Sisters Shaunna and Kristina Larkin might look like typical All-American college girls spending their school vacations working summer jobs and spending evenings hanging out at the mall, but for these natives of Church Hill, Tenn., the summer of 2003 finds them not only caught up in the ongoing demands of cruising the festival circuit with the family bluegrass band, but embarking on a career in their own right as country music artists, The Larkins, signaled by the release of their self-titled debut CD on Audium.

"Right now, at this particular moment, neither one of us are going to college," says Shaunna, at 21, the elder sister by 2 years. "We've been traveling so much in the past two years that it would be pretty impossible for us to go right now. We've been really, really busy, and we're going pretty much non-stop, though we kind of slow down in December. So, right now we're just doing music full time as a career."

If that makes the sisters sound a little bit too much like seasoned, road-weary professionals twice their age, Kristina is quick to dispel the notion that they've grown old too soon.

"I'm having the time of my life. It's a great opportunity. I love being gone and touring. If I'm home for a couple days, I'm just like 'Why are we not out on the road?' I just don't know what to do."

From their earliest years, in fact, playing music has been the overwhelming passion of the younger two of the three daughters of Lowell and Barbara Larkin. Lowell, a touring bluegrass performer for many years with his brothers, encouraged and nurtured his daughters' interest in music, and since 1988, the Larkin Family band has been welcomed at bluegrass festivals across the map. The oldest daughter, Rachael, also performed with the band, but according to Tina has opted not to make a career out of music. For the two youngsters, though, it was a shared bond of lasting strength.

"We were very close growing up," agrees Kristina, "We pretty much listened to the same music. We borrowed each other's CDs."

Shaunna picks up the thread, and continues "We kind of started singing together when Tina was three, and I was four, learning the songs that our dad sang with his brothers up on stage, and whenever Tina turned about five, then my uncle started working with her on how to sing tenor, and I was singing mostly lead then, so we've been singing together for years. So, that's pretty much all we've ever done."

They began displaying instrumental talent early, with Tina playing mandolin and Shaunna winning fiddle contests by the age of eight, but what's obvious from the first opening bars of their new album is that, though their professional experience to date has been in the bluegrass world, their sibling harmony is classic country - although they've obviously listened to and been influenced by the wide world around them.

"We definitely listen to everybody," says Shaunna. "Whenever we were growing up, we listened to Dolly Parton a lot, we always loved her, and also Alison Krauss, we listened to her growing up...those two are probably the ones who influenced us more, how Alison does a lot of different styles with her music. If you put her in a category, it would be bluegrass, but really, if you listen to her CDs, they go in all different directions. She does some country stuff, and even some more stuff that even kind of sounds like acoustic pop. Also, Dolly's done almost every kind of music in her career, and all kinds of different styles, so we've definitely listened to them a lot, but we love Martina McBride and Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. And even in pop, we listen to Britney Spears and Mandy Moore and all those pop people...it helps us to want to have a variety in our music in what we did starting out in bluegrass, then kind of switching over into country."

The album's opening track, for example, is "Lay Your Memory Down," an upbeat country rocker on which they serve notice that they're not just pickers who can sing a little bit. Their voices are strong, the phrasing is expert, and the harmony reflects the fact that, young as they are, they know each other's strengths and what makes them sound best.

Shaunna says it's just a matter of growing up together.

"I guess we've sung together for so long, most of the time when we just hear a song, we can tell whether it's going to fit Tina's voice or my voice better, and Tina does do most of the leads, and so most of the time we just hear a song, and if we like it, then we just automatically know if it fits me or her better. Then some songs, if we can't tell right then, then both of us will sing them...and see which one it fits better."

It's a kind of vocal harmony that, to those who have listened in recent years to fellow East Tennessee natives Dolly Parton and the Stevens Sisters, may seem almost an inborn quality, or something that's in the water that cascades down from the Smoky peaks.

