruments and get together to play."

After a number of years going their separate ways - travelling and making music in various different countries, the three of them met up again in Vancouver and took their name from a song written by a friend of theirs. One of their first shows was busking outside the Lilith Fair festival, then they made a name for themselves in Vancouver, then Canada, then the US, now Europe.

Their timing seemed right. The unexpected success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack, which featured roots and bluegrass music, and the accompanying success of Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, has brought attention to a previously neglected genre. "It's a changing thing," says Parton. "Bluegrass and folk music have been around forever, but they just seem to come to the surface at different times. It just seem liked 'roots' was getting 'fashionable' again when this Hollywood movie came out that reached a huge audience. We certainly didn't have any notion of that when we recorded our first album."

Parton's own musical education came from listening to Bob Dylan records. "I can remember listening to Self Portrait, and once I realised some of the songs were covers, it led me back in time to the original acts, back to the 19th century - and I guess I stayed there."

With a very simple and very pure sound, infused with a rare sort of joyousness, the Be Good Tanyas realise how much of an anomaly they are in the modern music world. Their new album, Chinatown, is already beginning to outsell the first, helped along by an atypical cover of House of The Rising Sun and a skewed take on a song made popular by Led Zeppelin In My Time of Dying - which sees Jimmy Page being replaced with a banjo.

"The majority of the album is our own stuff," she says, "but sometimes a cover just seems to suggest itself. It probably goes back to the folk tradition, but some of the covers we do, either on record or live, we never picked up from an album, but rather from our friends. One of the songs on this record I had heard from a friend singing it, and when I heard a version of it by Uncle Tupelo on record, I realised I had got the chords wrong and the melody and lyrics weren't quite right, so I suppose I had made it into my own version - but that happens in folk music."

Aware now that there are pressures on them to tour, play festivals and do the sort of things expected of a big selling act, Parton finds herself recoiling from the ways of the industry. "It's just a case of keeping ourselves heading in the right direction, and not to be distracted from the very reason we first got involved in music. So far we've got it across to everyone that we're not really into anything that's not connected with the music and we really intend keeping it that way."

Chinatown is on the EMI/Nettwerk label