Mount Moriah makes wistful modern folk

Jenks Miller and Heather McEntire of Mount Moriah are careful when clarifying the religious connotations of their band’s moniker.

For Christians, Mount Moriah is the sacred location for the sacrifice of Abraham’s son, Isaac.

For everyone else, it’s a mountain (or mountain range) referenced in the Bible.

Google “Mount Moriah music” and you might end up on a website for a much different band, one that is “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Guitarist Miller elucidates.

“I’m not anywhere near being called a Christian, but elements of mythology have always interested me,” he said.

“I think the symbols at the heart of Christianity are powerful even outside of their original context, and they’re shared in a lot of other belief systems and mythologies.”

McEntire sees the significance of the band’s name in a different light.

“I kind of come at it from this really personal, intimate experience with Christianity that I’m still sort of reasoning with,” she said.

And reasoning she will have to do. McEntire, who identifies herself as queer, grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, one of the most conservative denominations of Christianity. For her, the Bible and the South could be synonymous — the religious text and its ideology are deeply rooted in the history of the Southern states.

Mount Moriah isn’t a Christian band — it’s a Southern one. The band’s name is more of a reflection of its culture than its creed.

“We love the South,” Miller said. “We love the places that we are from. Part of the process and part of our goal is to retain the aspects of this area and this culture that we find really valuable, but also recast them in a way that is meaningful to us and perhaps less limiting.”

The band takes the traditional folk sound and pays it homage with a reimagined, more modern sensibility. In the same vein as Neil Young, Mount Moriah sees its songs as true folklore, an oral history that changes as songs are played live and revisited and reexamined.

Lyrically, McEntire drives Mount Moriah, bringing her confrontations with Christianity into her music. Inside her introspection, McEntire deals with topics far beyond the expected folk realm, bringing in issues with gender identity and her own sexuality.

On “Reckoning,” a track from the band’s upcoming self-titled debut, McEntire performs a gender swap on the archetypical folk tale of a man’s coming-of-age.

“It plays with the song form that would be a young man who would leave his mother and go through this sort of individuation,” Miller said. “But the narrator’s voice is a female, and in this song, it’s a woman who has individuated and found a relationship with another woman. It’s referencing a more traditional song form, but with added tension.”

Mount Moriah approaches modern love with the mindset of a folklorist, sharing its insights in ballad form on its latest release.

Contact the Diversions editor at diversions@dailytarheel.com.