Let me put it this way: Letters from Sinners & Strangers is excellent. Let's propose, on second thought, that it's better than that. Since I haven't heard every folk CD released by a new artist in 2007, I can't pretend to pronounce confidently that this is, objectively speaking, the top American album in that particular category. I can state, however, that it is the best one I have heard personally as of late September. I can make the further point that there is no shortage of capable, accomplished recordings -- that describes much of what I hear and review here -- but Letters seems more than that, something like the debut of somebody to whom potentially a lot of people will be paying attention. As they do, say, to Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams.

Neither of whom, I hasten to stress, Eilen (pronounced ee-lin) Jewell much resembles, unlike many of her female roots-oriented contemporaries. Nor, wonder of wonders, is she a singer-songwriter. Yes, she composes some of her own songs, and they are all exceptionally well crafted. But she also is a glorious interpreter. For a couple of examples: while Bob Dylan's "Walking Down the Line" and Eric Andersen's "Dusty Boxcar Wall" have been recorded on a number of occasions since they were written in the 1960s, they have never sounded like this.

I have no doubt that Dylan wrote "Walking" specifically for bluegrass bands to cover, and indeed bluegrass bands from the Dillards onwards have carried it crisply forward. That's perfectly all right, of course, but the results certainly have little to do with actual walking; galloping is more what comes to mind (and of course there is that line about how "my feet'll be flyin'"). Here, Jewell slows down the tempo to a strolling gate. That, with her conversational style of singing, gives the song a warmth and intimacy one could never have anticipated. You have the sense that you're walking with her while she tells you, in an appealingly casual, friendly voice, of her wanderings. It is a knockout.

Actually, every performance -- a dozen in all -- will knock you out. Her young years notwithstanding (she's 20-something), Jewell, born and raised in Boise, Idaho, and now living near Boston, has absorbed a range of roots styles, integrating revival folk with jazz, rockabilly, honkytonk and blues, both downhome and uptown, in a startlingly wise and mature fusion. Her voice is a distinctive instrument, vaguely reminiscent of an especially gifted "girl singer" in a 1940s big band. Peggy Lee comes to mind on Jewell's original "Too Hot to Sleep" and Billie Holiday on her evocation of the dissolute life "High Shelf Booze" ("Well, it's one man on Sunday/Another on Monday/Two on Tuesday afternoon").

"Where They Never Say Your Name," on the other hand, subtly echoes Texas songwriter Butch Hancock's "Boxcars," which for all I know may have been its inspiration. Any smart listener will have figured out, before he or she has read it in the liner notes, that "How Long" is "inspired by the words of Martin Luther King, Jr." Dr. King's oratory often drew on the Old Testament-drenched language of the spirituals. Jewell uses those words, both ancient and King's own, to argue movingly for a new spirit of freedom and a renewed struggle for justice. "In the End," another original, is the best kind of modern folk song -- in other words, one that sounds as if it's been around for at least a hundred years. On the other hand, when a song is a century old, as is the case with "If You Catch Me Stealing," it sounds as immediate as last week.

Jewell sings -- her voice very much to the front always, where it belongs -- backed by a small, skeletal band that, revved up and fiddle set aside, could just as easily drive purely rockabilly rhythms. Her ambitions, though, are broader -- to expand and deepen American musical traditions, turning old into new, the familiar into the unexpected. She succeeds pretty much beyond any reasonable expectation.

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