Here's what happened to Marah

Marah had a tumultuous run of highs and lows between 1998's

Let's Cut the Crap & Hook Up Later on Tonight

and 2008's

Angels of Destruction

.

Led by brothers Dave and Serge Bielanko, the Philly band made fans of Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Hornby, and Stephen King with its rootsy rock-and-roll, its literate storytelling, and, especially, its brilliant live shows. But Marah burned through rhythm section after rhythm section; it squandered early momentum with 2002's expensive, overproduced Float Away With the Friday Night Gods; it abandoned Philly for New York City. Finally, on the eve of a major tour for Angels, Marah imploded, leaving Dave Bielanko and keyboardist Christine Smith alone. "It sort of broke the back right there and kind of did some irreparable damage to the reputation," Bielanko says. He and Smith relocated to an old farmhouse in central Pennsylvania's Sugar Valley, and, aside from occasional shows as a duo and a reunion with Serge for a tour of Spain two years ago, they have been out of the public eye, settling into their rural community and setting up a home recording studio.

A few years ago, though, a fellow musician gave them a copy of Henry Shoemaker's Mountain Minstrelsy of Pennsylvania, published in 1931, a collection of turn-of-the-century and Civil War-era folk-song lyrics. That prompted a new record of the same name, due Feb. 25, and a short tour that comes to Yards Brewing Company on Sunday in a show presented by the Philadelphia Folksong Society.

Bielanko and Smith wrote music for the songs, often inspired by styles indigenous to the area and the period, and rewrote lyrics as needed. They gathered local musicians, including a then-8-year-old fiddle prodigy and singer, Gus Tritsch, and recorded the songs live to tape, in mono, in a church in Millheim, Pa. The songs range from Bo Diddley-style rock-and-roll ("Sing! O Muse of the Mountain") to mountain fiddle tunes ("Harry Bell") to somber folk ballads ("The Old Riverman's Regent") to communal string band tunes such as "Ten Cents at the Gate."

"That was like the Mummers to me, a parade thing," Bielanko says. "That's a very Pennsylvanian sort of influence, early string band kind of thing. Throughout this whole process, I've been learning about stuff and carrying that . . . book around like a college student and delving into what people were actually playing around here in these lumber camps and stuff. There was quite a bit of these cornets and horns, in addition to these mountain instruments of mandolins and banjos and fiddles. It was interesting to try to reimagine what that might have sounded like."

The record and show are billed as "Marah Presents," and at Yards, Bielanko and Smith will lead a six-piece band that includes young Gus. Bielanko says he has some original material in the works, but this project is a new beginning.

"The coolest thing and the only thing that I really wanted was to make something that you couldn't judge against anything else we'd done, and really put some distance between myself and that word Marah. And it does that," Bielanko says. "It's a record with a purpose that's bigger than a songwriter and his feelings. It's these old works of art that no one got credit for, redone in a one-traffic-light town with the people that were there. It was incredible for us."