If you define "folk music" as what singer-songwriters produce, these two albums will give you a different, truer understanding of the phrase. Folk music and traditional music used to mean the same thing. Music being what it is, an elusive, slippery thing, you don't have to look far to get into a good argument on the shades and nuances of what constitutes "folk" and "traditional," though probably less so where these two newly issued discs are concerned.

The Minnesota-based Roe Family Singers, now on the bluegrass label Bonfire, are not a bluegrass band but performers in the pre-bluegrass oldtime style. On Roll Up the Rug! the Roes -- the married couple Quillan and Kim, plus friends -- expand the concept to include a Hank Williams song, not that great a stretch given Hank's manifest grounding in Alabama folk and blues, and also -- an eyebrow raiser until you hear it -- Neil Young's "Daddy Went Walking." That one, which turns out to fit perfectly here, is an inspired choice.

So is the 1926 pop song "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbing Along," which sounds as if always intended to be a jug-band outing. (I will always associate it, however, with a side-splitting Johnny Carson Rambo parody decades ago.) Quillan contributes a couple of trad-flavored originals. The gospel "What Did He Say?" gives voice to the couple's progressive brand of Christianity. Woody Guthrie could have written the other, "Don't Worry About the Rich Man."

I am going to presume that the Roes got "While the Band is Playing Dixie" from Sara & Maybelle Carter's 1966 Columbia album, An [sic] Historic Reunion, which retains a special spot in my heart because it introduced me to the Carter Family. Others of the 15 cuts include nicely done, comfort-tune favorites such as Henry Clay Work's "My Grandfather's Clock" (from 1876) and Dock Boggs's "Country Blues" (a variant of "Little Maggie"/"Darlin' Corey"). Unfortunately, "Red River Valley" is ruined for me by Quillan's decision, irritating and inexplicable in equal measure, to pronounce "adieu" as "ay-dieu" and "away" as "ay-way." Too bad; it is a terrific song, once known to most Americans but rarely cut or sung anymore.

Roll Up the Rug! concludes on an uplifting note with the wonderfully strange ballad "The Ram of Darby," with roots in the 18th century and possibly before. A variant of it survives to this day as the New Orleans early-jazz standard "Didn't He Ramble." All in all, the Roes are bequeathing us some of the most entertaining stringband sounds you're going to hear in 2020.

Spider Tales is a much darker proposition, a collection of songs and tunes mostly from the pre- and post-Civil War era, which is to say from blues protohistory. A black man, Jake Blount is focused in good part on a music championed by few younger African-Americans, though with the rise of Rhiannon Giddens, the Carolina Chocolate Drops and others that is happily changing.

In any event, when it was a local music available only to locals, black and white musicians shared much of this material and even played it in each other's company before Jim Crow managed to segregate downhome sounds -- one reason for the rise of blues, I imagine, at the end of the 19th century. There is even an instrumental version of "Rocky Road to Dublin," learned from an ex-slave.

From a lifetime's listening and reading I know the American tradition fairly well, but more than half the content in this instance is new to me, something that though rarely experienced always puts me in a positive humor. A fiddler of remarkable gifts, Blount plays in an archaic style with a rich, sometimes menacing tone. It definitely isn't gentle background sound.

Spider Tales is not a solo effort all the way through, but for the occasional band effort (e.g., the cheery "Done Gone") it usually communicates the feeling that you are in the pines, where the sun never shines and you shiver when the cold wind blows. Actually, the song often called "In the Pines" is here, in Lead Belly's version albeit under the title "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" Lead Belly recorded it as "Black Girl."

Besides being a formidable musician, Blount is a scholar who holds a degree in ethnomusicology. At least as of last year he toured and recorded with Libby Weitnauer as the duo Tui. I reviewed their Pretty Little Mister in this space on 3 August 2019. It and, even more emphatically, Spider Tales offer hope that brilliantly conceived, impressively executed traditional folk music will find a home in this still-new century.