Longtime area musicians Rob and Susie Suraci recently decided to leave the Possum Trot Orchestra, a popular local band specializing in various forms of roots music that they helped found in 2005.

Co-founder John Minton, a folklore professor at IPFW who released a number of CDs under his own name before fronting the Possum Trot Orchestra, said it was a classic case of “artistic differences.”

Minton characterized the parting as amicable.

“It was a natural evolution,” he said. “It’s just one of those things, like any relationship.”

In an email, Susie Suraci wrote that she and her husband “have been surprised by how many friends said they could see this coming long before we did.”

“Eventually the Suracis woke up and realized that continuing to donate so much time and material to a band we could never consider ours was just plain stupid,” she wrote.

Suraci wrote that she and her husband plan to reboot their folk-rock duo of the ’90s, the Flying Suraci.

“So now we are busy, making up for lost time by re-recording our own versions of Susie’s tunes as the Flying Suraci and creating CDs of newer unrecorded material as well, this time with Rob getting more limelight. We’re already hooking up with some of the finest players in the region toward that effort, and it’s pretty exciting for us.”

Minton, who recently released another solo album called “The Hills Are in Bloom,” said the Possum Trot Orchestra will continue.

“The Flying Suracis have gone back to being the Flying Suracis, and PTO has gone back to its original focus: down home blues and old time country,” he said. “Like I said, it’s a natural evolution.”

Minton said the Possum Trot Orchestra will return to an “original format” onstage as well.

“It will be looser and more spontaneous,” he said. “We will rehearse more publicly now.”

Minton’s and the Possum Trot Orchestra’s releases have always gotten a lot of positive press in Europe, where many of the more traditional forms of American music are held in higher esteem.

Keeping local and international fan bases happy does not always involve complementary tasks, Minton said.

Minton said it isn’t always easy to know in this paradoxical period of digital downloads and resurgent vinyl records how best to advance a musical career.

“How do you use the double rainbow video (on YouTube) as a business model?” he said.

Still, he said, the Possum Trot Orchestra has “been together almost as long as the Beatles.”

“We have never given up our day jobs, so it’s not a fair comparison,” he said. “We never planned for it to be an ongoing thing, so I’m very pleased that other people think of us as a local institution.

“Others think we should be institutionalized,” he added.