And, if it almost sounds like Parton herself singing harmony on "Steady As The Rain," well, it is. Dolly not only lends the backup vocal, but the song is a Parton original as well. Shaunna acknowledges that having their idol help out on their debut record is a thrill beyond description.

"It was a dream come true for us because I never dreamed that we would ever be able to sing with her or really even more than meet her because we met her a few years back, and I never dreamed that we would become friends and have her sing on our CD and be in the video with us. So, it's definitely been a dream come true."

The Parton connection is not new, though. The Larkin Family has been a popular act at Dollywood for most of the last decade, and Shaunna has come to recognize what a golden opportunity it has been for her and Tina to learn that music and show business are not quite the same thing.

"I think it's definitely good training because most of the people that come into Dollywood, there's so many different people that come into Dollywood. They're not people that all like one certain type of music. There's people in there that like bluegrass and country and pop and rock and all different kinds of music. So whenever they're walking through the park, you not only have to play the songs, but you also have to put on a show. You have to entertain the audience to try to attract them into your theater and do a good show because there's just so many different people there that it's hard work, but it's fun. I love playing at Dollywood. I think it's a great training ground, to not only do your music, but to entertain an audience, to learn how to do that."

Of course, both sisters agree that their parents, especially Dad Lowell, were constant sources of learning and guidance.

"He definitely has helped us in a lot of different ways," says Shaunna. "Whenever we first started playing, he made sure that we all had really great teachers, and he would always buy CDs of great players so we could study with them and practice with them. He helped us a lot with stage presence...how to talk on stage and how to entertain and also how to present yourself at the record table and everything like that."

As befits their wide and varied musical interests, the album mixes elements of country, bluegrass, blues and pop in a fashion that, in terms of radio airplay these days, is possibly more often referred to as "Americana" than "country," but the sisters seem comfortable with either label.

And the first-rate nature of the backup cast certainly adds to the album's strengths - former Skaggs sideman Bryan Sutton, Adam Steffey (longtime member of Krauss' band - "he's from Kingsport, we've known him pretty much all our lives"), Aubrey Haynie, Dobro ace Randy Kohrs, bassist Michael Rose and drummer Steve Turner all join Parton as guests.

The sisters also tried out their own songwriting talents, as Shaunna relates.

"Me and Tina, along with (producer) Bruce Bouton and Randy Kohrs, we wrote 'Head Over Heels'...and Tammy Rogers, she's actually the one who taught me how to play fiddle, she wrote 'Lay Your Memory Down,' which is the first track on the CD."

Whether writing their own or choosing which songs to perform, Shaunna is refreshingly candid and down-to-earth in describing what they look for.

"A song that relates to us and really hits to what we are and what we can sing about. We're young. There's a lot of subjects we can't sing about. We can't really sing about getting a divorce or about having a bunch of kids or anything like that. We kind of look for songs that we would like to hear and songs that really hit us, and if someone was watching us perform them on stage, it wouldn't seem out of place for us to be singing about it."

For the time being, Shaunna welcomes the challenge of balancing their ongoing bluegrass career with their new status as country vocalists.

"Right now, what we're doing, because we have several bluegrass festivals for the rest of the year and we're switching over into country, we're opening up for some country artists and we're doing some fairs and different country shows. We're kind of doing it half-and-half, like whenever we play a bluegrass festival, it's the four of us, the family and then a bass player, and then whenever we do a country show, we take along a drummer and most of the time a Dobro player or an electric guitar player. It is kind of crazy right now. Just this past weekend, we had a bluegrass show and then a country show and then a bluegrass festival, so we had to take our extra band members up there with us because there wasn't any way we could come back and get them before then, so we had to take them up there with us...we really have kind of two entirely different shows that we do right now, depending on whether it's a bluegrass festival or a fair or a country show."

Looking down the road, for the long run, Tina anticipates the opportunity to continue their growth as women, and as musicians.

"I just really hope that we grow bigger and better, and we're better musicians, we're better songwriters...and we're touring even more and going to bigger venues."