The singing partnership of Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) and Alice Gerrard helped bring oldtime music to a generation of non-Appalachians who had neither heard it nor even (in most instances) heard of it. In 1954 Dickens, a member of a West Virginia family that had relocated to Baltimore for economic reasons, met the young Mike Seeger and educated him in the performance of mountain songs. Seeger -- who in later years would marry Gerrard, though the union would not last -- went on to co-found the hugely influential New Lost City Ramblers, the first urban hillbilly string band and an inspiration to Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder and the Grateful Dead, among others.

As Hazel & Alice (a California transplant) the duo would record bluegrass albums when the genre was almost entirely the domain of male musicians. I reviewed a sterling tribute recording, Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands' The Hazel & Alice Sessions, in this space on 27 February 2016.

While Gerrard is still more or less active, it is likely that Sing Me Back Home is the last we'll hear from the fabled duo. The 19 songs were preserved on tape from informal jams in Gerrard's living room, subsequently cleaned up by the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and now released by the roots label Free Dirt. This is not a bluegrass album, though songs from Jim & Jesse, Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley appear here in arrangements that owe an obvious debt to the Carter Family, also represented. Those who know bluegrass, oldtime and early country will recognize the songs. A couple of 1960s country hits, folk-flavored compositions by Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton, round out the proceedings. Hazel & Alice's arrangements reinvigorate all of them and send them off shining a new light.

The two women keep their cool amid occasional living-room chaos (husbands, children, slamming doors), not to mention occasional vocal misfires, garbled lyrics, coughs, giggles and not-quite-in tune instruments. Some cuts come through unscathed, such as the Carter standard "Tell Me That You Love Me" (aka "We Parted by the Riverside"), but I can attest from numerous listenings that one soon accommodates oneself to the imperfections. While Hazel & Alice were hardcore traditionalists whose influences are audible to the informed fan, they are unlikely to be mistaken for anybody else.

Unless you know deep-Appalachian church music, Gone Away With a Friend will be a revelation to you. Recorded in Haysi, Virginia, in one evening, it documents the austere hymn singing of Frank Newsome, onetime coal miner and now minister of Little David Old Regular Baptist Church. The late Ralph Stanley was a parishioner. In fact, Stanley was so enamored of Newsome's unaccompanied singing -- Old Regular Baptists forbid the use of instruments in church -- that he chose him to open Stanley's annual Hills of Home Festival.

Stanley himself and the late Kentucky balladeer Roscoe Holcomb were products of the same vocal tradition (sometimes called the "high lonesome sound"). Welling up from an existential darkness and expressed at a level of intensity unimaginable to most listeners of popular music, it is only sketchily documented on albums on specialty labels. Yet, while hardly meant for casual listening, everything on Gone -- comprising 11 hymns and one sermon -- is almost unnervingly stirring.

Mostly these are old hymns, new to those not raised in the faith. Some trace their origins to Great Britain, while two ("Go Rest High on That Mountain" and "Long Black Train") were country hits within recent memory -- admittedly written by two composers, Vince Gill and Josh Turner respectively, who were intimately versed in the style. If none of this is blues by any definition, only the rawest, most keenly, almost brutally, felt downhome blues plumbs comparable depths. Well, that and Roscoe Holcomb singing "The Wandering Boy."

This is not your ordinary anything. Many thanks to Free Dirt for making it available to us.