If you live in Orient, you’ve heard the fiddles, driving drumbeat and tight rural harmonies of The Mudflats, echoing out of Poquatuck Hall or spreading on the breeze across the Oysterponds Historical Society’s grounds.
This band appears to have blossomed onto the North Fork music scene over just the past couple years, but many of its members’ lives have been woven together for decades, from Nashville to Washington DC to New York City and then out to the far tip of the North Fork, where their sound finally melded in a series of impromptu concerts on an Orient porch at the height of the Covid pandemic in mid-2020.
“We started out as friends, and we’re still friends,” said fiddle player Helen Hooke as the band practiced this week for Saturday’s Song Swap at Poquatuck Hall, where they’ll be kicking off the second act.
Their sound is a melding of influences native to this country that has coalesced into a genre known as Americana — a form with roots from places as varied as Ireland and Africa, Appalachia, and the deep South.
Mimi Fahs, a classically trained violin player who now plays fiddle in The Mudflats, began attending composer Jay Ungar’s traditional music camps in the Catskills before Covid brought the band to her porch, rooting her firmly in the burgeoning Americana tradition.
“I fell in love with the Southern style, western swing, Irish music, although the Irish music has too many notes for me,” she said. “I love how the southern style gathered the rhythms from the banjo that African Americans were bringing up from the south — I felt that was the origin of rock and roll.”
“Old Time fiddle tunes were the origin of a lot of this,” she added. “That was music during really hard times in America, working in the mountains and coal mines. This is how people got together. They rolled up the rug — if they even had a rug — the fiddle would be tuned a special way that made it ring even more loudly and they would dance all night. We’re going through some hard times ourselves right now, and this music is so important to keep the community together.”
Ms. Fahs and her partner, Elizabeth Thompson, who started out as a jazz drummer but now plays bass in The Mudflats, met Helen Hooke in Washington DC in the late 1970s, when Ms. Hooke was playing fiddle in a band called The Deadly Nightshades.
“We did a lot of country rock, and were part of the second wave of the women’s liberation movement,” said Ms. Hooke of that band. “We got swept into the wave. We had a big following and a record deal with RCA. We toured the south with Billy Joel for six weeks. It was huge fun and crazy times, but we were too young to be that successful. We didn’t know what to do with it.”
While in DC, Ms. Hooke met Colleen McDonough, who joined her band on glockenspiel.
“She shot straight right up to washboard,” quipped the band’s mandolin player, Mary Dorman, whose family ties on the North Fork eventually brought most of the band to live in Orient.
“With no tambourine in between,” finished Ms. McDonough, a verbal rim shot to her friend’s sentence.
She also played the glockenspiel in an all-woman disco band, where she did some “killer” renditions of Barry White tunes, according to Ms. Hooke.
Before keeping the beat with The Mudflats, Ms. McDonough had a heavy career as the Executive Director of the ASCAP Foundation, the non-profit arm of the largest songwriters association in the world. But she wears that work lightly here.
Another chance meeting in Nashville between Ms. Hooke and songwriter Nancy Baxter, a household name on the North Fork, helped bring The Mudflats story back here. Ms. Baxter, who winters in Florida, will soon return to join the band on guitar and vocals this summer.
When Ms. Thompson and Ms. Fahs moved to New York in the early 1980s, they fell in with Ms. McDonough and her roommate Roma Baran, a Canadian record producer who was working with Laurie Anderson. They were looking for a third roommate in their Tribeca loft, and agreed to take on a fourth roommate as well.
And the circle continued to weave them closer to their adopted North Fork home.
Ms. Thompson, once a jazz drummer, has now fully embraced her new instrument, thanks to a chance find of a bass that had once belonged to famed pianist William Kapell.
She and Ms. Fahs found the bass for sale for $100 on the sidewalk outside the real estate office of Kapell’s son, David Kapell, the former mayor of Greenport.
And Ms. Baran is now the band’s producer and best critic.
“Being able to sit around and talk about music and listen to music with people I love is a wonderful thing,” she said. “I’ve had to sit on the other side of a piece of glass listening to the music of people I don’t love. Once a song starts, everybody starts to meld together. For me, that’s the greatest pleasure — everybody listening to each other, and not just shining on their own.”
Everyone in the group had long been friends with Mary Dorman, a guitarist and folk singer who was always encouraging the friends to come out to Orient. They slowly made their way eastward at her urging.
Not too long before Covid drove The Mudflats to Ms. Fahs’ porch, Ms. Dorman’s brother gave her a mandolin.
