The other Monday, when the UPS guy dropped off a package I wasn't anticipating, I eye-balled it with suspicion before transferring it from the front porch into the living room. Judging from the dimensions, I guessed it contained a bunch of CDs, except that the review discs usually arrive one inside a package at a time, three or four at a rare maximum. On opening, I found eight albums, six by Eden & John's East River String Band, two the work of associated projects.

A brief accompanying note from bandleader John Heneghan informed me that as he was reading my latest book, he learned of my interest in folk and roots music and of my Rambles.NET gig. Being the most recently issued, Live at the Brooklyn Folk Festival was the first I listened to.

Drawing on various folk, blues and vintage-pop traditions, Heneghan and partner Eden Brower have joined with cartoonist/musician Robert Crumb (who illustrates the covers of all their releases except this one) and a revolving group of associates, some more frequently in attendance than others, to keep Eden & John's East River String Band a going operation, to conclude only "at the end of time," we're earnestly assured. Some names will be known to those conversant in the trad-folk scene: Dom Flemons (an original Carolina Chocolate Drop), Eli Smith (Down Hill Strugglers, an architect of the newly released, acclaimed box set The Harry Smith B-Sides), Pat Conte (ethnomusicologist, 78 collector and compiler) and more.

Like Crumb, Heneghan, who lives in Manhattan's East Village, is an avid gatherer of first- and second-generation vinyl. It is from those primary sources that he and Brower build their repertoire, which covers material familiar to me (blues, hillbilly) and not so familiar (pop, novelty) from the 1920s and '30s. This is the sort of broad musical approach jug bands embraced in their heyday in the 20th century's third decade. Yet the East River String Band, if jugband-like, does not amount to a revival of same in the way Jim Kweskin's did during the folk revival. For all their eclecticism, the members assemble a pan-genre sound that feels remarkably, also oddly, logical and integrated.

They capture the unhinged spirit of the old music, the wild, anarchic quality that most revivalists, more focused on modern notions of vocal and instrumental perfection, miss. Without imitating the originals exactly, they celebrate the raggy, excitable, absurd and glandular. On the other hand, Brower is a splendid country-blues vocalist who is unsettlingly dark one moment, goofily playful the next. In her treatment the real deal goes down; yet she is never anybody but her distinctive, charismatic self. When not radically reinvented, the rural blues resists fully credible reconstruction across this distance in time and culture. With the help of her gifted bandmates, though, Brower burrows into the blues' roots to cook them up as satisfyingly as one can want. Which is to say the more you hear her singing, the more you hear there.

If you're a blues geek, the best-known song is the sly Memphis Minnie classic "Me & My Chauffeur Blues," on which improbably Brower holds her own. (Not to demean her in any way; the original is so definitive that only an unusual degree of self confidence, deserved or delusional, would lead another artist to attempt it.) On the other hand, if I've heard "Skinny Leg Blues" before, I don't remember it, at least this way. This one made me laugh in its (I guess you'd call it) disingenuous eroticism, in other words a dizzyingly bawdy recitation delivered by a hilariously faux innocent. From "Fare Thee Well," less excitingly but no less interestingly to the nerd in me, I learned where Lead Belly got the refrain he uses in "Titanic."

The East River String Band is eminently worth seeking out. If you elect to do so, I urge you to start your exploration here. The interaction of band and audience makes this recording a particularly joyous experience. You'll wish you'd been there, but this is the next best thing, and there's plenty more where it came from.