Not many albums grounded in traditional music have "machine" in their titles, but here we are with Carolyn Kendrick's Each Machine. It showcases some Big Ballads, opening with "The Devil's Nine Questions," likely introduced into the mid-century repertoire by Burl Ives though rarely covered these days.

Kendrick, a Californian, sets folk and folkish songs into arrangements that manage to be airy or brooding, or sometimes both at once, but which stray from the strictly traditional as they fall into the hands of a band not armed with the usual instruments or discharged in the usual way; still, they keep the spirit of tradition intact even on those occasions when the lyrics are the work of a single literary poet.

Here we encounter everything from a reworking of a Nepalese pop song (the irresistible "Leela") to two different readings of the American gospel classic "Are You Washed in the Blood?", written in the 1870s and often performed by country acts, perhaps most famously by the legendary brother-harmonizers Ira & Charlie Louvin from whom many bluegrass outfits learned it. (A friend of mine disliked the song for its gruesome Bible-based salvation metaphor. If most listeners paid that kind of literal attention, perhaps it wouldn't be so popular.) It seems an even odder choice than most featured here, but it works.

Kendrick's voice possesses the aura of one you'd expect to hear a ghost or banshee to be singing in a dark wood in the midnight hour, in other words beautiful if chilling. She grounds it in occasional excerpts snatched from the words of famous people speaking over the air, mostly on environmental and feminist themes that drive the narrative with sufficient nuance that none of it feels like a sermon.

A high point is the eerie supernatural murder ballad "Wind and Rain," which may stretch back to Shakespeare's time. As she acknowledges, Kendrick learned it from Jody Stecher's much-admired version. Her reading of the venerable "Sumer (Sing Cuckoo)" quietly carries the listener into a realm of approaching season and awaiting bird life.

Another couple of songs touch on witchcraft/Wicca themes, in which Kendrick apparently has a personal interest. The penultimate of the 13 cuts, the late Jean Ritchie's revered celebration of earth and nature, "Cool of the Day," will fail to move you if you happen to be dead, or maybe lack the values that would render those matters urgent issues on a threatened planet.

As noted, recordings of resurrected traditional material are adjusting to modernity via imaginative arrangements or, when the occasion calls for it, via topical anthems less bluntly expressed than old-fashioned protest songs, yet still effective. Beyond that, the latter employ, movingly, an arcane musical language to address modern ills. Carolyn Kendrick has mastered a complex approach to what 21st-century folk song needs to do. I hope she has more to offer in these dangerous times through which we stumble.