The joy is palpable.

Inside a home tucked away near the shore in Orient, the members of the Mudflats crack jokes, cross-talk and finish each other’s thoughts. They laugh about raising their hands before answering a reporter’s questions. They tease banjo player David Air about the Mudflats’ sketchy history of losing banjo players: one to a fatal heart attack and another who just up and ghosted the group. Then they begin to play.

Two fiddles rise together, and in come guitars, a mandolin, a banjo, an upright bass and steady drums. Voices settle into harmony and the room fills up with the bright, driving rhythm of American roots music, reshaped and renewed by a handful of top shelf musicians crowded into a tiny living room out near the edge of the peninsula.

The members of the Mudflats are in their 60s and 70s, but they talk about new arrangements, upcoming shows and festival invitations with the excitement of a young indie rock band.

This is already their biggest summer season. After years of playing North Fork concerts, community events and local festivals, the band is prepping for bigger shows, including a September performance at the Fiddle & Folk Festival in East Setauket.

“We’re in high gear right now,” said bassist Elizabeth Thompson.

‘Old-time music’

The band came together gradually, though the friendships behind it stretch back decades. Fiddler Mimi Fahs first saw Helen Hooke perform in Washington, D.C., and was drawn to the old-time fiddle style Hooke sometimes incorporated into her wide-ranging work. The two stayed close as friendships and musician connections developed among players living in Orient, East Marion, Greenport and New York City.

“We had been together as friends for almost 40 years,” Fahs said. “Then we really became a coalesced group playing together during the pandemic. We were our own ‘pod,’ and we just started playing some of this old-time music that I had really fallen in love with.”

They rehearsed outside, spaced apart and careful about exposure. Neighbors began stopping to listen. Some brought blankets and sat beyond the fence while the band played in the yard. The singers were positioned downwind so they could perform without masks.

“People lined up here with their picnics,” Nancy Lee Baxter recalled. “The neighbors would go by, and they’d stop. They’d wander in.”

They had already been playing at Green Hill Kitchen in Greenport, but before long the Mudflats were appearing at Orient’s Poquatuck Hall, the Jamesport Meeting House, Oysterponds Historical Society programs and community concerts across the North Fork.

The name came easily. String bands often dream up odd names, Fahs said, and the mudflats surrounding Orient and Oysterponds seemed like a natural fit. But there was another consideration.

“We always wanted to keep expectations low,” she said, and everyone burst out laughing.

Expectations have risen considerably.

The Mudflats are an unusually large acoustic string band, with at least eight musicians onstage for most performances. Their sound draws from southern Appalachian fiddle traditions, folk, bluegrass, country, rock, blues and jazz. The lineup includes Fahs and Hooke on fiddles, Baxter on rhythm guitar and lead vocals, Air on banjo, Mary Dorman on mandolin, Deb Roth on guitar, Thompson on upright bass and Colleen McDonough on drums.

Their process is practice, and they get together to play every week, whether there’s an upcoming gig or not. A song may be played repeatedly, altered, abandoned, revived months later and rehearsed again. Harmonies are worked out in sidebars. Transitions are practiced until one song can flow right into the next.

“The more popular we get, the better we have to be,” Dorman said. “My band members have inspired me to be as good as I can be. Else, I’m going to be left behind.”

No one in the room appears in danger of being left behind. They listen closely, laugh a lot — like a lot — and lean toward one another when the music starts. It’s a moving thing to witness up close.

‘A local hero’

While preserving traditional music, the Mudflats are repurposing it. It’s become one of the band’s signatures to take songs that have been passed down for generations and make them feel like North Fork songs. They rewrite lyrics and seek inspiration in the neighborhood.

One of the Mudsflats’ latest barn burners started with an old fiddle tune called “Old Billy Hell.” Helen Hooke loved the melody. The lyrics? Not so much.

“I looked at it and thought, ‘Old Billy Hell. What does that mean?'” Hooke said. “It means the devil. I thought, ‘I’m not going to do a song about the devil.’ But I loved the music.”

So she started thinking about another Billy: Orient Service Center mechanic Billy Hands. Anyone who has lived in Orient for long knows the veteran mechanic whose shop has kept generations of aging pickups and station wagons on the road long after many people would have given up on them.

Billy Hands and the lyrics that Helen Hooke wrote for him.

“He’s a local hero around here because everybody’s got old cars that still work,” Hooke said. “The guy is amazing.”

One evening, she sat down and rewrote the lyrics to “Old Billy Hell.” The devil disappeared and Billy Hands got top billing. The first time the mechanic heard the song, he loved it.

“Free oil changes for life for the Mudflats!”

The room erupted in laughter at the memory.

Nancy Lee Baxter, whose songwriting career took her from New York to nearly two decades as a staff writer for BMG and Universal Music Group in Nashville, re-tooled “Ida Red,” a standard that was popularized by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and is widely regarded as the inspiration behind Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.”

