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The mournful moan of a pedal steel guitar carries on the thick night air billowing out of Barb Hollow, off of Rocky Branch Road near Blount County’s Walland foothills, muted only by the patter of recently fallen raindrops from the surrounding trees.

Up a pitted gravel drive, goats trot toward the sound of approaching cars. Inside Gordy Gilbertson’s workshop, Brock Henderson sits at the pedal steel methodically working his way down the frets while his bandmates in The Drunk Uncles crack open fresh beers, debate the merits of an in-the-works new song and trade good-natured insults.

A pool table sits nearby, covered with a film of sawdust blown in lazy circles by a couple of industrial fans that stir the air. A mutt the size of a hog is sprawled out on the cool concrete floor, oblivious to the conversation or the music; cut lengths of lumber are stacked into piles and stuffed into empty horse feed bags; a chicken named Bode struts in through the back door and cocks an eye at the five men who, after a few minutes, launch into a new tune.

It’s a scene that seems tailor-made for a country song by the Uncles — all that’s missing is the girl, although Sarah Pirkle, wife of Uncle Jeff Barbra, briefly puts in an appearance. If nothing else, it’s proof that the Uncles aren’t just singing country music — they’re living it. Whether it’s an obscure cover by George Jones or Vern Gosdin or an original written by Barbra and/or Uncle Mike McGill (the band’s songwriting team), the Uncles pour their hearts into every note. They do it for love of the song. Not for money or fame (or even infamy, although a small measure of that has been achieved locally) — but for the song.

They do it because it’s music that was written across their rebel souls long before they ever picked up instruments. They do it because it speaks of their lives, the land from which they come and the community they call home.

“This is the kind of music I grew up listening to with my parents,” Uncles drummer Eric Keeble says. “I didn’t think it was cool, but I was raised on that. My dad used to sing Vern Gosdin songs, and he’s been playing this music all my life. My parents have been 110 percent supportive of everything I’ve done, and they’ve let me do whatever I wanted. My dad has seen me play with all kinds of bands. Whether they were good or they sucked, he supported me.

“But when he saw The Drunk Uncles, he came up to me after the show and said, ‘I’ve seen every band you’ve been in and everything you’ve ever done, and this is the best band you’ve ever played with.’ That was a real accomplishment. And playing with the Uncles has really gotten me back into the music I grew up with. I’ve been listening to it at home and driving my wife crazy. I just love it, man.

“I’ve never gotten rich, but I consider myself a successful musician because I make a decent living playing with guys that I love,” he adds, his compadres nodding in silent agreement.

The Uncles came together roughly five years ago as an outlet for Barbra and old friend Mike McGill to play the traditional country music from their childhoods. Riding around Blount County’s backroads, listening to Gosdin and Tom T. Hall and Merle Haggard, they mourned the lack of traditional-sounding country on the radio and decided to put together a local band that would carry on those traditions. For a couple of years, the two men were the driving force behind the Uncles, who played various local gigs with a number of utility players (“We’ve been through more drummers than Spinal Tap,” Barbra jokes). After a couple of years, however, the band dropped off the radar as both men turned their attention to White Oak Flats, a local bluegrass outfit with a standing gig at Westgate Smoky Mountain Resort and Spa in Gatlinburg.

The Uncles, however, never truly went away. Last year, Barbra and Pirkle landed a weekly Wednesday night show at Backroom BBQ in Knoxville’s Old City; the schedule, however, was too demanding for Pirkle, who balances her own local music commitments with a full plate of violin students. Barbra asked McGill to fill in, and eventually they decided to fill out the lineup with a new version of the Uncles.

McGill remembered a couple of local musicians with whom he had played at recent gig for Knoxville’s Dogwood Arts Festival; he called them up, and suddenly the Uncles had a pedal steel player in Henderson and a bass player in Aram Takvoryan. Barbra called around for a new drummer and discovered, to his surprise, that he and Keeble shared a childhood bond — both of their fathers had spent a great deal of time in Murlin’s Music World when they were kids, and they live less than five minutes apart.

The sixth member would be another neighbor — baritone vocalist and fiddle player Gordy Gilbertson, the elder statesman of the Uncles and the man whose shop provides the band’s practice space. He’s a quiet sort, humble about his past accomplishments and generous with the praise of his bandmates — which they deflect right back at him.

“Gordy’s the laid-back, quiet one, and he’s become the rock star,” Barbra says. “He has a persona he doesn’t realize he has.”

“Gordy walks in the room, and people with soul and heart automatically gravitate toward him,” Henderson adds.

Gilbertson worked for years as a professional musician during the 1960s and early 1970s, and even charted a few minor country hits in Canada before moving to Blount County in 1978. He’s played off and on since then, but he was more dedicated to his woodworking ... at least until he attended the CD release show for Barbra’s 2007 solo album, “Country Music for Country People.”

“It was at Patrick Sullivan’s (in the Old City), and Jeff asked me to get up and sing,” Gilbertson recalls. “I didn’t realize how much I had missed this kind of music, so I started pushing Jeff and Mike to get the Drunk Uncles going again.”

They did, and promptly asked Gilbertson to join. The six members, Barbra says, split evenly down the middle — Gilbertson, himself and McGill are the heart and soul of the band; Keeble, Henderson and Takvoryan are the brains and brawn. The former trio pushes the group into wild, foot-stomping honky-tonk numbers; the latter trio keeps the whole ramshackle train from jumping the rails.

“Aram and Brock and Keeble keep me and Mike and Gordy in line technically,” he says. “If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t care if it sounded sloppy or rough. They do a lot for us.”

For Takvoryan and Henderson, utility players with a long list of local bands to their collective credit, playing with the Uncles has been nothing less than an education. Keeble — who currently gigs with the Moonshine Cherrys and FishSticks, among others — is used to the musical change-up pitches that come with veering from a tears-in-beer ballad to a punch-your-best-buddy-and-smile-while-he-hits-you-back foot-stomper. The other two are learning on the fly, they say.

“I’ve never played this kind of music before, and I’m still learning,” Takvoryan says. “It’s a lot of discipline for me to play less. But to know that we can come into any situation and rely on those three guys and they on us because we’ve done our homework, that’s great. We can all go and kick ass because of that.”

“It takes guts to go out and do this — for these two great songwriters to put their own songs out there — and our job is to make them sound good,” adds Henderson, who spent time playing with the house band for a traveling circus in Brazil before returning to East Tennessee. “They sing the songs they want to sing, and we get to be a kick-ass rhythm section. Life is short, and I wanted to be a part of something that’s fun but has meaning behind it.”

Look past the insults with these men and you’ll find a group of guys with deep affection for one another. Maybe it’s because their conversation is being transcribed, but it doesn’t feel that way — these guys are genuine, just like the music they sing. Not because they’re incapable of deceit, but because they couldn’t look themselves in the mirror the next morning if they didn’t say — and sing — what was on their minds.

“We want to entertain people, and we like to pick out obscure covers where people don’t know if it’s a cover or something we wrote, but when we write songs, we write abut what country is supposed to be about,” Barbra says. “It’s about losing your job and having your heart ripped out of your chest and being handed to you and looking for salvation in the bottom of a bottle. It’s about life, and life is hard.”

And sometimes, McGill adds, music is the only way a working man — or woman — can cope. Whether they’re performing it, as the Uncles do, or enjoy it as their fans do, it’s a release. And it sure beats the alternative.

“To me, a guitar neck feels a hell of a lot better than a hammer or a trawl or anything else,” McGill says. “It’s my happy place. When I’m up there, I’m not worried about making house payments or being on time; I don’t worry about nothing.”