Sisters Ellie, Powell and Lily Balkcom call themselves the Castellows in honor of their great-grandmother; Castellow was her maiden name. That embrace of family and the long-ago courses through their engaging debut EP, A Little Goes a Long Way, which echoes an array of sibling acts from throughout country music’s storied history, including the Carter Sisters, the Forester Sisters and, especially, the Chicks from the days when Dixie preceded their name. Their roots run deep, in other words. Shared DNA is at play, too: Hearing them harmonize is akin to eavesdropping on heaven.
Acoustic guitars and banjo run through the songs like water through a brook, alongside fiddle and mandolin. They wrote or cowrote six of the seven tracks, with Ellie earning a sole credit on “Heartline Hill.” The songs tackle typical topics, I suppose, aka matters of the heart and home, with some tackling heartbreak, others yearning for the grandiose love depicted in the movies, and others celebrating the Georgia Pines. They sound great in the car, on the headphones and the living room. My favorite, “No. 7 Road,” finds them celebrating their “little slice of heaven”—a dirt road that their granddaddy walked on his way to school many decades before. It speaks to the continuity of the human experience.
The lone song they didn’t write is “Hurricane,” first recorded by Levon Helm in 1980 and then again by Leon Everette in 1981, with the latter single rising to No. 4 on the country charts. It’s about New Orleans, its levees and the major storms that often hit the city. It’s dramatic, for sure, almost outlaw in its presentation, but so much has changed in the decades since: The city has about 20 percent less residents now than it did pre-Hurricane Katrina, which hit the city in 2005, for instance. Also, between Katrina and Ida (2021), some $15 billion in federal funds went to bolster the earthen berms, flood walls and floodgates that protect the city. Dissing outside experts just seems out of place. More importantly, I think, it breaks up the flow on what is an otherwise sublime set.
The track list:
The Old Grey Cat 
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