On a late Sunday afternoon at Ella’s Americana Folk Art Café, local folk pop ensemble The Grecian Urns captured and held rapt a room packed with people chowing down on soul food and barbecue, the musicians charming and captivating with their infectious feel-good energy and youthful exuberance.

The music — sometimes quiet and pastoral and pretty in its simplicity, other times rollicking and carefree and lush with well-textured instrumental arrangements — brightened up the place with its pure joyousness, the songwriting flavored with the sun-drenched nostalgia of those still young enough to appreciate the freedom of summer and all those precious moments leading up to its end.

The end of summer is particularly bittersweet for Grecian Urns, since those few precious months are when they’re active; most are away at college in different corners of the Southeast the rest of the year.

“We come back in the summers, we play a ton of shows — this summer’s been really great for us — we get a huge head of steam, then we go our separate ways,” guitarist/lead singer Bryce McGuire tells me when I meet with Grecian Urns the week after their memorable Ella’s performance. The band includes siblings David and Laurie Beth Norris (he on drums, she on vocals, keys, trombone, flute and percussion), bassist Jared DiMaggio, violin player/backup vocalist Katherine Dunn, and the McGuire brothers — Bryce on lead vocals and acoustic and electric guitars, and Brandon on keys, electric guitar, and occasionally harmonica and drums.

This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2010.