Celebrated for her lovely, brittle vocals, Dale Ann Bradley is a prominent, multi-award-winning figure on the bluegrass scene. She's been one ever since her first solo album in 1997. (She also records periodically with the all-female group Sister Sadie.) Whatever your musical tastes may be, you would not want to be the kind of misanthrope who's immune to Bradley's musical graces.

Yet for all that, she has never released a truly great album. The problem is not Bradley but her sometimes distractingly uninspired choice of material. Here and there the songs are so slight that one wonders not only what Bradley saw in them but why anyone bothered to write them. To those who embrace all that is admirable in her music, this feels not so much vexing as inexplicable.

Happily, Kentucky for Me is among her stronger recordings, with some well-crafted songs by the likes of Billy Joe Shaver (the often-covered, gospel-flavored "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal"), Tom T. Hall (the title tune), Johnny & Jack ("One by One") and Guy Clark ("Poor Man's Pride"). The album ends, unfortunately, with the spell-breaking "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," which calls to mind everything I dislike about whatever Nashville is doing these days. Otherwise, everything is warm and friendly, at times better than that.

Among the guest vocalists (including bluegrass patriarch Danny Paisley) is the deep-voiced country singer John Conlee, an artist as unlike Bradley as one could be; yet the two coexist cozily in the same tight sonic space. Beyond that, maybe nobody can pull a smile from the listener as readily as Conlee manages with the Shaver lyric "I'm gonna be the cotton-pickin' rage of the age," already a funny line.

Still, a warning to the pure of heart: while acoustic from start to finish, Kentucky is not really a bluegrass album. No hard driving, no Scruggs banjo, no tough mountain harmonies; if that's what you're looking for, you won't find it. Yet I trust you can live with an approach that might be called bluegrass-adjacent. The album showcases the instruments, the themes associated with the music Bill Monroe invented, even the home ground. Most songs at least mention Kentucky, Bradley's native state along with Monroe's, but here the component elements -- oldtime, gospel, mid-century country -- that fused to make bluegrass what it is turn in a more contemporary direction, if an undeniably engaging one.

Of course, if you must, you could do what I have just done: when Bradley's disc ceases playing, you can replace it with Lorraine Jordan & Carolina Road's new A Little Bit of Bluegrass. Jordan and crew aren't there to reinvent the wheel, just to keep it moving smoothly and ensuring an enjoyable ride. Theirs is as clean-running a mountain-bluegrass band as exists on the scene these days, even in the happy presence of serious competitors.

If these guys won't surprise you, they'll satisfy you with expert picking, harmonies and in-the-tradition songs. I am particularly enamored of the sprightly reading of Gram Parsons' "Hickory Wind," usually performed (as in Parsons' own version as well as the Byrds' on their classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo) with reverent homesickness. My second favorite number follows just after that. David Stewart and Brink Brinkman's "Just an Old Penny," which boasts witty lyrics and a melody that sticks in the psychic jukebox, exemplifies bluegrass writing at its most creative and captivating. Lynwood Lunsford's "Molly Rose" doesn't rise quite to that level, but nonetheless it is a pleasure to listen to more than once or twice. There's also....

OK, you get the idea. Much to like lurks in these grooves. Decades after its creation, bluegrass in the right hands continues to bless us with its special joys.