The band began its life as acoustic Americana trio The Victor Mourning, formed in Austin in 2008 by songwriter/frontman Stephen Canner, with Lynne Adele on harmony vocals, and Stefan Keydel on fiddle. Following the release of A Handful of Locusts in 2010, bandmates Canner and Adele embarked upon a self-imposed exile in Southern Appalachia, returning to Texas seven years later with plans to record a long-delayed second album.
When the project was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Canner and Adele found themselves rearranging, reworking, and for the first time, co-writing songs. Subtle layers of instrumental texture and hints of psychedelic folk were woven into the minor keys and stripped-down underpinnings of the band’s hillbilly noir aesthetic, creating a mutant folk sound with a strong American gothic undercurrent. A source close to the band has described it as “hillbillies who got lost on their way to the moonshine still and stumbled upon some mushrooms.” To reflect this metamorphosis, a rebranding was in order.
Around this time, Adele, an avid genealogist, discovered the Last Will and Testament of her 10th great-grandfather Matthew Woodruff of Farmington, Connecticut, who died in 1682. The final item in the document, listed as an addendum to the handwritten inventory of his assets, was a “swarme of beese” valued at 10 shillings. This humble item, a beehive, so teeming with life and potential, yet initially overlooked and then remembered only as an afterthought, holds all sorts of rich visual, folkloric, and literary associations, and has long been symbolic of the fruits of united effort. The pre-standardized, 17th-century spelling added to its charm, and inspired the band’s name change.