The new-look Steep Canyon Rangers are both different and similar as they go through a period of post-Woody Platt rebuilding. 

On July 22, inside Wilmington, Ohio’s, Murphy Theatre, Aaron Burdett took the stage to explain how, some 20 years earlier, the nascent Rangers began their career playing and singing around a single mic. 

With that, Burdett’s bandmates sauntered on to the dimly lit stage and began their second set with “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Girls” from their forthcoming, Darrell Scott-produced Morning Shift LP. The album marks Burdett’s recording debut with the band he joined one year ago, replacing founding guitarist/singer Platt. 

It was here – during the band’s intimate, five-song, no drums and one microphone interlude – that the Murphy’s balky sound system met its match. This issue notwithstanding, over the course of the 21-song, two-hour performance, the Rangers tapped into some of the old magic on the gospel soul of “Be Still Moses;” their sublime take on James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James;” Barrett Smith’s coal-miners’ lament, “Call the Captain;” and Graham Sharp’s harmony-rich and balladic “Birds of Ohio,” making its on-stage debut. 

Burdett and the new songs aren’t the only things that are different about the post-pandemic Rangers. Fiddler Nicky Sanders, who wore a mask during the show, has virtually abandoned his feverish, two-stepping stage presence and cedes more musical space to Smith (acoustic bass, guitar and vocals), Mike Guggino (mandolin, harmony vocals), Mike Ashworth (drums, Dobro and harmony vocals) and Sharp, the baritone Ranger who played acoustic and electric banjo, acoustic guitar and harmonica and is the band’s on-stage leader among equals. 

What hasn’t changed in the Rangers’ status as virtuosic instrumentalists and impeccable vocalists, though the new-look, lower-energy band is still working out its on-stage chemistry even as Burdett – who sings his own compositions such as “Deep End” and Platt-fronted numbers like “Get Me out of this Town” – and Ashworth have developed an especially strong blend at the mic. 

SCR’s ongoing de- and reconstruction was best represented at the encore, which jettisoned the formerly ubiquitous “Auden’s Train” in favor of the Traveling Wilburys’ “The End of the Line.”

“Everything will work out fine. Well, it’s all right. We’re going to the end of the line,” they sang.