Tracy Nelson has released something like 20 albums since the 1960s. The first to draw more than local attention was the eponymous Mother Earth (herself and her band, taking the title of the Memphis Slim song). It remains among the most listenable of white-blues records of the era, when most of the competition conjured up ineffectual imitations of the genuine article, not quite Pat Boone versus Little Richard but in some excruciating moments close enough. Nelson's vocals -- restrained, conversational, yet rising from a deep place -- attracted the admiration of just about everybody, critic or fan, who heard it.

Stardom wasn't in the cards, as it was for so many of inferior talent, but fortunately, except for a period of inactivity in the 1980s, she has stuck around to cut memorable albums on labels major and minor. Life Don't Miss Nobody is her latest. I am reluctant to rank it among her best, for the simple reason that Nelson's recordings happen to be consistently successful on so many levels. I will permit myself to attest that she sings as affectingly as ever, she selects the usual strong material, and the songs are perfectly arranged. It bears noting that from the outset that she has been more than ordinarily comfortable in the studio.

Stylistically, she's rooted in mid-century blues, r&b, gospel and country, the kind of music she discovered in her youth in Madison, Wisconsin. Even then it was not the sort of pop you were going to hear on AM stations that catered to middle-class white kids. If Elvis's rock 'n' roll seemed subversive enough to their parents, this stuff was even scarier, the product of marginal, heretofore ignorable groups (people of color, hillbillies). Of course, things were changing rapidly, if for the moment invisibly; the music would soon come to dominate much of popular culture and play a role in the changes to come.

Like many of her generation, Nelson began as a folk singer but would shed that identity and turn to sounds that, in fact, bore an organic relationship to America's pre-20th century traditional music. On the current disc she touches base with her folk origins on not one but two versions of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times," first with a band, the second time solo with an acoustic 12-string. Either one is a highlight in a disc crowded with them. I suspect that Nelson intends an overview of the different but linked genres that have influenced her over a long, honorable career as a lover of straightforward American music, of the sort based in the experiences of everyday people, given expression by fellow artists and songwriters like Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Willie Dixon.

A dark masterpiece and a Nelson co-write with Mike Dysinger, the title number warns apocalyptically of the fate that awaits the prideful. There's a sly, spirited duet with Willie Nelson -- I presume no relation -- on Hank's good-natured, swinging "Honky Tonkin'." In an appropriately menacing reading Nelson revisits Sonny Boy Williamson II's murderous fantasy "Your Funeral and My Trial." "There Is Always One More Time," on the other hand, is an overwhelmingly stirring sacred anthem, backed by a choir that means business.

One marvels at how Nelson continues to do this. If there is any decline in the quality of her vocal performance, meaning her ability to dig into the heart of a song and draw forth -- without excess or pomposity -- sentiments that go straight to the soul, it would take better ears than mine to detect it. If you haven't heard Tracy Nelson in a while, here's the album to reintroduce her to you.