I started listening to bluegrass when I was just out of high school, and I have never tired of it. Not, of course, that I've loved every bluegrass recording I've ever heard, but at its best the genre provides satisfaction not quite like any other. Newly issued albums by Starlett Boswell & Big John Talley and the supergroup Mighty Poplar thrill me both in recognizable ways and in their own distinctive fashions.

If you don't listen to bluegrass, you may not disagree with the standard, exasperating complaint: it all sounds alike. No, it doesn't. Only the music at its most uninspired sounds generic. The most accomplished performers bring their individual, even idiosyncratic, interpretations with them. They keep the music fresh even when their chosen vehicle of expression looks back to a sound rooted in Appalachian folk songs and mid-century country from which, if one strays far enough, one is no longer practicing bluegrass. If nothing else, bluegrass proves how a body of rich, nuanced music can live and thrive within those guardrails.

Of the two up for review here, Living in the South is the one that recalls bluegrass before it and mainstream country became separate strains of rural-accented music. When it began, in the years after World War II, bluegrass was just one kind of sound you could hear on the Grand Ole Opry stage, alongside honkytonk, Western swing, sentimental parlor-style songs and what remained of the oldtime string bands that dominated the venue's opening era. For its first few years "bluegrass" did not even have its own name; it was just a country sound associated with Bill Monroe and his band. Few thought of them as what they were and what their music would come to be seen for: radical traditionalism.

Some of Living offers up the spirit of early modern country as much as it does bluegrass. Though marketed as the latter, produced by prominent bluegrass figure Ron Stewart and released on a bluegrass label, the album features some cuts more accurately characterized as acoustic country (in other words, without banjo or bluegrass rhythms). That's an observation, not a criticism. The cover tunes, including some from Merle Haggard, Hank Williams and Harlan Howard, are pulled out of the country repertoire (in which clearly Starlett & Big John are deeply versed); except for Hank's playful "Settin' the Woods on Fire," these are as little known as they are welcome.

My favorite cover, though, is Damon Black's "The Dirt That You Throw," which comes scarily close to defining everything I adore about hardcore country. The inspired originals, I should add, could have been Opry hits half a century and more ago.

Besides that, the two are remarkably able vocalists both as leads and as harmony partners. If I were shameless enough, I'd dig into my grab-bag of cliches to retrieve the old groaner that they don't make 'em like this anymore, except that a couple of somebodys (along with a very fine three-piece back-up band) just did.

On the other side of bluegrass there's a 10-cut collaboration of five bluegrass pickers from four popular bands. They call themselves Mighty Poplar -- not a typo -- as a wink at contrary commercial reality and as a play on words. If Starlett & Big John's outside-bluegrass influence is 1950s country, Mighty Poplar even with its more contemporary approach is rooted in the late 1950s (specifically, the Country Gentlemen, who invented urban bluegrass) and, beyond that, older folk traditions that predated Monroe's invention by centuries. Among its song choices, the 17th-century Child ballad known as "Black Jack Davy" (in the Carter Family iteration anyway) is the oldest. "Lovin' Babe" and "Little Joe" -- the first a folk song, the latter a lachrymose popular number -- were conceived in the 19th century. There are several fiddle tunes, only "Grey Eagle" known to me, as well as Bob Dylan's "North Country Blues" and, more recently, folksinger-songwriter Martha Scanlon's "Up on the Divide." The album ends on an impressive note with Leonard Cohen's "Story of Isaac," arranged as if it were less from the Old Testament than from the Scotland of another century.

The first to celebrate bluegrass as a modern folk music was the famous song-collector Alan Lomax in a much-quoted 1959 Esquire article. As much as anyone he was responsible for bluegrass's survival. Just as it was going out of fashion as Nashville sought a more pop-oriented sound, the folk revival of the 1950s and '60s emerged to hand bluegrass musicians a new audience. Some bands adjusted their playlists to encompass oldtime songs they knew from their rural childhoods, and some went on to embrace folk-influenced songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Ian Tyson, John Prine and others. To most listeners this material felt organic to bluegrass, even though some musicians were privately uncomfortable with it (e.g., Lester Flatt) or actively despised it (Charlie Waller). These days venerable folk numbers, especially but not exclusively fiddle pieces, are widely accepted in bluegrass performance.

Few recordings, however, place so heavy an emphasis on grassroots music as Mighty Poplar's self-titled album does, creatively reimagining both it and bluegrass itself. As a happy consequence, both traditions are transformed into something that manages to be old and new at once, and always exciting.