Colorado-based Barbara Jo Kammer represents that rare artist, once upon a time the norm, who is more interested in song interpretation than in song composition. If you're looking for that lost art, Kammer is an able practitioner, crossing and combining country, folk and pop styles, and she has the vocal chops to maintain your attention.

It's a sound hatched in the 1970s, modestly updated for the 21st century. You'll likely think of Judy Collins midway in the evolution of her career from folk singer to chanteuse or Linda Ronstadt in her prime as a radio star. The focus is on songs with strong lyrics and melodies that rock modestly if at all. Most of the 13 cuts betray the influence, direct or indirect, clear or faint, of commercial folk music. There is one actual folk song here, "Lonesome Valley," best known from the Carter Family's 1930 recording, and one, Cyrus Clarke's "Springfield Mountain Coal Miner," that might as well be traditional.

"Valley" is a lovely hymn whose theme is personal travail and the pain one endures and the wisdom one acquires overcoming it. There are few songs that more movingly evoke that experience, or that address it with such honesty and conviction. I know it rolls through my own head whenever a crisis falls into my life. The extra verses at the end are uncredited but presumably composed by Kammer, who has undergone her own acknowledged struggles and whose taste in music has been shaped by them.

As in her earlier One Song at a Time (which I reviewed here on 9 September 2017), the contents (in the current instance the first half-dozen cuts) consist of songs of reassurance and uplift. The best of them is "Valley," of course -- hard to top that one -- but the rest, some more successful than others, are decent enough. A few carry the kind of hard edge absent, to their detriment, from more vapid inspirational anthems. Cuts 7-13 highlight other themes and also direct the listener's ear to Kammer's singing gift and nuanced artistry, particularly in evidence when she takes on a chestnut like Tex Owens's "Cattle Call," a 1944 hit for Eddy Arnold and too often covered since. Kammer actually made me like it again, something I would not have thought doable short of attitudinal adjustment via brain surgery.

She has the good sense to resurrect a couple of small, overlooked modern country masterpieces, James Rushing & Emory Gordy's "Cheap Whiskey" and Willie Nelson's "Sister's Coming Home," in interpretations that will stand up to anybody's.

Overall, though, my taste in songs leans more to the ones that populate One Song. That's purely a matter of taste, however, and the new disc is undeniably worthwhile on its own. However you may feel about an individual song, Kammer's way with it will not be up for complaint.