Somehow I missed the first volume of True Blues (issued in 2013), but it is at least some comfort that the sequel found its way to my ears. Though I love blues in almost all its varieties, I am rendered critically defenseless when up against the downhome kind if capably performed, which usually means fiercely, with emotions laid bare amid elements that evince the genre's grounding in 19th-century ballads, work songs and spirituals (the last notwithstanding the once-ubiquitous Southern superstition that to play blues is to confess allegiance to Satan).

In recent decades some younger Black artists have resurrected downhome blues and adjacent sounds. It's certainly not improper to define them as bluesmen. Technically, though, you can also say they're songsters, since they demonstrate a willingness to wander, when so inclined, outside the boundaries into adjoining territory. The professional designation "blues singer," more or less an invention of the early recording industry, came to be when the labels' a&r men learned a business lesson: that blues discs cut by artists who outside the studio had a broader repertoire found particular favor among the emerging customer base. For the historically minded Fight On! recaptures the essence of an era when the blues was evolving into an independent organism whose musical parents remained vivid in their progeny's memory.

Blues in its first generation has been voluminously documented in countless reissues, along with discs celebrating songsters such as Lead Belly and Mississippi John Hurt. These included some of the most enduring figures in American folk music. If one is to retrace the path, one had better know how to travel it. Seasoned musical ramblers Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Guy Davis hold their own as guitarists, vocalists, and authorities of force and power, not to mention profound immersion in the traditions they bring to listeners in the 21st century. Davis's reimagining of "Shake Sugaree" (usually associated with the legendary Elizabeth Cotten) -- he retitles it "Everything I Got Is Done in Pawn" -- thrills the soul.

This will come as no surprise to those who have heard them before. Still, I should add that the Guy Davis who appears here is a tougher, grittier case than the one I used to hear on his acoustic singer-songwriter recordings, where he took an approach that sometimes struck me as less than fully formed. Here Davis comes across as the equal of any living competitor, which means fellow masters Harris and Hart. The three share the belief that there is truth yet to be uncovered in the oldtime tunes. It's a proposition they validate definitively.

The nine tracks offer up the three in individual performances, which is to say they're not joined in a trio. Instead, they're fashioning separate perspectives on rural Black music from the early decades of the last century, plus occasional in-the-tradition originals such as Harris's "What's That I Smell?" -- a crude but funny piece derived from a New Orleans street song. At the opposite extreme is Harris's luminous reading of the spiritual "We are Almost Down to the Shore." For his part Hart has his own "If Blues was Money" and two standards, "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues" and "Highway 61," which are so exquisitely conceived and executed that if you aren't careful, they may leave you with the impression that you haven't heard them before.

There is, alas, a criticism to be registered. As an album Fight On! is a bare 27 minutes long. It passes so quickly that listeners may be left wondering if they were dreaming. While it lasts, however, it's a beautiful dream.