The cover illustration of I Hear Bluegrass Calling Me depicts the five members of Carolina Blue in semi-profile facing Bill Monroe as he holds out his uplifted right arm. The gesture is ambiguous. Is it a friendly greeting or a warning that they are to go no farther? According to a liner note, the album intends to preserve "traditional bluegrass music and the father who created it."

In this debut release the Brevard, North Carolina-based Carolina Blue doesn't try to imitate Monroe's sound. This is not a tribute record, and no Monroe-composed or -covered song is to be heard. The band forges its own identity even as the Father of Bluegrass' influences are detectable everywhere in one degree or another. The numbers -- 10 of the 13 -- are largely originals generated inside the group by Bobby Powell (guitar, vocals) and Tim Jones (mandolin, vocals) who prove themselves to be able songwriters.

The loyalty to basic bluegrass is most evident in the clean, expert picking and the commanding harmonies, more of the Flatt & Scruggs (or maybe even Country Gentlemen) school than the hard-driving one associated with Monroe. The songs themselves could not be more thematically traditional. Hardly a bluegrass meme is missed. You've got mountains, trains, heaven, Mother, murder, prison, the old home. As far as I'm concerned, the further bluegrass gets away from those venerables, the less it feels like bluegrass. The aptly named I Hear Bluegrass Calling Me definitely strikes the ear that way. God bless Carolina Blue's devotion to the treasured fundamentals.

Formed in 2007, Balsam Range is another acoustic band from western North Carolina but aside from being generally identifiable as bluegrass, not much like Carolina Blue. Though it does not entirely eschew the traditional side of the music, its sound carries elements of jazz, pop and popular folk. I doubt that Monroe, who wanted bluegrass to be narrowly focused, would have approved. Still, the group has many admirers within the genre, and deservedly so. It has claimed numerous awards, including collective and individual ones from the International Bluegrass Music Association.

One could add that not many acts would name an album after a Greek word ("about time and timing ... lasting ... vitality," we're informed), suggesting that unlike many of their Southern contemporaries its members don't confine their reading to the Bible. Still, Balsam Range is linked to genre conventions not only by the instruments it chooses to play but also by the sorts of hillbilly-themed songs it performs, encompassing rambling, heartbreak and death. At the same time the words and sentiments are expressed in 21st-century language and sensibility. Songs such as Ray LaMontagne's "Hobo Blues" and Adam Wright's "The Rambler" cover an oft-visited subject of American traditional song but with a contemporary sophistication.

On the other hand, Barry Bales' "Graveyard Blues" -- not to be confused with the Roscoe Holcomb song of the same title -- feels like something the Stanley Brothers could have recorded in their 1950s prime, though it doesn't sound the same. "Angel Too Soon" addresses the death of a child, a staple of sentimental popular songs of another age and of the early bluegrass repertoire. Maybe one day Balsam Range will cut an entire album of traditional and trad-inflected material. I'm sure it would be a spectacular piece of work.

There is, however, another direction it could go, represented by the 11th and concluding number, George Harrison's "If I Needed Someone." It's not that songs by the Beatles, or in this case a solo Beatle, aren't represented on bluegrass albums. As early as the mid-1960s, the Boston-based Charles River Valley Boys released an album's worth of such on the Elektra label. But before now, the songs have been performed as pure bluegrass. Here, "Someone" amounts to a Beatles arrangement with Scruggs-style banjo in the mix. Any more of this, and any characterization of Balsam Range as bluegrass will have to be appended with an asterisk.