The unlikely revival of Appalachian music continues apace. I've been hearing it since the 1960s, when the folk-music fad brought authentic performers out of obscurity and encouraged urban pickers to play it professionally. I have always loved the oldtime sounds but never would have predicted that in the next century they would be, if still at the margins of the industry, not that hard to find if you go looking for them. That wouldn't be true if talented younger artists weren't finding their own ways to this particular strain of the American tradition.

Willard Gayheart, the grandfather of roots-pop singer-songwriter Dori Freeman (reviewed here on 30 January 2016, 16 December 2017), is a genuine son of Appalachia, a resident of Galax, Virginia, host to a celebrated annual fiddle gathering. If you're expecting to hear somebody in the vein of Frank Proffitt, Dock Boggs or Roscoe Holcomb, though, you will soon learn otherwise. Gayheart is at least a generation younger than these legendary carriers of what Mike Seeger called the Old Southern Sound, and his influences are not the same. In other words, more cosmopolitan, relatively speaking.

For one thing, on At Home in the Blue Ridge (not the only album to bear that title, by the way) the material is nearly all self-penned. The single exception is "Coney Island Washboard," written in 1926 and later a hit for the Mills Brothers. Produced by Teddy Thompson (who also oversees Freeman's recordings) and Ed Haber, it is an acoustic-string exercise except for drums and a rarer steel-guitar appearance.

Gayheart's influence is less deep Appalachia than the sort of commercial music that came out of the South as the region's native sounds absorbed the pop mainstream. At Home has a kind of lighter-than-air approach reflective of the more easygoing country of the 1930s and '40s. Only a couple of numbers, "The Shootin'" and "The Salet Song," are reminiscent of older folk songs. If Gayheart doesn't sing as memorably -- and who does? -- one could imagine each of these songs sung in the late Mac Wiseman's voice. Basically, this is a pleasant, likable album. "Ern & Zorry's Sneakin' Bitin' Dog" is a marvel of rural comedy.

Libby Weitnauer and Jake Blount, a duo who call themselves Tui after a bird they saw while touring New Zealand, are around Freeman's age, not her grandfather's. Yet their Pretty Little Mister is based in the Southeastern music of another era (though it has not entirely disappeared from its natural environment), the sort of thing collectors were capturing before the early recording industry learned there was an audience for fiddle tunes and ballads.

The neo-oldtime repertoire is finite, no doubt because many of the songs and tunes had disappeared before anyone thought to preserve them. Happily, Weitnauer (fiddle, vocals) and Blount (banjo, fiddle, vocals) have gone to some trouble to find out-of-the-ordinary versions of tunes and songs. They also bring in mutant instruments such as a half-fretless banjo and a five-string fiddle which seem paradoxically to deepen the link to the Old Southern Sound. The effect is gorgeous, hypnotic, almost otherworldly. Each of the 13 cuts is infused with a warmth whose source can only be sincere affection, coupled with the talent to fashion enduring art out of it.

Every once in a while I encounter someone who insists that music is only for the heart and not for the head. This fatuous insistence, which denies the many dimensions of pleasure great melodies brilliantly played and sung can provide us if we're open to them, is belied by the fact that Tui's members are also scholars. Weitnauer is a classically trained violinist, and Blount is an academic-level music historian. The two bring every tool they possess to what they do, and the result is ... well, listen to it.

Tui opens on occasion for the well-known African-American folksinger Rhiannon Giddens, one of whose instruments is the banjo. As is well known to anyone who cares about such things, the banjo was invented in West Africa and brought to America along with slaves. The banjo figured prominently in the first popular stage music produced in this country, along with white entertainers, their faces painted black, who catered to the most degrading stereotypes.

By the 1900s, beyond the occasional presence of the four-string version in early jazz bands, within black culture the banjo's association with minstrelsy had driven it into the shadows. For years the only popular banjo-playing African-American musician I knew of was Taj Mahal. Over the past two decades young musicians have sought to restore the instrument to its rightful place in black tradition. Otis Taylor's 2008 Telarc release Recapturing the Banjo brought him and five male colleagues together to attend to the business. This year Smithsonian Folkways issued Songs of Our Native Daughters in which Giddens and three other women do the same.

All a long-winded way of dropping in the fact that Jake Blount is a black man and, as noted, a banjo man as well.

A Fireproof House of Sunshine weighs in at five cuts and 16 minutes. That means it's an EP (extended-play) mini-album, the point of which may be that the Hackensaw Boys, a product of Lynchburg, Virginia, are back after the near-death experience of longtime band member Ferd Moyse's departure last year. Happily for those of us who like the Hackensaws, bandleader/lead-singer David Sickmen vows to carry on with his outfit, as much a way station for passing pickers as firmly defined institution. In that regard it's like a bluegrass group, but what the band does is something else, something like oldtime music if oldtime had been invented within our lifetimes.

The music is played on the sorts of acoustic stringed instruments (guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo) one associates with traditional music. The songs, however, are Sickmen creations, rooted but undeniably modern in their references and sensibility, sometimes hammered at rock-level intensity. Sort of like Old Crow Medicine Show, but not imitators of same. The Hackensaws have been around for two decades. In my experience of them, judged solely from their recordings, they keep getting better and better even with the personnel changes, and Fireproof highlights some particularly strong performance and solid songwriting. I look forward to the full-length release I imagine the EP presages.