There is, let us be clear, no such word as "tyme." I know because I just checked. I don't know why people do that. There's no such word as "alright" either, but I digress, except to acknowledge that as one who's spent his life working with words as writer and editor, I tend to be crotchety about these things. Otherwise, I have no complaints to lodge against the Borrowed Tyme Band.

Borrowed Tyme showcases tradition-flavored bluegrass by an Indiana-based four-man band. A check at the website, however, yields only three names, one unfamiliar, a testament to the shifting line-ups of outfits within a genre whose rewards are not usually financial ones. The typical bluegrass musician has to be fiercely committed to his or her craft. Even with fresh pickers, though, the bands that survive manage to keep a particular concept intact, unless they make a conscious choice not to.

In bluegrass' formative days in the middle of the last century, some chose a harder sound (Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers), while others took a lighter-edged (though still tradition-based) approach, most famously and influentially Flatt & Scruggs. While it doesn't sound like F&S, Borrowed Tyme can trace its lineage to that school, a point underscored in its rendition of Lester Flatt and Curley Seckler's "No Mother or Dad" (1950).

On the other hand, there's a tasty reading of Carter Stanley's "Think of What You've Done" (1958), serving to remind us yet again of what an exemplary songwriter Ralph's brother was. I am certain that the folksongs "Wild Bill Jones" and "Gold Watch & Chain" were learned from Stanley recordings. The latter is reimagined in a lovely new arrangement, its opening nearly orchestral, its tempo slowed thereafter. In an odd sequencing decision, the album bows in with "Little Bessie," a 19th-century popular song most famously (and depressingly) cut by the Blue Sky Boys in 1939. Its subject is unsparing: the death of a little girl. Those of you who have little girls in your lives are forewarned.

When I first heard "Anita, You're Dreaming" on a 1966 Waylon Jennings album, I recall thinking, "That sure sounds like 'To Ramona.'" It's been a long, long time since "Anita" (written by Jennings and Don Bowman) has shared sonic space with me. Coincidentally, not long afterwards I met the real-life Ramona -- to whose younger sister my brother was engaged at one time -- celebrated in the Bob Dylan song. Anyway, I liked "Anita," and I was delighted to hear this obscure number as the closer on the Clay Hess Band's Just Another Story. It's still a good song, and it still sounds like the song on Another Side of Bob Dylan (released in 1964), not just in the melody but, even more remarkably, in the opening lines.

Hess and his four associates are traditionalists (and capable, assured ones) in their approach but not always in their repertoire, as "Anita" attests. Even more surprising are Carl Perkins' "Restless," a terrific rockabilly tune in its initial incarnation, and "The Field Behind the Plow," written by the late, much-missed Canadian folksinger-songwriter Stan Rogers.

I am confident that all but the youngest bluegrassers know who Perkins was, but Southern bluegrass bands, however rooted their music may be, are more tied to mainstream country than to revival folk. (That's the reason, I suspect, bluegrass lyrics overwhelmingly deliver rote romantic sentiments, in common with the gruel dished out by Nashville hacks.) Admittedly, "Field" is not a typical Rogers seafaring ballad, but it is hardly a standard sentimental homestead-on-the-farm song either. The Clay Hess Band, though, finds the bluegrass in it, making it the outstanding cut on an already pleasing album.

Last time around, Lorraine Jordan & Carolina Road teamed up with onetime country star Eddy Raven for All Grassed Up -- which I reviewed here on 17 June 2017 -- for one of the most refreshing bluegrass recordings of the year, even as Raven heretofore had no observable association with the genre. True Grass Again, this time back to the band's usual line-up, takes the sound into the high-mountain direction at which it has excelled. If anything, this time Jordan and the boys sound as if they have gone militantly retro.

Actually, no "sound as if" is in evidence, when the opening cut, "True Grass" (written by David Stewart), laments the passing of the foundational approach. It's the bluegrass equivalent of Larry Cordle/Larry Shell's "Murder on Music Row," the notorious broadside -- a hit ironically for superstars George Strait and Alan Jackson -- lambasting the crimes latter-day Nashville committed against honkytonk country. "True" even name-checks "Murder." There is, however, still plenty of hardcore bluegrass around; if you demand evidence, check out The Bluegrass Trail, hosted by the near-oldtime Alan Sibley & the Magnolia Ramblers, early Sunday evenings on RFD TV. On the other hand, no question: there is also more experimental stuff whose link to bluegrass stretches the definition to the breaking point.

In any event, the top-drawer singing and picking here will thrill anybody who can't get enough of the real stuff. Along with them come the old-fashioned pieties, secular and religious, to give voice to the songs. Here, the results are not uniformly happy. Rather than quarrel with, for example, the to-me distasteful politics of "Poor Monroe" (about, sigh, those lazy, welfare-chiseling poor people prominent in so many barstool rants), I'll tip you off that it's there. You can deal with it as you choose. Sadly, it seems bluegrass has been enlisted in the culture wars.