ABSAROKEE - Dave Oltrogge has been singing for decades, yet the multitalented musician harbors no dream of hitting it big with CD sales of his latest act.

Oltrogge, who jokingly describes himself as "on the sunny side of 60," joins his son Luke, 23, and daughter Hannah, 20, in performing a musical retrospective of the 1960s group Peter, Paul and Mary.

"We try not to reinvent Peter, Paul and Mary," Dave explains. "We try to replicate it. So, what better than to go out and encourage people to buy the real thing?"

The Oltrogges have performed their show at several venues this past year, including a taped session that will broadcast next spring on Montana PBS' "11th and Grant." Named for the street location of the KUSM-TV studio in Bozeman, the show seeks the best Montana talent for in-depth interviews and performances.

"And here they had this unkempt family from Absarokee who had never been in a recording studio before," Dave said, grinning.

If musicians could be stereotyped, no doubt the Oltrogges would shatter the mold. Hannah, who summers as a whitewater rafting guide on the Stillwater River, studies cell biology and neuroscience at Montana State University. Luke spends much of his time 100 feet underground, working on a doctorate in biophysics and chemistry in a subterranean lab at Stanford University in California. Dave lives in Absarokee, where he and his brother Richard own and operate a heavy construction business.

"Sometimes my business partner wonders where my heart is," Dave said, grinning.

In fact, it's evident that his heart is with his family. And that family is full of music.

Dave started playing in the 1960s and today plays in several bands. Hannah has been performing in front of crowds since the age of two - she also plays with her father and Tom Blankenship in the group "Two Geezers and Hannah" - and Luke, who's long played piano, was drawn into the act after working lights and sound for his father's Everly Brothers' Show.

According to Dave, their musical bond is hard to explain.

"One of us will start humming something and we'll just break into song," he said.

"It's a level of communication that transcends the distance. When we get together, we just have to shut out the whole world and bang on our guitars. It's pretty intimate time."

So when the trio decided to form an act, Peter, Paul and Mary seemed an obvious choice. As they began researching the '60s trio, the Oltrogges discovered there was much more to the group's musical legacy.

"The social issues, they were very relevant again," Dave said.

Barely a year ago, the father, son and daughter set a concert date and quickly added more PPM tunes to their limited repertoire. Besides music, the Oltrogges' show includes anecdotes about the famous trio, set against a backdrop illuminated with photos from that era.

After months of occasional performances, the Absarokee family was humbled but awed at the invitation to play for the Montana PBS show. The connection came through Eric Funk, the host of "11th & Grant," who also happened to be one of Hannah's professors at MSU's Honors College.

"He would take the students out to coffee separately," she said. "When I mentioned the Peter, Paul and Mary show, his eyes kind of lit up."

If the family was awed by the invitation, they were even more "wowed" by their studio experience. With five cameras rolling at all times, and makeup artists dabbing powder on their faces between takes, the musicians spent nearly 12 hours recording more than a dozen songs.

"Some of the songs we did two takes, three takes so they could change the camera angles," Dave said.

"Even if we felt like we'd nailed it, they'd come out and say 'the video people aren't happy,' " Hannah said.

Accustomed to some kind of response from their listeners, the Oltrogges found it strange when dead silence followed the end of a song.

"We didn't know whether to stare at each other or look off into space," Hannah said.

Ultimately, the daylong session will be edited down to 45 minutes. Only five episodes of "11th and Grant" are filmed each year, and all are recorded during a one-week stint in the summer. In-home interviews of the Oltrogges will be taped this winter, culminating in an hourlong show to be broadcast sometime next spring.