Yard Sauce, a Maine-based folk band, performed at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village on Saturday, March 15, raising $2,400 to help with the ongoing Herb House Cultural Center project.

Yard Sauce has been playing together in their current form for around three years, but the members – Chris Moore on mandolin, Jeff Christmas on guitar and Mitch Reed on fiddle, and all singing – have known each other for about a decade and have played music together various times before.

Moore, a Maine native, has been connected to the Shaker Village, which he described as one of his favorite places in the world, for decades. He first visited as a child in 1970 when his family brought him to services at the old meetinghouse, and was taught at school by former Shaker Museum Director Lenny Brooks. Since returning to Maine from Nashville in 2013, Moore has maintained strong ties to the village, attending meetings and performing at concerts.

Moore and his bandmates each have expertise in different folk music traditions. Moore grew up playing the mandolin after the classical violin, and later became interested in bluegrass, old-time, Celtic and other folk traditions from around the world. Meanwhile, Reed, originally of Lafayette, Louisiana, played with the well-known Cajun folk band BeauSoleil for several years, while Christmas, originally from North Carolina, was an expert in traditional fiddle music from Appalachia. Moore noted that Yard Sauce was named after a pizza topping created by a friend of his, made out of whatever happened to be growing in their yard, and compared the sauce to the band’s creative process.

“It’s whatever we’re most interested (in) personally,” Moore said. “Folk and country music traditions in the U.S. is sort of the staple of what we do.”

The songs performed at the concert consisted of a wide variety of musical traditions, including traditional Shaker hymns, Russian instrumentals, Cajun and Appalachian tunes, and music from across Latin America. They also included original pieces from Moore’s new solo recording, “Changing Union.” Regarding the Shaker tunes, Moore explained that one of the songs that Yard Sauce played was written at Sabbathday Lake in the 19th century by Eldress Mary Ann Gillespie and had been transcribed by Moore into standard notation.

Before the concert, village Director Michael Graham said that the Shakers were grateful to welcome the attendees to their home, describing it as a place where everyone’s individual and diverse talents make everything stronger. However, he did also note that they had recently suffered another major setback in the ongoing fight to secure federal money for the herb house project, after the most recent congressional budget bill canceled $1.2 million in USDA Rural Development funding allocated to the herb house.

Nevertheless, Graham was determined to get the project done, noting that the community had come together to build the herb house, and that they would make sure it came to fruition. Graham also explained to the Lakes Region Weekly that Sabbathday Lake was applying for a Semiquincentennial Grant from the National Park Service, given out to historic sites in honor of America’s 250th anniversary next year, which would hopefully give the herb house up to $750,000 in extra funds.

At one point, Sarah Potter, a member of the audience, was invited up to join Yard Sauce in singing a couple of songs. Speaking to the Lakes Region Weekly after the performance, Potter explained that she knew the band members from 317 Main Community Music Center, a music school in Yarmouth where she worked as registrar and all three band members taught music, and was also a singer with another of Christmas’ groups, Deep Roots.

“We’re just really lucky that she came,” said Moore, who, along with Potter, said that her part in the concert was completely impromptu.