Hard to miss the target when the bullets out of the gun are Big Joe & the Dynaflows and Severn Records. The first, from the D.C. area, is a longtime purveyor of relaxed and swinging electric blues, the other an independent blues label, based in Annapolis, whose releases are consistently of sterling quality. I reviewed You Can't Keep a Big Man Down, the band's previous Severn disc, in this space on 23 April 2011.

"I have always loved the blues," drummer Big Joe Maher attests. "It's like an infatuation with me." Rockhouse Party (the first word comes from the Franklin, Tennessee, studio in which the album was cut, unfussily) sounds like the sort of thing accomplishable only by musicians still fully engaged with their music after playing it for a long, long time. I said "sounds like" because two of the contributors are only in their teens. Maybe it's the genes.

Anyway, of the 13 cuts, four of them are attractive Maher originals, along with deep-catalogue covers from the likes of Percy Mayfield, Little Milton, Roosevelt Sykes, Fenton Robinson and Dave Bartholomew. Surely the most challenging had to be "8 Men 4 Women," associated with the late hard-core soul man O.V. Wright, a wildly over-the-top fable about the jury that found the singer "guilty of love." Wright turns the narrative into a vocal tour de force and is the version you really need to hear. Still, bassist Tom "Mookie" Brill, who sings it here, acquits himself surprisingly well, giving no reasonable listener anything to gripe about. Given the band's exacting taste, I am sure it would not have appeared here if he had.

Maher and associates allow themselves to stray from strict blues and r&b on occasion. Maher's "World Gone Wrong" -- also the name of a 1993 Bob Dylan album, after his arrangement of the Mississippi Sheiks' "The World is Going Wrong" -- is a kind of talking jazz. There are two or three inspired rockabilly outings, including the dementedly fun "Vibrate" (credited to "M. Self/Copyright Control"). Rockhouse is agreeable as well for what it doesn't bring to the party, notably out-of-control hard-rock guitar excess and shrieking vocals. It's governed by the principle of straight and natural music, as Mississippi Fred McDowell called the blues at its truest.

If this album doesn't make you happy, I don't want to know you.