Jason Barie is a Florida-raised, Tennessee-based bluegrass musician and luthier, an award-winning alumnus of Lorraine Jordan & Carolina Road and Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. Over a couple of years, beginning in 2017, he worked on the side to create Pieces, which features his tradition-grounded, intensely melodic fiddle work accompanying an assortment of genre notables, among them Lawson, Kristin Scott Benson, Del McCoury, Joe Mullins, Becky Buller and Paul Williams.

With that kind of lineup you'd expect a successful album, and that's what you get. But you also get an almost perfect tone, envisioning the spirit of traditional bluegrass at its most moving, when vocal and instrumental skills serve a larger purpose than to demonstrate technical mastery. Pieces abounds in what even decent bluegrass discs so often lack: consistently first-rate material.

Nobody would argue the proposition that "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" is among Hank Williams' greatest compositions (it helps that it was written on the template of the "Lonesome Dove" cluster of Southern folk songs). Still, I can't recall being as moved as I am by the arrangement here, with McCoury's stark tenor at the forefront and Paul Williams' nuanced harmony, Mullins's banjo, Barie's fiddle and Randy Barnes' bass. It had me almost believing I was hearing the song for the first time.

Other standouts include the Stanley Brothers' "We'll Be Sweethearts in Heaven" and the oldtime gospel "Beyond the Sunset for Me." Barie's opening fiddle piece "Waiting on Isaac," written for his son, is an ingenious improvisation on the two-century-old "Old Joe Clark." "Diary of My Mind," credited to John and Sadie Starks, should be known to me, but it isn't. While I have no idea how old it is, I do know how old it sounds: like a terrific country heart song from the Opry in its mid-century golden age. Corey Hensley's singing is impressively suited to its aching but brave narrative, apparently not about a departed lover but a deceased spouse.

Pieces concludes with the familiar "Ashokan Farewell," of which it would be hard to tire, and certainly not of Barie's way with it. Many listeners assume it is an authentic Civil War air, though in prosaic reality its only association is that it served as the theme to Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War. It was originally composed and performed by folk-revival figure Jay Ungar. Still, who wouldn't want it to have been bequeathed to us from the middle of the 19th century? Wouldn't it just plain feel better if it were a theme not to The Civil War but to the Civil War?

Maybe one day it will pass quietly and by common consent into authenticity, in the spirit of the judgment voiced by a character in John Ford's film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."