Instead of singing verses written for another era, Baxter built a whole new story around the title.

“I redid the lyrics for ‘Ida Red’ being an apple — and temptation,” she said. “It’s about Adam and Eve.”

Guitarist Deb Roth said the band’s not looking to sanitize history, but to honor it without getting trapped in it.

“The songs are old, and sometimes the lyrics are problematic,” she said. “They’re not necessarily lyrics we’re comfortable singing. The music is so beautiful, and we want to continue to carry on with tradition, but we’re not going to sing it this way.”

The band has also produced a North Fork version of the traditional tune “Sail Away Ladies,” updated with nautical references that fit a community surrounded by water.

The Mudflats see this as part of the tradition itself. Songs traveled across oceans, changed from town to town, picked up new verses, lost old ones and were animated by the people singing them. The Mudflats are just adding a new chapter.

Much of that process begins with Hooke. No one appointed her musical director. Nobody needed to. As the conversation around the rehearsal room bounced from one musician to another, members repeatedly talked up Hooke whenever the discussion shifted to arrangements. She studies the songs, experiments with harmonies and instrumentation until a piece begins to sound less like an old standard and more like a Mudflats song.

“Helen really comes up with a lot,” Fahs said.

A train medley Hooke assembled grew into a seamless suite of 10 traditional songs stitched together without pauses. The arrangement became so ambitious that it took months to master. Along the way, Roth noticed something. Without intending to, Hooke had built the medley around songs associated with three of the most influential women in American guitar history: Mother Maybelle Carter, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elizabeth Cotten.

“Helen worked on this for months,” Roth said, “and we ended up with this kind of homage to three great, wonderful women musicians of the 20th century.”

‘A wonderful thing to do’

The band members’ résumés are formidable. Baxter earned a platinum record after country singer Joe Diffie recorded one of her songs, ‘Never Mine to Lose’. Hooke toured with Billy Joel, Peter Frampton and John Prine as a member of the pioneering all-female band The Deadly Nightshade, whose work is preserved by the Smithsonian Institution and the Country Music Hall of Fame. McDonough spent 21 years leading the ASCAP Foundation. Thompson has played rock, jazz, blues and rockabilly. Fahs immersed herself in Appalachian fiddle music during a sabbatical in Asheville, North Carolina.

Their influences are as varied as their résumés.

For banjo player David Air, it started with the 1960s folk revival in Greenwich Village. He remembers learning from Pete Seeger’s banjo instruction book, seeing the New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson and Lightnin’ Hopkins live and up close. He played Café Wha? during the height of the Village music scene and was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar, a pivotal moment that cracked the folk scene in half and launched a revolution in American music.

“I was there,” Air said. “That altered my musical course.”

He followed Dylan into electric music before eventually stepping away from performing live.

“So joining [the Mudflats] brought me back to the music I started with,” he said. “Collectively it’s just a wonderful thing to do — to practice hard and achieve some success. It’s wonderful at this point in life.”

Roth loves Joan Baez and the harmonies of the Weavers, the group that prompted her as a 7-year-old Long Island girl to beg her parents for guitar lessons. Baxter built a successful career writing country music in Nashville while Hooke moves effortlessly between rock, Americana and experimental music. Fahs immersed herself in southern Appalachian fiddle traditions, while Thompson’s background stretches from jazz and blues to rockabilly.

Thompson hears that unique blend every time the band plays together.

“There’s bluegrass banjo, there’s old-time fiddle, there’s country rock, folk rock, folk blues, rock and roll, jazz backgrounds,” she said. “All of it’s here. I think that feeds into this twin-fiddle thing. It’s just a really fresh fusion of some great old melodies.”

McDonough calls it magical.

“It kind of reminds me of when you walk into a philharmonic concert and everybody’s tuning up, and it’s very dissonant,” she said. “There are all these sounds and everything, and we come in — maybe talk about the setlist, maybe not. But then when you start playing the music, it’s just magical, and it’s healing. It’s something that I think keeps us together.”

A new arrangement may take months before everyone is satisfied. Someone brings in an idea. Everyone studies it at home. They listen to old recordings, compare interpretations and return the next week ready to try again. Sometimes songs survive, sometimes they disappear.

“We really set that high bar,” Fahs said. “It has to be a Mudflats song.”

The band is particularly excited about this fall’s Fiddle & Folk Festival, where they’ll perform before an audience that already understands the traditions they love.

“It’s a new audience for us,” McDonough said. “I think that’s what we’re hoping to build up now.”

Near the end of rehearsal, someone suggests another song. There is no discussion about who should lead it. Hooke nods almost imperceptibly. Instruments are lifted into place, and the room fills up with music again.

It is music that has traveled across generations: through Appalachian mountains, Southern churches, Greenwich Village coffeehouses, Nashville honky tonks and countless front porches, before winding its way into an Orient home tucked away on Old Farm Road.

The melodies are old. Everything else belongs to the Mudflats.