David G. Smith is a product of the Iowa scene that produced the well-known folksinger-songwriter Greg Brown and the less noted but equally impressive Dave Moore. The three are in the same age range, which makes Smith more seasoned than most of the many singer-songwriters out there these days.

Smith's musical influences are not quite the same as his contemporaries'. Besides the expected blues and folk, one hears jazz, rock and pop-soul, integrated into a sound that necessitates fuller arrangements, capably accomplished by the late producer Blue Miller and by Jim Lightman, who took up after Miller died. I hear echoes of Tim Hardin, famously composer of the modern folksongs "If I Were a Carpenter" and "The Lady Came from Baltimore" but whose albums, forgotten now, were defined in good part by jazz-based vocals and production.

By the second listening to Who Cares I'd begun to notice and appreciate Smith's moral seriousness, which never descends into preachiness, sentimentality or cliche. I also discerned that the title responds to the cruelly cynical question Melania Trump once raised on the back of a jacket: "I don't really care. Do U?" In the title (and last) cut Smith delineates who cares: all compassionate people. The wrenching "Mi Familia," sung partly in Spanish to what could be a traditional Mexican tune, may be the most powerful and sympathetic evocation of the immigrants' plight since Woody Guthrie's "Deportee."

Another stand-out cut is "Jesse James," otherwise the title of one of America's most-sung folk ballads. While the latter portrays James as a Robin Hood figure, the historical equivalent was nothing of the kind; psychotic killer, along with homicidal racist, gets closer to the reality. If you've read T.J. Stiles's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002), you'll know where Smith's song got its inspiration. The details are accurate; so is Smith's cold summation: Jesse James had two lives/ One was real/ One was lies.

Leslie Bixler, who is the Miss Bix end of the Blues Fix, is a singer-songwriter but just as importantly a notable blues creator and performer. Her songwriting skills are formidable, though curiously she has had previous careers in smooth jazz and children's music. She's a late-comer to the blues, though you wouldn't know that.

Much blues writing is formulaic, there as a taking-off point for instrumental and vocal showcasing. Bixler's songs each claim their own personality and their own story to tell, however. Notwithstanding the excellence of her band, on We Don't Own the Blues the focus is on her singing, which is never given to excess. It's recognizably within the tradition, but the voice is conversational, never abandoned to hair-raising, exhibitionistic screech, just as her band holds back from hyper-volume and self-indulgent jamming.

With about three exceptions, Bixler's lyrics reflect been-there blues subject matter but manage to make it surprisingly fresh and immediate. Her approach amounts to a synthesis, at once contemporary and akin to what a time traveler could have heard at any given moment in blues history, from the early rural South through mid-century Chicago and beyond. Other blues acts ought to be covering sterling concoctions like "Follow Me Down'" (the opening cut, which brilliantly fuses the spiritual and the erotic), "Slave to the Grave" (domestic abuse), "Gotta Get Off This Ride" (a train as both escape and metaphor) and "Black Widow" (malicious gossip).

"It Wasn't Me," a gorgeous nightclub confessional, hauntingly recounts an intimate encounter more downbeat than pleasurable. It is every bit an impressively imagined piece of short fiction as it is a song, and it will stay with you. Even so, for all its dignity, I couldn't help being reminded of the rollicking, cheerfully coarse "Who Were You Thinking Of?" recorded by the Texas Tornadoes some years ago. The rest of line goes "when we were making love last night." Two very different songs with a single theme, sufficient to set off a severe case of cognitive dissonance if you hear them in dangerously close proximity.

We Don't Own the Blues bows out with another non-blues, "All the Time," which hovers ambiguously between a secular love affirmation and a sacred hymn, and moves the listener on either side of the reading.

Take my word for it: this is not just another by-the-numbers blues album.