Like most people, when I'm feeling anxious or sad, I prefer to listen to downbeat songs. And when I'm happy, I prefer to listen to downbeat songs. Not that there are no upbeat songs for all occasions, but they're scarcer than you'd think. Funny songs, of course, fall into a category of their own.

Every Bit of Me is mostly happy songs, mostly written by Ali Shumate with Donna Ulisse, the latter a leading performer and composer on the current bluegrass scene. Beyond that, in the fashion of Alison Krauss, a huge influence on a generation engaged with a genre that was once nearly entirely male-occupied, Shumate is engaged with a strain that at one time would have seemed a contradiction in terms: bluegrass-pop. It's the sound of a South that is more Florida (where Shumate lives) than West Virginia (where she was born). These days pop sounds are ubiquitously incorporated into bluegrass, formerly imagined as a purer form of country music than its mainstream counterpart. So much so, in fact, that few appear even to notice anymore.

Shumate, a recent parent, is understandably in a positive state of mind, and her mood is reflected in some of the material. She sings these and other sentiments to a classic bluegrass acoustic string band, un-augmented (as a few current bands are) by piano, drums or electric guitar. Her vocals are pitch-perfect, and the overall sound is clean, slick and easy to like.

To my hearing the most interesting songs are those in which she steps outside her natural habitat, though as she does so it must be said that "Jezebel" isn't that far removed from Dolly Parton's "Jolene." "Mama's Bible," whose title gets close to parodic (a country equivalent might be "Drunk & Cheatin'"), nonetheless will get to you even if you've heard it all before, just as it's still possible for a bluegrass composer to do that to you with a tear-sodden lament for the old home place.

If a modernist in some ways, Gena Britt, a banjo picker, is closer to a downhome approach. At least she has an appetite for heartbreak, death and hard times -- well, at least in her choice of songs. Chronicle nods to most of the traditional bases, and she sings in an expressive, out-of-the-ordinary voice with a light vibrato. You wouldn't mistake her for anybody else.

Britt's most obvious inspiration is the exquisite Dale Ann Bradley, who appears as a guest on one cut. She sings with Bradley in the all-female bluegrass outfit Sister Sadie. Sometimes, for all its virtues, Sister Sadie's performance is stronger than its material, but that is not the case here, where the songs on the whole are thoughtfully selected and fairly wide-ranging in their subject matter. While meant to comfort, for one example, Mindy Smith's "Come to Jesus" in Britt's handling manages to be every bit as spooky -- and I mean that in the fashion of a ghost story -- as reassuring. It grips your attention, and it doesn't require too much of a leap of imagination to consider what the late high-lonesome Kentucky balladeer Roscoe Holcomb might have done with it: risk scaring listeners to death, I would guess. As it is, Britt's reading engrosses and unnerves in a way that only the most unsparing gospel music can touch.

Here and there, some of bluegrass' present-day finest, among them Brooke Aldridge, Alecia Nugent, Marty Raybon and Alan Bibey, show up to contribute to the proceedings. The result is an album of unexpected distinctiveness and power.