On Even the Sparrow, her debut album, Kansas City-based Kelly Hunt pulls surprises out of the familiar. In common with Rhiannon Giddens and Gillian Welch, she writes original songs out of rural musical styles in circulation long before she was born. The template is oldtime mountain music played in what at first blush seems merely unusually melodic fashion. I mean nothing disrespectful by "merely"; I refer not to the quality of the sound, which is impressive, only to one's expectations. The most immediate blow to such complacency is likely to register when one studies the photo in the CD's interior, on which Hunt is shown clutching a four-string banjo to her chest.

We do not associate four-string banjos with Appalachian music, which boasts a long fifth-peg allegiance. Hunt has found a way to traverse the distance so smoothly that the listener may be unaware, at least initially, that ground has shifted. (Hunt says she found the banjo in a shop where it was identified as the onetime property of a long-forgotten street entertainer who in the 1920s operated a [literal] dog-and-pony show.) None of the dozen cuts is actually as old as comparably superficial exposure may lead one to judge. Indeed, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- as far as I know the first to be written to the Coen Brothers (via Preston Sturges) title -- informs us that the influence of that 2000 film in inspiring a revived folk revival has yet to flag. Yet Hunt's "Brother" itself is an inspiration, not an affectation, a ballad that visits a blood-soaked theme as ancient as the Book of Genesis and Prof. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Sparrow opens with "Across the Great Divide" which, except for the feminine vocal and the banjo, resembles nothing less than a magnificent lost Bob Dylan song from the Freewheelin'/The Times They Are A-Changin' period. In fact better than some he wrote, it amounts to a cry across a gulf of fading love that contains a hint of Irish music in the distance, sort of in the vein of "Boots of Spanish Leather" but with its own brand of crushing musical heartbreak. It's really hard to write at that level -- I know; I've tried -- but "Divide" is the kind of song (testimony may be a more apt word) that demonstrates folk music's constant potential for extraordinary re-creation. I am reminded of Ian Tyson's observation a few years ago, to the effect that while other styles come and go, folk -- in or out of mainstream popularity -- remains. For all its ostensible simplicity, it is in reality complex enough to address all human possibilities.

Modern composers have written more songs about the Civil War than have actually survived from that historic conflict. None, however, is even remotely like "Men of Blue & Grey," a you-didn't-see-this-coming narrative beyond the capacity of a lesser songwriter (though recognizably fact-based to those who know their Civil War/Reconstruction history). Being smart and well-read will not by itself make you a superior artist, of course, but it certainly can help elevate you if you possess the other gifts to carry your ideas aloft. Like Dylan, Hunt is a reader, or so I surmise because if she isn't I have no idea how this song could have come to be.

She claims the voice, too, to deliver the goods to ear and heart. My one complaint is that on some numbers the lyrics are only now and again audible (and multiple listenings turn out not to be a sure solution). At times she treats her singing and phrasing less for a storytelling purpose than as another instrument. This didn't particularly bother me. Even though the package contains no lyric sheet, I thought I'd find the words online. I didn't. (No, Kelly Hunt is not to be confused with Kelley Hunt, who's somebody else.). If that frustrates you as it did me, on the other hand it has the virtue of giving us an excuse to listen again.

Even the Sparrow is already on my best of 2019 list. I'm sure not just mine.