For all the hurt they have inflicted on their fellows, not to mention other species and the planet itself, human beings managed to do one thing right: they invented traditional bluegrass. As I listen to inspired instances of such, I am at peace, at least for a few minutes, with the world.

If the recordings under review don't do that for you, chances are you and I don't have much in common. I confess I didn't grow up in Appalachia -- or the Mississippi Delta either -- but the music that came out of those places can all too easily enter into the bloodstream of just about anybody who takes the time to listen and let it in, where it will likely remain. As the wise Dr. Johnson would have put it, when one tires of it, one is tired of life.

Bluegrass is not exactly an old music. It just sounds like it. It emerged after World War II as a novel style of commercial country, though it didn't have a specific name until a few years later. It was the fans who first started calling it "bluegrass" (after patriarch Bill Monroe's band, the Blue Grass Boys) for amusing reasons you can look up in any history of the genre.

Of course it wasn't called "traditional" bluegrass back then. A decade after it first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry stage and other hillbilly venues, other forms of bluegrass, influenced by the folk revival, jazz and pop, entered the scene, the creation of pickers eager to stretch out into fresh territory. In due course Appalachian bluegrass -- at its debut, just a generation distant from the oldtime Southern mountain string bands that provided the template -- seemed to some alarmed listeners to be on the road to extinction.

But it has proved resilient for good reasons. Done right, it is a rawly emotional, melodic, rooted way of playing, singing and telling a story. Two new albums attest to the continuing vitality of the music shaped by Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs, the Osborne Brothers and other foundational acts.

Anyone who knows bluegrass will detect the Stanleys' influence on The Old Home by Larry Efaw & the Bluegrass Mountaineers. The outfit is led by a veteran Ohio-based mandolin picker with four young members early in their careers but already exposing talents well beyond their years. The title tune, a Carter Stanley favorite, is not to be confused with the Dillards' "The Old Home Place," another standard piece expressing bluegrass's obsession with life as it used to be. One could easily compile a multi-box collection of anthems on the theme, by the end of which the listener will likely be permanently cured of the disease of nostalgia.

The band revisits Ralph Stanley's resurrection of William Shakespeare Hays' "I'll Remember You Love in My Prayers," written in the 1870s. According to a biography of Doc Holliday I read many years ago, it was a song one could depend on hearing in any Western saloon of the period.

Much of the material will be known to the longtime bluegrass enthusiast, but none of it will have outworn its welcome, given the near-perfection of these performances. The gospel-harmony stuff risks melting the cold, cold hearts of any heathens who happen to be within hearing distance. (You know who you are, and you have been warned.) As many times as I've heard "I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby," associated with the Louvin Brothers but written by the, shall we say, troubled country composer Autry Inman (whose story surely deserves a ballad of its own), the corny twist ending always puts a smile on my face and, so help me, a tear in my eye.

Jason Barie's Radioactive is another gem, with a slightly more modern playing style but with an emphasis on the heart songs whose sensibility early bluegrass thoroughly colonized. Often called "parlor ballads," such songs defined much of American popular music of the latter 19th century, before ragtime, jazz, blues and other, more rhythmic approaches took over with the onset of the 20th, bringing less sentimentality and more cynicism -- more sex, too -- to lyric writing.

But to this day bluegrass is not a destination for those desiring celebrations of the flesh. Barie and associates -- whose guest list encompasses such notables as Paul Williams, Doyle Lawson and the late Bobby Osborne -- rouse the hearts in heart songs, forcing all of us to acknowledge that, our embrace of coolness and cosmopolitanism aside, we've been there.

Nothing on this lovely disc is unlikable, but not many songs anywhere, in any genre, pack the emotional wallop of the late Tom T. Hall's "I Wish I Loved Somebody Else Not You."