You may have seen them entertaining the crowd on Sundays at Hillcrest Farmers Market in the DMV parking lot on Normal Street. You may have heard them on stage at Lamb’s Players Theatre in last year’s production of Cotton Patch Gospel, which was extended twice due to audience demand, or on National Public Radio’s “Car Talk with Click & Clack”. Maybe you stumbled across one of their performances at a multitude of summertime outdoor music festivals.

But if you still haven’t heard of the 7th Day Buskers, it’s seriously time to learn.

The band’s third CD, Fool’s Grass, is 47 minutes of what the Buskers do best: playing energetic goodtime music (think O Brother, Where Art Though?) that’s, well, uncommonly good. And they have a swingin’ time doing it.

These are accomplished musicians who effortlessly blend bluegrass, folk, Irish, blues, alt-country and any other hook they fancy to make each song as catchy as the one before it.

Though it’s hard to find a band these days that doesn’t consider themselves a blend of genres, not all of them can pull it off the way the Buskers can.

Every band has its origin story, and the Buskers is one that’s as carefree as the music they make: The band’s founder and front man, Shawn P. Rohlf, started busking (that is, playing music in public areas, usually for tips) with his banjo at farmers markets up and down the coast of San Diego in 1997-98, then settled on Hillcrest Farmers Market.

“The Hillcrest Farmers Market was by far the best, and that’s the one I made a regular thing of,” he said. “And the community’s been great. It was really the birthplace of the band.”

Other musicians joined him playing live at the market over time, and by 2000 the band had fully formed.

Their first two albums, 2001’s Long Live the Caboose and 2002’s Born to Pick, are rollicking collections of original work and highly-demanded audience favorites that have earned them a dedicated following as well as San Diego’s vote for “Best Americana” at last year’s San Diego Music Awards.

The prolific group is hitting their stride with this month’s release of Fool’s Grass and the addition of Melissa Harley, a two-time Weiser National Fiddle champion, to the band.

Rohlf, who has been playing music somewhat professionally since he was 9 years old, plays guitar and harmonica on Fool’s Grass, and is the band’s lead vocalist. Slide guitar player Robin Henkel, a local legend in his own right, and upright bass player and vocalist Ken Dow comprise the rest of the Buskers’ core, though there are numerous “honorary Buskers” who drop in for a song, a show or a jam session occasionally. One such honorary Busker is Steve Peavey, who plays mandolin and guitar on Fool’s Grass.

The 2000 release of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the widespread interest in bluegrass it generated turned a lot of people on to the Buskers’ brand of music.

“I was pretty surprised, actually, when it came out, because I’ve been doing this music for a number of years and my old mentor back in Minnesota told me, ‘Just watch: At the turn of the century, the people will start going back and looking at old music and appreciating it again,’” Rohlf said. “So when that movie came out and all of the sudden there was this big craze going on, I thought, ‘Wow. He was right.’ I think it definitely turned a lot of people on to us that wouldn’t normally have listened to that sort of music.”

In fact, Grammy Award-winning Gavin Lurssen (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?) mastered Fool’s Grass, which Rohlf produced and wrote the majority of the songs for, aside from Henkel’s “Argentina” and “Mortero Road”, and the album’s cover of Steve Earle’s “Devil’s Right Hand”.

The Buskers were born from live performance, and they translate that energy onto their albums.

“This one we decided we wanted to make as live as possible,” Rohlf said of Fool’s Grass, “so we went up to Big Fish with [engineer] Ben Moore and basically had him mic us all in one room in a big circle, and then we really just went at it live. There’s really only two overdubs and the rest is all live. We’re best as a live band, and we really wanted to keep the energy.”

The energy of a live show is definitely present on every track, but the band is so in sync musically, listeners may be surprised to learn that most of the tracks were nailed in one or two takes.

“I think that this album really shows the maturity of our playing together,” Rohlf said. “It really became clear to me how tight we’ve become. It really brings out the energy when you feel like you can kind of read each other’s minds, and the tighter we become, the funner it is to play together.”

And just like playing live, unanticipated influences can enhance the performance. One such instance involved a cricket that was chirping in the studio during the recording of “The Last Tin Soldier”, which can be heard at the end of the song.

“We didn’t notice it until we faded down, and it was really funny because it was the perfect song to have a cricket in the background,” Rohlf said.

Raised in a small town in Minnesota where he was a member of the Land of Lakes Choirboys, Rohlf has played in countless bands on the San Francisco industrial/punk and Minneapolis thrash scenes, and did a two-year stint busking in Amsterdam and throughout Europe before moving to San Diego. The variety in his musical background “offers a whole different flavor of this other stuff that’s going on in my head,” he said. “It’s cool to hear it come out in acoustic instruments, and all the possibilities you can do with that.”

Whether putting on a foot stomping honky-tonk show at the Whistle Stop or The Casbah, or an intimate jam session at Lestat’s, you can’t help but tap your feet when the Buskers play.

In a town that prides itself on being laid back, the Buskers get the good times rolling.

The 7th Day Buskers play every Sunday at Hillcrest Farmers Market. Catch their CD release party Saturday, Feb. 26, at 9:00 p.m. at Lestat’s, located at 3343 Adams Ave. in North Park. Call (619) 282-0437 or link to their website via this article at www.gaylesbiantimes.com for more information.