In the late 1950s the New Lost City Ramblers introduced oldtime music to the folk revival. The three founding members -- Mike Seeger, Tom Paley and John Cohen -- brought a more authentic iteration to the sound favored by urban performers, many of them smooth-harmony, rather dorky groups that played and sang traditional songs. They did so, however, in a style, conjured up a few years before by the Weavers, that bore little resemblance to the real thing. The NLCR on the other hand carried the fiddle, mandolin and banjo back into the equation along with grassroots vocals. As city boys they learned most of their songs from Appalachian field recordings and commercial 78s waxed in the early days of the recording industry. Nothing sappy was indulged. This was, as one album title insisted, music from the true vine.

According to the standard narrative, oldtime would evolve eventually into what we know as country. Oldtime banjo players such as Uncle Dave Macon, Grandpa Jones and Stringbean would be Opry stars the rest of their lives even as the mainstream veered sharply pop-ward into another genre entirely. Another Opry headliner, mandolin picker Bill Monroe, updated oldtime as bluegrass. You could say that one branch started with the Carter Family, which influenced Monroe, and the other the Carters' contemporary Jimmie Rodgers, essentially the first superstar Southern pop singer, who influenced practically everybody else.

That's why we don't call Nashville's non-bluegrass product "folk," though Hank Williams and some of his contemporaries did for a while in another era of Opry history. In fact, except on the fringes and sometimes in the so-called independent country movement, the modern stuff bears little resemblance to anything rural/mountain people were singing a century ago.

If you're curious about what kind of sound you might have heard in the first decade or two as Southerners were feeling their way to a music that would make some of them rich, the Clover Valley Boys will show you how they did it. Already in the 1920s working musicians were finding a way to fuse outside genres with the ones they'd grown up with. In the early days there was, of course, a significant representation of old-time songs and fiddle tunes. Then pop songs began to shape the product as the music grew to become something that existed to sell massive quantities of records. Eventually, it served as a lucrative division of what was known as -- with no sentimentality or apology whatever -- the "music industry."

The Clover Valley Boys are a neo-oldtime outfit, with roots in the Deep South and New Orleans, though, in not quite in the usual mold. Most oldtime bands can't help bringing modernism into the sound. In fact, the most prominent "oldtime" group today is Old Crow Medicine Show, which has incorporated some electric instruments and mostly original material (and done so appealingly, I might add). To my ears -- some may dispute this; their arguments will escape me -- these guys have gone back to the original model and replicated it as closely as possible.

If you're a veteran listener of American music, you may recoil at the notion. You shouldn't. This album is eminently listenable, even joyful. It's so good that it civilizes even "Treasures Untold," the sort of exercise in romantic excess that has caused me to be a longtime avoider of Jimmie Rodgers; this "Treasures" is something like a pleasure. Other cuts resurrect rural folk songs such as "Going to Georgia" and "Ramshackle Shack" (which I associate with North Carolina stringband legend J.E. Mainer, though via error the track is misidentified as "Memphis Stomp" in the table of contents). At the other extreme is the opener "Bum Bum Blues" -- warm, funny and defined by comic-book harmony.

The Carter Family's "Pretty Raindrops," a tearful parlor ballad, links 19th-century popular song to traditional arrangement (a description that applies to much of the Family's repertoire). "Blue Ridge Mountain Blues" is a 1920s-composed pop version of something with a number of antecedents in more authentic expression. As a song idea it's nothing particularly inspired, but it's pleasantly done here. The closer, however, is a moving reading of a "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" variant. I haven't heard that song, a favorite of mine when I was a kid, in many years, but the Clovers' reading is a very fine one indeed.

The album assembles folk, blues, fiddle pieces, swing and vintage pop to remind us that the stew thus cooked would be served up one day as country music. It takes much less a leap of taste or imagination to get from here to whatever is playing at the Opry tonight.

Or you could say the Clovers are letting us know what we've missed in the end. The music, for all kinds of reasons good and bad, could not have remained like this forever. That said, nothing here isn't working to elevate listeners' gratification and happiness. We're hearing the old turned new by staying resolutely old. We're taking a thrilling journey into a lost world.