In just a few years bluegrass performer Donna Ulisse has fashioned a distinctive style within the genre, influenced not only by its traditions but also by the country-pop of the 1970s, when female stars defined much of what Nashville was putting out for fans' edification. One thinks of Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Dottie West, Janie Fricke, Crystal Gayle and others. This isn't, let us be clear, profound art. With the occasional exception its subjects are love and sex, its pleasures disposable ones. Still, done properly, it has its charms.

Time for Love, Ulisse's 11th solo album, boasts enough charms to have made my Best of 2019 list. It's not all country-pop -- there is, for example, a genuinely moving song ("Heart of Rosine") about Bill Monroe -- but it is, mostly. All but two of the songs are Ulisse co-writes. A few decades ago, just about any of them would have been a radio hit. (Ulisse is an award-winning, much-covered bluegrass songwriter.) They're tuneful and expressive, infused with humor, heartbreak, faith, love and lust.

"Magazine Rack" is pushed by a charming calypso-lite rhythm. At the other extreme, there is a gripping, well-crafted gospel song, "I'm Not Afraid," which one could imagine a future standard in that corner of the music industry. The bland album title is taken from "When We've Got Time for Love," actually about sex albeit not of the cheatin' kind. If you miss the wordplay that once enlivened much of country songwriting, Ulisse revives it smartly in "Hi, Lonesome" (i.e., "high lonesome" in a more somber context). One of the two covers revisits a song I hadn't thought of since it stopped playing on the radio, "I'll Never Find Another You," originally an ear-worm 1965 hit from the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop group. Sonny James put it on the country charts two years later. Tom Springfield, who wrote it, is better known for the enduring "Silver Threads & Golden Needles."

Bluegrass veteran Doyle Lawson produces with all the skill and taste you'd expect. Between them he and Ulisse create a recording impossible to dislike.

On his debut outing, West Virginia Rail, Joe Hott name-checks his native state on a satisfying trip deep into the country of mountain bluegrass. In his mid-20s Hott calls to mind a young Carter Stanley, not because Hott is necessarily a sound-alike but because he experiences sorrow Appalachian style. If you don't know what that means, the Hott co-write "I Got No Reason To Stay" will educate you in the apocalyptic nature of mountain break-ups.

Without sounding in the least affected or dated, Rail has the feeling of first-generation, post-World War II bluegrass. Call it old-soul music. Like downhome blues at its most felt, it communicates the sense that it is the sound of what is. Next to it, the merely fashionable can seem merely futile. Its truths are the eternal, sometimes scary human ones, impervious to mindless fads or critical enthusiasms or market shares or phony comforts. Yes, it can be done badly, in which case none of the foregoing applies.

But West Virginia Rail goes to the heart of traditional bluegrass' claim on our emotions. In other words, you don't get to listen casually.