The three classic mid-1960s bluegrass albums the Dillards cut on the Elektra label will never cease calling up some of my favorite musical memories. The first was a studio LP, the second a live recording and the third a set of instrumentals. They were just about perfect. I still listen to them on occasion.

Each shared space between originals and traditionals, the latter mostly old mountain songs such as "Reuben's Train" and "Old Man at the Mill." The former two LPs highlighted some of the best new bluegrass ballads ever written, songs that are now entrenched genre standards such as "Old Home Place," "The Whole World Round," "Dooley" and "There is a Time." Their rendition of "Walkin' Down the Line" may be the first bluegrass arrangement of a Dylan song ever. They got their widest exposure as a comic hillbilly family known as the Darlings on the Andy Griffith Show between 1963 and 1966.

Dillard bluegrass was always distinctive, but soon enough, after the folk boom had faded, the outfit moved on to a kind of experimental country music, a fusion of folk, pop and rock, which was pretty good but insufficient to hold my rather puritanical interest back in the late 1960s and 1970s. In due course banjo player Doug Dillard split from his brother Rodney, though he returned for reunions with the band from time to time before his death in 2012. Rodney carried on with the group, sometimes as the Rodney Dillard Band, recording on various mostly bluegrass labels. Co-founders Mitch Jayne and Dean Webb died in 2010 and 2018 respectively.

Old Road New Again is not lightning put back in the bottle. At its core, however, it is bluegrass, if largely a softer strain with percussion and occasional electric instruments. Some of the original songs are smarter than your typical bluegrass fare, though the one undeniable classic is resurrected from the early days, a reworked, folk-rockish production of Mitch Jayne & Joe Stewart's celebration of backwoods in motion, "Whole World Round" (set, by the way, to a "Shady Grove"-like melody). The sole more or less actual folk song, a reimagined "Cluck Old Hen" called "Funky Ole Hen" here, is led by Beverly Dillard, master of the clawhammer banjo.

Some of Old Road comes across as bluegrass-pop, not an approach I'm ordinarily attracted to. Rodney's two topical songs suffer from muddled messaging, what results when you're mad about something but when expressing the sentiment you worry about hurting someone's feelings. Still, I'm always grateful for a new Dillards record, and I hope it isn't the last.

I reviewed Turning Ground's previous album, Old Country Store, in this space on 8 December 2018. I liked it a lot, and Crazy House -- an intense record focused on criminals and prisons -- gives me no excuse to change my mind. This is a young, five-piece band from rural Kentucky, and I am pleased to report it sounds like it. As before, Nathan Arnett, who tells stories like an oldtime balladeer, sings lead vocals and writes the bulk of the songs.

I am in a continuing state of wonder that bluegrass survives in the third decade of the 21st century. It's alive because both fans and performers continue to love the music in spite of everything. (And why shouldn't they? At its best it's a mighty style, as soulful as any genre ordinarily attached to that adjective.) Even more amazingly, young artists remain drawn to it, putting it forth nearly as credibly as previous generations did. I remember that a few decades ago many hands were wrung over the issue of whether anyone would be able to sing bluegrass in the future, the alleged softness of modern times apparently threatening to turn voices into some weak iteration of their onetime selves. Does anybody -- besides me, evidently -- have any recollection of that?

If you do, put Crazy House on the player, and have a good laugh at old, silly fears. While you're doing that, you'll be hearing one of the most compelling groups on the current scene. More, boys, more.