Recently, for the benefit of those relative few who care about such matters, the Grammys announced the Best Folk Album of the past year. I had never heard of it, likewise the artist responsible. When I sought out further information, I was unsurprised to learn that the artist is a young singer-songwriter who, from available evidence, has probably never heard an actual folk song in her life. (Her stated influences, moreover, do not include a single folk musician, even by broad definition.) She does play an acoustic guitar, which I guess is all it takes to be a folk singer these days.

San Francisco-based Amelia Hogan, who effectively disqualified herself from the competition by being an actual folk singer (once upon a time defined as a performer whose repertoire consists of traditional and trad-influenced material), is the creator of Taking Flight. To those who treasure the old songs and ballads of England, Ireland and Scotland, Flight is likely to be heard as a brilliantly conceived celebration of a communal sound far removed from the inward-gazing effusions of those whose art as often as not amounts to a sour narcissism: me music as opposed to people's music.

On one level, of course, traditional songs and tunes live among us dwellers in the 21st century as visitors from a parallel reality where the characters and situations, if generally recognizable, are set in a landscape removed from our own. The heroes and villains speak differently, wear unfashionable clothes and answer to often outdated social and legal codes; yet they behave like your neighbors, maybe even you. The songs that tell their stories claim our emotions. The violence is disturbing, many of the jokes are still funny, and romance and sex correlate in most (not all) ways with our own experiences of them. Folk songs can feel like dreams at times, at others like novels written in other centuries or distant decades. Even so, if you let them, they can seem more real than the often sorry world through which we tread in our dreary daily existence. If they do not sugarcoat the past -- and they don't -- they give you some idea what it was like to be there, in other words to be human in another world.

Naturally, it goes without saying, Taking Flight doesn't attempt to imitate performance styles captured in the early years of the last century, when a generation of collecting heroes was active throughout the British isles trying to rescue an apparently vanishing body of home-made songs. It does, however, preserve their spirit through Hogan's remarkably evocative vocals and the nuanced instrumental arrangements that carry them. The strong selection of venerable numbers ("Lark in the Clear Air," "The Old Churchyard," "Twa Corbies," "What Will Do When We Have No Money" and more) is matched by modern covers composed by writers immersed in the tradition, including Anais Mitchell, Jez Lowe, Laurie Lewis and David Francey. The result is a powerful blend of obscure and familiar.

In these circumstances the concept of "familiar" is decidedly relative. I was introduced to English folk music in the 1960s via the Watersons' classic Frost & Fire recording. I went on to encounter Scottish music through the likes of Ewan MacColl and Bert Jansch (two very different approaches), the Irish equivalent through the Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. From there it was on to field recordings, electric folk (Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span) and the likes of Martin Carthy, Nic Jones and Niamh Parsons, as well as the current generation of revivalists across the pond.

Thus, in the present instance I find myself familiar with the old stuff, while the new selections surprise -- and delight -- me. Hogan knows a good song when she hears it, whether it's been around for a while or only pretends it's been.

You could say the same of Hogan, I suppose -- rockist critics habitually dismiss folk singers on those grounds (that's where the derisive term "folkies" comes from) -- but even as she rummages in other centuries, there is more lived life here than you'll find in a thousand rock or pop recordings. Hogan is a master, and Taking Flight is a masterpiece.