Ghost Hymns opens with the unmistakable sound, at once clean and scratchy, of the fretless banjo. If I recall emitting an audible "ahhh" sometime in the next three seconds, my memory is probably playing tricks on me. It was more likely a purely mental expression of awe. In any event, the album goes its way from there, carrying listeners through thrills and surprises and never letting them down. It's not just another worthwhile recording, rather something that -- to quote a line from an Irish song -- you don't meet every day.

The disc holds one dozen cuts. Unless you're having an unusually bad day, precisely zero will disappoint you. Acoustic-guitar master William Lee Ellis (son of Tony Ellis, once one of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys) takes an approach that feels less like reinvention than like rearrangement of an existing structure. The parts remain recognizable; rather than openly remodel them, Ellis has sunk them deeper. The irony, of course, is that if they seem deeper than they actually were and are -- and God knows old folk music is profound enough already -- they are in fact being modernized. It's just that they don't feel that way at all.

Performers, listeners and others moved by the tradition often debate how the old music should be presented. At the extremes are more or less note-for-note imitation on one side, radical experimentation and integration into a hypothetical future on the other. Only the most dogmatic think that the issue has been resolved. After all, as much observation attests, a sufficiently gifted musician can make either of these work. A less gifted one, however, ought not to be mucking about with it, because it's a lot more complicated than it looks. Ellis is not intimidated.

If you know enough about folk music in its authentic definition (or its revival one for that matter), you can listen to Ghost Hymns and figure out where its component parts can be located. One part is a deep immersion in obscure songs -- oldtime Appalachia, early rural blues, slave-era spirituals -- so far into the waters of the past that one conjures up an image of Ellis physically afloat in an ocean of tradition. Those are the cuts that immediately caught my attention; I expect you'll find the same, awash as they are in small-band acoustic arrangements, here and there with novel instruments (axatse, anyone?) but mostly with guitar, banjo, fiddle and washboard. Ellis's understated vocals are an instrument of their own, always contentedly at home, embracing all sounds and echoes of sounds around them.

The instrumentals take much of their inspiration from American Guitar stylists such as the late John Fahey, Leo Kottke and other formidable figures. Even so, Ellis's unique reading defies casual listening, and I mean that in the most flattering way possible. There is a chamber-music piece ("Earth and Winding Sheet," a fittingly somber meditation on an obvious subject) and, in the same vein, the hymn "Bury Me in the Sky," with an unforgettable fiddle coda on the spiritual "This World is Not My Home." The Hawaii-flavored original "Lost Heaven" conjures up a cloudy afternoon on a Pacific island, maybe one a day prior to Dec. 7, 1941. The amiable "Cony Catch the Sun" rewrites "Little Rabbit," and "Flood Tale" is set to one of the multiple "Lost John" melodies.

As happens to me on occasions like this, I rejoice in the persistence of old songs and tunes decades and centuries past their time, living on in spite of all commerce-driven efforts to kill them off. Among the tradition's most notable characteristics is its hold on those who open themselves to let it in, then pass it on with something of themselves attached to it. Few do that as powerfully as William Lee Ellis does on Ghost Hymns. Pay attention and thank me when you've started to recover.

[ visit William Lee Ellis's website ]