It's easy to get the impression that traditional bluegrass is approaching its last days. It's not as if some species of cosmic bluegrass -- though that is a real enough phenomenon, if rarer than legend would have it -- were laying waste to the grand castle that Bill Monroe built. In my listening, though, much bluegrass has settled into a mainstream form primed in its way for both modern and traditional tastes. In other words, if you call it one or the other, you're going to have to append an asterisk leading to a footnote that begins, "On the other hand...." In short, "traditional" is ordinarily relative.

In fact, exceptions remain. Lorraine Jordan & Carolina Road, who have been around for about 15 years, are an honorable one. A mandolin player, Jordan is, I believe, in her 80s, still active and musical, and looking back to bluegrass' Appalachian roots for her inspiration. For its own inspiration I Can Go to Them goes for a particular strain of old-fashioned songs, those long gone from popular taste: affirmations of Mother and Jesus. (The album is dedicated to the band members' moms.) I suspect that only a vanishing minority of living Americans have ever heard an un-ironic song on this subject; I'm sure many are unaware that such exist or ever existed.

If a pre-Freudian Mother doesn't consume every cut, the evangelical Jesus does, making this a gospel album with a particular slant. Listeners who know something about early country (and behind it 19th-century popular) music will know how central these sentiments once were to the popular heart and ear. As you would expect, some of the worst songs ever -- the one that always comes to my own mind is Jimmie Rodgers' "Mother, Queen of My Heart," written by Slim Bryant -- are in this vein, demanding a tolerance for treacle too powerful for the contemporary genetic structure to bear.

But if your listening encompasses a regular dose of vernacular songs from other generations, you don't have to be told that some Mother/Jesus songs are moving by any definition. Jordan and her band have rounded up some of the good ones, familiar ("Farther Along," "Brush Arbors") and unfamiliar ("Harp with Golden Strings"), for I Can Go to Them. The title cut's full title, by the way, is "I Cannot Bring Them Back (But I Can Go to Them)," a beautiful mountain-style hymn about departed loved ones. It is also the album's finest moment.

There's nothing to complain about here, unless in the unlikely event that you object to honestly and capably delivered rural music like they used to.

Based in the Carolinas, Deeper Shade of Blue celebrates its two decades' existence and its first album on Pinecastle with Twenty. Except for a pretty-much required gospel tune or two, it's a secular album with its own take on the trad-modern fusion sound of standard bluegrass in the new century. It comprises five bluegrass veterans, of whom banjo player Steve Wilson is best known to me. The sound is as one would expect: crisp and professional, with solid if undramatic material from fellow bluegrassers and from country writers such as Larry Gatlin (the 1975 country-pop hit "Broken Lady") and the late Johnny Russell (the much-covered trad-country standard "Making Plans").

Nobody would call this mountain bluegrass, whose heyday was at least three generations in the rearview mirror behind what Deeper Shade is driving through town. Still, if it is closer to Nashville than to the Blue Ridge Mountains, it manages to sound like one of bluegrass's variant expressions.

If you are among those who think of bluegrass as an acoustic form of country -- which in fact precisely defined it when Bill Monroe debuted it on the Grand Ole Opry stage of a distant era -- you'll catch Deeper Blue's lineage, a tradition of a different but just as authentic kind.