The label Women of the Blues debuts with this outstanding release by 83-year-old Chicago performer Mary Lane, a longtime if under-recorded member of the Windy City scene and an artist who ought to be better known. Don't let her age put you off, by the way. Her voice is in glorious shape. Travelin' Woman is the sort of authentic, authoritative blues that affirms the music's power to evoke human experience at its most elemental.

Lane, not incidentally, is among the last of the blues singers to undertake the fabled pilgrimage from the South to Chicago in the middle of the last century. By the time she left Arkansas in 1957, she had sung on stages with Robert Nighthawk, Joe Hill Louis and Howlin' Wolf, whom she would meet again on Chicago's West Side. Over the decades she worked steadily and recorded the occasional single and (in 1997) an album, Appointment With the Blues. The new one, only her second, is being released in association with a documentary on her life, I Can Only Be Mary Lane.

The album comes about through a collaboration with award-winning producer Jim Tullio, who creates the settings and co-writes the 10 songs, managing the effort with a band consisting of himself, Billy Branch, Corky Siegel, Colin Linden, the late Eddie Shaw and other luminaries. In the fashion of earlier generations of blues singers, Lane improvises the lyrics, grabbing whatever comes into her mind at the moment, as often as not floating images and lyrics that have been a part of the music since its inception.

Mostly -- the exceptions are an r&b number ("Let Me Into Your Heart") and an acoustic downhome blues ("Make Up Your Mind") -- this is the sort of propulsive sound one would have heard in the clubs and joints of the 1950s and '60s, when the city's blues integrated country and city, not much affected by rock 'n' roll and little like the blues-rock that would almost define the genre by the end of the century. To my hearing Chicago's first- and second-generation sound has felt as close to a perfect music as one could ask for in this far-from-perfect world. I was introduced to it via Howlin' Wolf, specifically his "Little Red Rooster" (written by the great Willie Dixon), and later, when I came upon the quote, I would understand what Sam Phillips meant when he pronounced Wolf's music as the place "where the soul of man never dies."

Like her contemporaries, most long gone, Lane speaks blues' earthy yet ethereal truths. In a recent New Yorker profile (March 11) Buddy Guy, who is around Lane's age, expresses the fear that the blues is disappearing with the passing of all but a tiny handful of those who helped shape it in its glory days. Though something still called blues survives, it is barely the same. As long as artists like Lane and Guy remain among us, however, the soul of blues is alive.