A noted figure on the Canadian music scene, Myles Goodwyn is the founder, songwriter and sole surviving original member of the rock band April Wine, born in 1969. Among the few rock outfits as old, actually a little older, that come to my mind are the Rolling Stones. I grew up with rock but long ago ceased paying more than passing attention to it, after Bob Dylan alerted me to folk music and the Stones to blues. Till lately, I'd never heard April Wine. It's only to be expected that I'd encounter Goodwyn on the blues side of town.

I haven't been exposed to the first volume, but Friends of the Blues 2 is pretty damn good. I even put it on my Best of 2019 list. Goodwyn's is an approach to blues the like of which I haven't heard before. It's not just that elements of rock, jazz and even first-generation country (the Jimmie Rodgers-patterned bonus track, "Even Singing Cowboys Get the Blues") are capably integrated. Beyond that, Goodwyn knows better than many that the most successful blues has always been among the most lyrically witty of genres.

Goodwyn has mastered that and more of the things that make blues and r&b so durable. It's hard to fill an hour-long album with interesting material, especially if it's all by the artist him- or herself. Just about inevitably, some of it is going to feel like filler. Not here. Yet all but one song (Bobby Womack's "It's All Over Now," covered by the Stones and by Ry Cooder, among others) are Goodwyn compositions. There is a single co-write, "Fish Tank Blues," a dizzyingly goofy parody of the primordial "Catfish Blues." "Speedo (Revisited)" amounts to a sequel to the 1954 Cadillacs r&b classic best remembered for the mysteriously hilarious line They often call me Speedo/ But my real name is Mr. Earl. Suffice it to say, whatever name he's going under this time, the guy finally gets his comeuppance.

"Help Me Baby" revives rockabilly, which is rock 'n' roll at its essence and always welcome in these ears. At the other extreme is "When Your Ship Came In (I Was at the Train Station Drinking)," which opens with a familiar-enough theme (alcohol's corrosive effect on a relationship) to a climax that transcends dark comedy; if one shade blacker, it would be grim tragedy. Maybe it already is. Less jarringly, "You Got It Bad" serves up the aural comfort food of the never-fails "Sitting on Top of the World" melody.

Beyond his way with lyrics, stories and ideas, Goodwyn has a pleasing, assured vocal style. His guitar playing seems the instrumental equivalent: eloquent and to the point. There is no single band but a shifting ensemble of featured players of the first order.

Andrew Alli's Hard Workin' Man is blues of a traditional kind, namely the sort from which Alli's juke-joint harmonica style takes its most direct inspiration: Big Walter Horton.

Born, raised and still resident in Richmond, Virginia, Alli came relatively late -- 20 years old -- to music, when curiosity led him to pick up the harmonica and to listen to the various genres playable on the instrument. The most notable, of course, is blues, pretty much a natural connection. From the harmonica he went on to study the genre's and the instrument's rich history: Sonny Boy Williamsons I and II, Little Walter, Junior Wells, Phil Wiggins, Sonny Terry and contemporaries.

Alli's deep, tough tenor voice is suited to the material, mostly self-written, mostly in the electrified rural style that Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and their fellows pioneered, while occasionally touching on the milder blues strains of Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and Tampa Red.

It's good stuff, and it holds up. You'd have to be more jaded than I am to complain that he hasn't taken the usual modernist approach (basically, by infusing rock and, lately, hip-hop). Without claiming thought-reading powers, I suspect that Alli discerned it was time to try something else, maybe try older sounds as the basis for a way forward. Any listener who loves the blues will wait happily to see where he takes it from here.