“He said, ‘sis, this is the perfect instrument. It weighs a pound and a half and no one plays it,'” she said. And another piece of this puzzle clicked.
“And then, during the pandemic, we became a pod,” said Ms. Fahs. It was a combination of retirements, working from home and her new swimming pool that kept them returning to her porch to play.
“We thought, ‘why don’t we do something for the neighbors? We sent out a few small invitations. Our close neighbors came by, and it kind of jelled,” she said.
The group had played informally with two male banjo players in the past — the exceptional Ben Freed, who died of a heart condition in 2015, and another banjo player, whom The Mudflats wouldn’t name. They say he is now in the witness protection program.
David Air, an Orient neighbor who learned the banjo in his youth after being inspired by Pete Seeger, was undaunted.
“I heard there was a chair open in The Mudflats, I applied for the audition, and I was fortunate to get in,” he said. “The previous banjo players met with bad and mysterious ends. I never got all the details. I don’t know how long I’ll be playing in the band, but I’ve enjoyed it.”
Deb Roth, who joined the band on guitar and vocals in 2024, ensured our reporter that “we send Dave for regular checkups. We don’t want to lose another one.”
Ms. Roth had played folk music on the North Fork dating back to Greenport’s First Night days in the early 2000s, where she played at the New Years Eve fair in downtown Greenport with a band called “Local Tomatoes.” She promised herself when she stopped working that she would take a leap and join a band.
The Mudflats are happy to have her.
“Helen and Nancy Baxter brought original songs to us, and an original approach to songs. Deb is an original contributor of songs too,” said Ms. Dorman. “What Americana is to me is a meld of the different song styles that we’ve inherited — whether it’s rock and roll, blues, jazz, fiddle or country. It’s a meld of our herstorical musicianship. That’s, I think, where The Mudflats are quite unique. We have the vestiges of all the songs we remember.”
“Whatever tune strikes any of our fancy, we bring it into the band,” said Ms. Roth. “We’ll listen to it, try it and see how we can make it ours, how we can adapt it to our particular style of instruments. Every once in a while we strike gold and find something we can deal with.”
“Last year, I got obsessed with train songs, and I put them all into one big jumble,” said Ms. Hooke. The band came along for the ride.
“The fiddle is so exciting,” said Ms. Baran, the producer. “A violin can be exciting, but not in this way. You don’t really go out to a classical concert and want to bang your feet.”
“You probably didn’t get that kind of excitement from a lead instrument until they plugged guitars in and somebody wailed on an electric guitar,” said Ms. Roth.
Ms. Fahs said her classical training as a violinist actually made it difficult to become a fiddle player, though Ms. Hooke says she didn’t have that problem because “I went bad so early.”
“The finest classical players will give this a try, and they can’t do it,” said Ms. Fahs. “The bowing is completely different. Classical players are so finely tuned to always be together in an orchestra, with absolute precision. But with a fiddle, the bow is never just going back and forth. It’s always circling, and that creates the rhythm.”
These types of bands don’t often include a drummer playing a kit, but The Mudflats decided to be different.
“To put a drum kit in a sweet little old timey band — it just make it so much more exciting,” said Ms. Baran.
“Mimi was so gracious,” said Ms. McDonough. “She said ‘we’re just going to be a little different.'”
The band has a slew of gigs planned for the upcoming months, from the 15th Annual Anne MacKay Song Swap at Poquatuck Hall April 11 to the Jamesport Meeting House on April 25 to a concert on the lawn at The Oyserponds Historical Society on July 15, the Rites of Spring Music Festival at Poquatuck Hall on July 24 and the Southold Summer Showcase Concert Series at the gazebo in downtown Southold on Aug. 5.
And yes, they’re available for private parties. You can find out more at www.mudflatsstringband.com, and you can get tickets for the Song Swap online here.
Poquatuck Hall, and the Song Swap, are in many ways their spiritual home.
“It’s the whole neighborhood. All the kids come and play,” said Ms. Hooke of the Song Swap.
“It’s a very nurturing charity event to support the maintenance of the hall,” agreed Ms. Thompson.
“People love the hall. It’s such a historic space,” said Ms. Roth. “A lot of wonderful things have happened there, and people have poured their money and time into it. It’s like our Grand Ole Opry.”
From left: Colleen McDonough (seated), Mimi Fahs, Helen Hooke, Mary Dorman, David Air, Deb Roth and Elizabeth Thompson are The Mudflats.
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