Yahoo Lifestyle On the Farm with Chatham Rabbits, the NC Folk Duo Who Should Be on Your Playlist
Sarah and Austin McCombie of the folk duo Chatham Rabbits have been at this a while now. When they met a over decade ago as college students in Raleigh, North Carolina, they were both in bands, and they’ve been playing music together since the early days of their relationship.
Still, Sarah says, their new record, Be Real with Me, released on Valentine’s Day, could not have been written before now. “We needed these years of marriage and partnership under our belts to be able to have the perspective to write these songs,” she says.
“This record is so much about looking in the mirror at yourself, looking across the aisle at your partner, and having hard conversations—getting honest about your own shortcomings, your desires, your goals. Maybe we thought we were having those conversations when we first got together and got married, but you know, we were 21. We needed the natural maturing of life to get us to this place.”
The song “Facing 29,” written by Austin, for example, is about life’s ups and downs, but also “that consistency of always knowing that we have each other through all of this and the comfort that brings,” Sarah says.
When the conversation shifts to talking about their home together, a 65-acre farm in central North Carolina, where they keep horses, turkeys, chickens, and cows, the sentiment is much the same. The real talk is that the farm is a lot of work, but it’s a constant that brings a lot of comfort too.
“There’re constantly things that need to be fixed, or animals that need to see the vet or, we got to reorder this feed for this animal. We’ve got to take down the limb that fell from the tree over here. We need to talk to this neighbor. We need to pick the pears before all the bees get them,” Sarah says.
It might seem counterintuitive for a couple of touring musicians, who are busy songwriting, performing, and managing their band, to take on the responsibilities of farm life. But, Sarah says, “The farm, with the views and the animals and the quiet, is such a respite from the road and from the constant green rooms and venues and buses and planes.”
Lately, songs from Be Real with Me, especially “Matador” and “Gas Money,” have become the soundtrack playing in the back of my mind, and I was curious to know more about this North Carolina band. Here’s what I learned from Sarah when we sat down for a chat—from how she and Austin met, to the significance of the name Chatham Rabbits, to the fascinating history of their farm and their life there today. (I even got the scoop on the amazing discovery they recently found hidden in the walls of the 18th-century home place!!
How they met and began to play music together
Sarah and Austin both went to college in Raleigh—Sarah at Peace University (now William Peace University) and Austin at NC State. Even though they where each heavily involved in the music scene, their paths didn’t cross until right before before their senior years.
Sarah was on stage playing banjo and singing with an old-time band as the opening act for the band Mandolin Orange (now Watchhouse). Austin, who at the time was in an electronic band, was in the audience, and Sarah caught his attention.
Afterward, he reached out on Facebook. “This is back in the day when Facebook Messenger was an acceptable way to get in touch with someone,” Sarah says. “We ended up going on our first date in Raleigh shortly after that and just immediately hit it off. We started playing music together as a hobby for the first several years of our relationship and then our marriage.”
Music was remained solely a hobby until 2018 when they were both wanted to make a change and get out of the nine-to-five corporate America lifestyle. “We decided to see if we could give it a shot,” and since then they’ve been full-time musicians.
All about their centuries-old farm — and a fascinating secret revealed in the original house
Once a huge track of 640 acres, the 65-acre farm has been in Sarah’s family for hundreds of years. She and Austin bought it from her paternal grandfather in 2022 shortly before he passed away. The original farmhouse there, which comprises a log cabin built in 1753, when the land was deeded to the family from the British government, as well as later additions, still stands.
Their eventual goal is restore the home, and they’ve already begun work. Meanwhile Sarah says, “We live in a tiny house on the property that my dad built back in the early 2000s. He thought he would live here and as he was working on the old home place, but that never happened. So we’re the next generation to give this massive project to go.”
As Quakers, Sarah’s ancestors were early abolitionists, and their farm was a part of the Underground Railroad that helped enslaved people along the journey from the South to the North by way of a network of safe houses and Quaker meetings along old trading paths, Sarah says.
When she and Austin began work on the old home, a hidden piece of the place’s Underground Railroad history revealed itself: “It has a secret room that we discovered when we were taking out old additions and readjusting the chimney and elevating it to build a new foundation,” Sarah says. Even knowing the history beforehand, the experience of coming upon the old safe room was “really, really crazy,” she says.
Making the farm their own
Today, Sarah and Austin strike a balance between making the farm their own and honoring its history in a way that feels authentic for them.
“Horses really my heart and my passion,” says Sarah, who grew up riding. She loves trail riding and focuses on natural horsemanship. The farm is also home to turkeys, chickens, and cows, and they partner with another young local couple who are the founders of Bravo Steaks, which sells pork, beef, and lamb online.“During the summer, our farm is the host farm for some of their female cows that are pregnant. This is like their vacation spot, I guess you could say,” Sarah says.
Chatham Rabbits uses the land as a venue too. They host members of their Patreon community multiple times a year for concerts and overnight campouts.
“We also do a Chatham Rabbits kids farm and music summer camp in June and are gearing up for plans for that again this year,” Sarah says.
The meaning of the name Chatham Rabbits
This is a band where roots matter, so it’s no surprise “Chatham” refers to Chatham County, North Carolina. They even recorded Be Real with Me in rural Chatham County at the Small Pond Farm recording studio. But there’s more to the story, as I learned when watching the PBS series about the band, On the Road with Chatham Rabbits.
As Sarah tells it in episode 2 to the show: “Back in the early 1900s, there were apparently huge rabbits all around Chatham county, and they would be cooked in kitchens and D.C. and New York and Baltimore and even in London and Paris. There was this very delicious roasted rabbit called Chatham Rabbit to honor the cash crop of rabbits in Chatham County. Lots of string bands were popping up all over the place and calling themselves different names that kind of bounced off of that. One of those bands was the Chatham Rabbit String Band in Bynum, North Carolina, where we lived.” They even found out that the guitar player of that band once lived in the same house that Sarah and Austin owned at the time!
For upcoming Chatham Rabbits tour dates and news, visit chathamrabbits.com.
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