Not long ago I watched a multi-episode history of the Grateful Dead. Among those interviewed was a Jerry Garcia ex-wife who happened to remark that she found bluegrass "tiresome." Garcia was both a lifelong fan of bluegrass and a player of it.

I think I loved bluegrass the first time I heard it, on a Flatt & Scruggs syndicated television show, though it took me awhile to admit I was attracted to a sound that seemed so unapologetically rural and frankly uncool. I have never lost my taste for the music. Since I don't think of the broad practice of bluegrass as "tiresome," I guess it's a matter of individual preference. At the same time, if somebody were to ask me if some bluegrass is tiresome, I'd have to reply in the affirmative. Some of it, even when played at a high level of technical skill (and if you can't play at that level, don't play it for anyone but yourself), lacks a certain spark. Bluegrass does not aspire simply to be admired. It wants to be loved.

In his telling Bill Monroe invented bluegrass (though not the name) in the spring and summer of 1939. In the eight decades since then, it's split off into various schools, roughly traditionalists and modernists, and permutations thereof. Back when, some musicians and fans viewed each new development with suspicion but eventually made their peace, and the genre has been better off for it. To us devotees, openness has kept bluegrass from lapsing into artistic paralysis, a state that would pretty much define tiresome.

Gary Brewer & the Kentucky Ramblers are the most attractive kind of traditional band. If they're good at it, traditionalists keep it fresh by reaffirming the music at a deeper level -- in other words, recovering the truths that were already there but that can seem freshly unearthed if the singers and pickers possess the required temperament, knowledge, imagination and nuance. Brewer -- proper name Gary Brewer III -- represents the sixth generation of a family that has been making mountain music in one form or another.

On 40th Anniversary Celebration he and his father and two sons, who comprise the Ramblers, join forces with friends, who include Ralph Stanley II, Dale Ann Bradley, Russell Moore and other bluegrass stars as well as Doug Phelps of the blues & rock Kentucky Headhunters and r&b- influenced country singer T. Graham Brown. The 14 songs are all Brewer creations. He is an able writer attuned to a range of influences, historical and contemporary. His "Johnson City Blues" takes the title of an often-anthologized oldtime classic cut by Clarence Greene in 1928, the difference being that Greene's is a blues, whereas Brewer uses blues in the generic "bummed out" sense.

The strangest song is the closer, "Sally-O," which immediately calls up thoughts of "Milk Cow Blues" in which the farm animal stands in for the singer's sexual partner; in other words it's not a literal cow. Brewer, on the other hand, is singing about an actual cow and a farm boy's infatuation with her. You will either laugh at his naivete or endeavor to refrain from further speculation.

"Blues Down in Kentucky," written in honor of Monroe (never mentioned by name), is a tour de force. I presume that "Home Ain't the Way It Used To Be" is intended to do the same for Merle Haggard, who wrote with power of his hardscrabble childhood in "Mama's Hungry Eyes," "Tulare Dust" and other gut-punching, unsentimental remembrances. If that sets a high bar, Brewer and family surmount it.

Once legendary banjoist J.D. Crowe's back-up band before he retired some years ago, Flashback is at heart a traditional outfit. But it takes a modernist approach to the verities of bluegrass culture, starting with flatpick guitarist and vocalist Richard Bennett. Bennett sings like an Appalachian Gordon Lightfoot; his playing shows the influences of Doc Watson and Tony Rice while at the same time showcasing its distinctive character. The four members of the band (also comprising Don Rigsby, Stuart Wyrick and Curt Chapman) perform at a level of musicianship notable even in the most long-lived of bluegrass ensembles.

Flashback inherits Crowe's taste for material that is not only first-rate but unexpected. The guys immediately get on my good side with the opening cut, Bennett's original ballad "John Henry Holliday." Since childhood I've maintained a fascination with Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and their associates. I revisited them most recently in John Boessenecker's well-researched history Ride the Devil's Herd (2020). Bennett gets it right.

Rigsby's "Will You Fold My Flag for Me?" rewrites the harrowing Civil War-era folksong "Two Soldiers" -- covered by Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mike Seeger and others -- setting it in our time and in Iraq or Afghanistan. Other solidly crafted songs and well-shaped performances follow, with occasional modest incursions by non-bluegrass instruments such as electric guitar, steel and percussion. No matter. For all its modern touches, Flashback seems also to encompass just about everything that is worthwhile about bluegrass then and now. And besides, at moments it imagines -- who would want to miss this? -- what Lightfoot may have been if he'd been raised in the Southern mountains.