Though much of the music they play may have its roots in the 19th century, the Wood’s Tea Company boasts of having something in common with the more cutting edge band – and fellow Vermonters – Phish.

Fans of both groups follow the music and the musicians, rarely passing up an opportunity to hear a live performance, said Rusty Jacobs, a founding member of Wood’s Tea Company. As a folk group, Wood’s Tea may not draw the numbers that their rock ‘n’ roll counterparts do, but the group’s fans are just as passionate, keeping tabs on the touring schedule via a mailing list, said Jacobs.

Wood’s Tea Company plays tonight at Colby College’s Mary Low Hall, Friday night at the Waterville Opera House, and Sunday at The Grand Auditorium in Ellsworth.

And there’s another key difference between Wood’s Tea and Phish.

“We’re not a jam band,” Jacobs hastened to add. Yet the group believes magic happens when they play live. No long solos, but lots of musical dialogue, traded riffs and tight, four-part harmony.

“There’s a chemistry between us and the audience,” Jacobs said. “We interact with the audience a lot.” And humor is as much a part of the arsenal as are the many instruments the band juggles, he said.

The band’s music is an amalgam of lively folk, old-timey, Celtic, sea shanties and bluegrass.

“We’re not strictly traditional,” Jacobs said, though many of the tunes they play – like the 19th century sea shanties – are musical artifacts. Even so, the Wood’s Tea approach is not musicological.

“We find songs that we like,” he said, whether their roots are in Appalachia, the Maritimes, the Dust Bowl, or Ireland and Scotland, and then interpret them with gusto and originality.

“We all play four instruments each night,” Jacobs said. Wood’s Tea also pens its own tunes.

Jacobs is the only original member left. The band formed in the early 1980s. He mostly plays guitar, penny whistle and bodhran, a hand-held Celtic drum. Mike Lussen, who joined in 1983, plays mostly guitar and banjo. Howard Wooden handles the bass – acoustic and electric upright, as well as acoustic bass guitar and the concertina. The newest member, Chip Chase, handles the fiddle, and pitches in on mandolin, guitar and banjo.

All four sing solo and harmony.

While some might be tempted to compare Wood’s Tea to the popular Irish Rovers, Jacobs deflects this label.

“We sort of came of age in Irish pubs,” he said, but he sees more shared musical values with the Grateful Dead and Phish, the Clancy Brothers and the Kingston Trio.

The group is nothing if not versatile. Jacobs said they were once hired by the Canadian embassy to play Newfoundland music in Boston, they’ve played their share of tall ships festivals, offering the obligatory shanties and mariner tunes, and have even played Woody Guthrie festivals in the Midwest.

Wood’s Tea recorded catalogue includes six titles: “Where Am I To Go?” “Voice Upon The Wave,” “Journey Home,” “Side By Each,” “Live!” and the most recent, “This Side of the Sea.” In Vermont, a song from the newest CD, “St. Patrick’s Day in America,” penned by Jacobs, is getting radio airplay.

They’ve played in Maine before, as well as around the country, and to a small degree, in Canada.

For years, the trio – and, more recently, quartet – have played more than 100 shows a year. With a new and active agent, Jacobs said, Wood’s Tea is looking at playing as many as 150 gigs in 2001.

Though Jacobs laments time away from his 6-year-old daughter, he said the group is energized by its interaction with audiences. And while his own child won’t be able to come to the shows in Maine, the Wood’s Tea Company provides kid-friendly fare, he said.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Ron Powers, a fellow Vermonter who counts himself a Wood’s Tea fan, describes a show this way: “For a few transporting hours an old highway rolls, and the hard discordant notes of four American decades fall away, and we are as we might have been if we had only stayed Alberta bound; if we had only learned to play the drop-thumb banjo; if we had followed the child in us onstage. For a few hours we are on the road with them; we are up there thumping and happy with them, lusty and harmonic in the American night…”

Song samples are available on the band’s website: www.woodstea.net.