Love 'em or tell 'em to keep on walking, singer-songwriters are an un-ignorable presence on the 21st-century pop-music landscape. They haven't been a novelty since the mid- to latter 1960s. After such early folk heroes of original song-creation as Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Gordon Lightfoot, artists like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen fashioned a genre only dimly related to folk music. Today relatively few singer-songwriters base their work on anything other than what they learned from others in the trade. Singing-songwriting is a genre onto itself, albeit not a deeply rooted one in the hands of most.

In Valley of the Bones Jane Kramer visits the sort of musical territory first explored in early Mitchell -- in short, autobiographical rumination set to largely acoustic arrangements -- and continues today, most prominently, in Patty Griffin, Mary Chapin Carpenter and others. A decent representation of the genre, Kramer's boasts a deceptively simple, undeniably lovely arrangement courtesy of Adam Johnson, with Kramer and Chris Rosser listed as co-producers. Two of the cuts -- their titles "Waffle House Song" and "I'll See Your Crazy and Raise You Mine" give the game away -- are in debt to the country-pop one hears, at least if one is listening, on country radio these days. The title song, which is well conceived and genuinely moving, evokes the passing of loved ones.

To be frank, my own tastes don't run to most of what Valley offers, but hey, that's just me. After decades of listening I know what I want to hear, and my appetite for confessional writing of this kind was exhausted long ago. But if self-focused singer-songwriters are what you want to hear, you might check out Jane Kramer, an able and honorable practitioner.

Melissa Ruth adapts a more adventurous approach on Meteor, a skeletal blues-/rootsy rock recording with adult lyrics taken up with alcohol, sex, pending violence and Southern landscapes. She doesn't resemble anybody else in particular, unless perhaps in the broadest sense an eccentric on the order of the late JJ Cale. Conceivably, her lyrics are what might be expelled from the mouth and the imagination of a terser, earthier, more rural Leonard Cohen, if that makes any sense at all. You may detect other influences, especially when Ruth shows up on occasion in nightclub-chanteuse guise. In any event, you pay attention to her always, and her stark narratives never fail to excite and unnerve.

In her day job Ruth is an Oregon school teacher, not the hard-bitten barfly Meteor would lead you to believe. That means, probably, that we should not mistake her songs for autobiography; I surmise, in other words, that they are not ripped from life. Still, she tells these bleak tales with something approximating genuine conviction. She definitely stands out, if you can say that of a shadow in darkness, which is the visual image of her that the album projects.

Melissa Ruth is the most original singer-songwriter I've heard in recent memory. She claims that her music is "doo-wop twang," more a witty metaphor than an accurate description of it. For one thing, there's no doo-wop, and for another, this isn't country. Pretty damn good, though.