Of the final cut, "This Ground," Warwickshire folksinger-songwriter Ellie Gowers crisply states, "Leaving home, finding your feet, returning home." I could say the same about my own life's arc, though I judge from her photograph that I am, as the venerable hymn has it, farther along, surely enough to recognize the pre-ambivalent, celebratory stage of return she expresses here.

I'm sure the landscape everywhere is dotted with those who fashioned their lives into that kind of circle. I find them even in the little Minnesota town where I have lived in two installments, the youthful and the not so youthful where I write these words. Conversing with my fellow returned exiles, I'm struck by how similar our experiences turn out to be. Usually, over time you find more and more asterisks to append to any assessment of how it's all turned out. You could write a book about it. Some have. Though I am a professional author, I have chosen not to. You might say the subject is -- not trying to be cute about it -- too close to home. Out here where the big cities lie in the far distance, though, you can always find a place to park. On the most trying days, that amounts to a measure of comfort, to be appreciated for its modest but manifest role in uncomplicating your daily existence.

I used to follow the English folk scene fairly closely, back in the days when the late fRoots seemed to miss nothing. But a few years after the magazine's collapse, Gowers appears with her first album, attesting to the scene's continuing vitality. I had never heard of her till shortly before Dwelling by the Weir found its way to my front porch after an epic voyage from the West Midlands to the Midwest. I suppose you could call it Gowers's tribute to her native county, though that doesn't quite capture it. Tributes are often boring. Set engagingly in local history and culture, Dwelling is hardly that.

Gowers is literate in the English folk tradition, whose influence seems -- in my hearing anyway -- to grow ever more prominent after two or three initial numbers shaped by the early folk-pop Joni Mitchell. The influence, let me stress, is positive. All it means, I infer, is that Gowers hadn't entirely found her own voice when she wrote them. That aside, they're perfectly decent songs, and they introduce, in addition, a splendid singer of immediately apparent promise.

Still, my own tastes lean toward the roots, and soon enough, Gowers is walking through those weeds, beginning with a dark ballad and true story, "A Letter to the Dead Husband of Mary Ball," about the circumstances behind the last hanging in Coventry, in August 1849. While the album is largely acoustic (beautifully so), folk-rock sounds are put to powerful use in the sharp-edged environmental protest "Waking Up to Stone" and in "Brightest Moon," a grim remembrance of the Blitz as suffered in Coventry on the moonlit night of Nov. 14, 1940.

Other standouts include "Poor Old Horse" and "The Ribbon Weaver," exquisitely written, conceived and performed. The one non-original, Pete Grassby's "The Last Warwickshire Miner," borrows the stirring melody of the 19th-century American folk hymn "Poor Wayfaring Stranger."

I'm taken with Dwelling by the Weir, the equal of any first recording I've heard this year. I'm already looking forward to her second.

[ visit Ellie Gowers' website ]