Country music eventually emerged from the blur of mainstream popular and Lutheran music -- than which no hymns are drearier -- that washed over me during my youth. It happened in high school when a friend turned me on to some early Johnny Cash albums he'd bought for some reason. (I knew who Cash was but had never given him a thought that I recall.) Casual observers generally think of Cash as a country artist, mostly because he pursued his career in Nashville within the confines of the industry. Even so, he was not much enamored of honkytonk songs, which largely defined country in the era of Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams and beyond. Cash performed rockabilly numbers, which did not particularly cause him to stand out in the late 1950s when rock 'n' roll, then newly emerging, posed a threat to country's very existence. Few artists who struggled to attain or remain in the spotlight failed to incorporate some rockin' rollers in their songlists.

But as I learned more about rural-based music, I understood that Cash's roots were deeper than just about any of his contemporaries'. He was conversant in folk ballads, including as an example one sometimes known (though not by Cash) as "Range of the Buffalo," that shaped Southern and Western vernacular sounds before somebody thought to call them "country" (a designation that did not become universal till decades after the Grand Old Opry's debut in the 1920s). Even the legendary folksong collector Alan Lomax took notice, leading to correspondence between the two, according to Cash biographer Robert Hilburn.

Thus Cash's enduring influence on me: he led me not to a single genre (country) but to two. In due course blues, to which the Rolling Stones' first albums pointed me, joined my listening habit and became the third to spin regularly ever since on my playing devices and inside my mental jukebox. Over time country makes a rarer appearance for a number of reasons, one being an ever diminishing interest in pop (and country is perhaps most accurately defined as pop with a Southern accent) and a disdain for the formulaic dreck oozing in a foul and steady stream from Music City. Far more than other genres I hear, it exudes commercial ambition more distinctly than it does artistic aspiration. Country is overwhelmingly instantly disposable. The intersection of genius, which can be detected from time to time within it, and product therefore is something of a miracle. Though rare, it happens more often than you'd think it would.

In other words, it's rather remarkable that genuine masters have become stars and received airplay in proportion to the hordes of hacks and dunces who also have. You could say it challenges one's sense of the possible. But I could fill -- but won't -- a long paragraph, and more, with those who created music of power, meaning and worth from within the squeaking gears of Nashville's junk machine.

So country remains in my life even today. I need to add, too, that the genre is evolving healthily with a younger generation engaged with what's being called "independent country," which operates on three levels: (1) honkytonk revivalism; (2) what used to be called country-folk, sometimes Americana; and (3) countrified rock. The first superstar of the movement, more or less from the second category, is likely to be Sierra Ferrell, who is gloriously unlike any other figures in the history of country, yet still undeniably one of them.

Ain't Through Honky Tonkin' Yet is a 12-cut excursion into honkytonk revivalism on as high a level of perfection as one could ever hope to encounter. This album goes back a couple of years, but it's new to my hearing. I ordered it a month or two ago after catching Brennen Leigh, whose name I knew only marginally, on a trad-country cable television show. She performed two original songs ("Running Out of Hope, Arkansas" and "Carole with an E," the latter a terrifically charming trucker's reflection), which practically on their own validated the gritty sounds that post-Western swing bands fashioned in working-class bars of the 1940s Southwest. Here is country's classical music: steel guitars, fiddles, hard living, hard partying, hard working, joy, despair, word play and -- far from least -- rueful humor.

Leigh is also a honkytonk vocalist of rare gift. You couldn't ask for anybody better suited to deliver these songs, of which there are none anyone but a misanthrope would judge unlikable. They vary from good to better to, at their peak, a glimpse from earth of hillbilly heaven. In a just world three or four of these would be familiar to every country fan everywhere. Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Loretta Lynn would be proud to have composed "Ain't Through Honky Tonkin' Yet," which in Leigh's treatment speaks boldly to the endurance of country itself, and the hilariously indignant "The Bar Should Say Thanks."

Leigh is out of the country end of the Austin scene, though she grew up in the remote Upper Midwestern territory where I spent my young days and would return in middle age: namely, the shadowy hinterlands between the eastern Dakotas and western Minnesota, possibly as far from the center of the universe as you can find yourself. No doubt that underscores the reality that country is no longer a regional music except in its inception. It also reminds me that for all country's cliches, if you're smart and talented enough -- and Brennen Leigh is those in spades -- you can make something original of them.