Now in her late 70s, Maria Muldaur first recorded in 1964 as a member of the Even Dozen Jug Band and, a year later, with Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band. She was Maria D'Amato until she married fellow musician Geoff Muldaur (the marriage ended in 1972). She released the first of many solo albums in 1973.

Along with Kweskin and the male Muldaur, she is one of the 1960s folk stars -- Dylan is the most famous, of course -- still performing and recording roots-based music, still producing material eminently worth listening to.

Amazingly, her voice has held out. The evidence of aging is slight and does not affect her characteristically sly, playful delivery of jazz-blues from the 1920s. Let's Get Happy Together looks forward, intentionally or otherwise, to that hopeful time, maybe later this year, when the pandemic has receded and it is possible for people to get together and shed months of fear, tension, isolation and bad memories. A jaunty young New Orleans eight-person group, Tuba Skinny, joins her in the effort.

I confess that my knowledge of the blues of a century ago mostly arises from decades of listening to downhome blues, more a strain of folk music than of early jazz, but I enjoy the latter when I hear it, especially when it's performed as consistently winningly as Muldaur does it. In some senses she reminds me of the late Mike Seeger, who approached Appalachian music initially as an outsider to the culture, but after many years of immersion it felt churlish to think of him as anything but a fully authentic carrier of what he called the Old Southern Sound. Muldaur, who is white, has accomplished the same with vernacular Black traditions.

Moreover, her genetic talent, extensive experience and keen smarts are reflected in an impressive catalogue of recordings, each with its own personality and accent, that are effectively reviewer-proof. If you know her music, you need know no more than that she's still doing it and doing it as exquisitely as ever. By now everything beyond that has been said, and many times over. Beyond that, though, you'll want to be introduced to Tuba Skinny, a perfect accompanying band with shared musical passions and an instinctive understanding of how Muldaur does things.