A Celtibillies set list might include an Irish jig, a Scottish reel, a West Virginia fiddle tune and a Carter Family song.

Photos by BRETT LEMON Special to The Roanoke Times

The Celtibillies — Becky Barlow (from left), Jack Hinshelwood, Tim Sauls and Jeff Hofmann — hammer dulcimers, slap basses, saw on fiddles and play keyboards, among other instruments. They sing, too.

The group has put out three albums and they all appear on "If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O," a companion CD to the book by Sharyn McCrumb.

Dancing, we've been told, can lead to all manner of unintended consequences.

For Becky Barlow, an invitation to play at a dance has led to 14 years of hammering dulcimers, beating an Irish drum and playing keyboards with a Celtic-and-Appalachian music quartet that's about to tour Alaska at the e-mailed invitation of a fan in Fairbanks.

"They always blame it on me," Barlow said of the Celtibillies' genesis.

When she got that call about playing a contra dance, Barlow called fiddler and guitar player Jack Hinshelwood. Then she called banjo, guitar, fiddle and bouzouki player Tim Sauls. Then she called bass player Patrick Turner.

Turner left the band about six years ago.

"They still call me 'the new bass player,'" Jeff Hofmann said.

Hofmann is also the bass player in six other bands: Los Gatos, Le Hot Club D'Big Lick, the Ministers of Soul, Einstein's Monkey, My Radio and the Rootstone Jug Band. Everybody else has day jobs. Hinshelwood is a civil and environmental engineer. Sauls teaches English and creative writing at Cave Spring High School. And Barlow is an organic marketer for the Shenandoah Resource Conservation and Development Council.

"I market manure," she said.

The original group performed as Fiddlesticks for that first dance. They were called Roaring Jello for a while. Barlow preferred Roaring Jello, but there was some concern about copyright issues -- and a band in New England already had the name.

"I always felt that during the Roaring Jello years," Sauls said as he tuned his bouzouki near the gazebo in Pulaski's Jackson Park, "a lot of people came expecting something a little more punk than we were."

Punk they were not.

From the beginning, the group played a mixture of Celtic and Appalachian songs. In the beginning, Sauls said, that may have had something to do with needing enough songs to play a whole dance. But it quickly developed into the band's identity -- playing among the connections between Celtic music and Appalachian mountain music. A set might include a tribute to a hero of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, a Scottish reel, a Carter Family song and a West Virginia fiddle tune.

For the next week or so, the Celtibillies will be playing in a whole other set of mountains. Traveling a 1,500-mile loop of Alaska -- Delta Junction, Anchorage, Homer, Seldovia -- they'll play at a music festival, an arts center, a couple of bars and Denali National Park and Preserve.

"When I called out there to talk to them to see if they might be interested in a performance, the executive director wasn't there," Hinshelwood said. "Because he was spending the winter camping out in a tent in the depths of Denali."

Willie Kardis was recreating a research expedition taken 100 years ago by Charles Sheldon, the man who had the idea of turning the area around Mount McKinley into a national park. Much of the time, the temperature was between 50 and 60 degrees below zero. The night the Celtibillies get to Denali, Kardis will be giving a talk about his winter on the Toklat River. The band will provide music for the event.

Lately, Hinshelwood spends a lot of time looking like a child anticipating Christmas morning. He came across a book called Scenic Drives of America. Three of those, according to the book, are in Alaska.

"They're the exact three routes we're going to be on." Hinshelwood was on the verge of giddy as he said that.

"It was Jack's idea and it's always been Jack's baby, but I remember when the initial e-mail went out," Sauls said. "I think there were probably exclamation marks on everyone's replies."

It wasn't exactly Jack's idea. Brian Dixon, an Alaskan watching television in Fairbanks, saw the Celtibillies on "Song of the Mountains," a syndicated public television show which used to be produced by Blue Ridge Public Television (Richmond PBS station WCVE produces it now). Alaska loves the Celtibillies, Dixon wrote. So when were they coming there to play?

Before this, the band's longest road trip ended in Toledo, so Fairbanks is a fair piece farther than they'd gone before. But Hinshelwood had always wanted to see Alaska, so he started making calls. He found places to play. But hammered dulcimers and stand-up basses are sort of like musical furniture -- difficult to fit on a plane. So Hinshelwood started looking for instruments they could borrow.

"We had an offer of no less than four hammered dulcimers from the town of Homer, Alaska," he said. They found a bass, too. So they're heading north to Alaska this weekend.

"It's one of the places I've always wanted to see," Sauls said. "My parents always talked about wanting to go to Alaska and they never did. And now they're in their 80s and not able to do it. So I've been a little sheepish. I mean, they know about it. But it's been a little funny talking about it to them. I feel like I'm stepping in and doing something they never got around to."

The Celtibillies will get around a chunk of Alaska over the next week, taking a couple of days between gigs to explore some of Denali's 6 million acres. Sauls and Hofmann seem a little looser about their down time, but Barlow and Hinshelwood have lined up raft trips -- very different raft trips. Hers will splash through Class IV rapids. His will be more tranquil.

"I wanted to float and see the wildlife instead of just hanging on for dear life," Hinshelwood said.

The Celtibillies will perform with the Northern Light Celtic Dancers. They'll be in Anchorage during the Galway Days Celtic music festival. They'll ride a ferry to a village that still carries the name it had when Alaska belonged to Russia.

But first they'll have to get provisions for a 1,500-mile road trip. So, on their first morning in the state that calls itself The Last Frontier, the Celtibillies are going to Wal-Mart.

"It's the first stop on our itinerary," Sauls said.