Reviewing Pernille Quigg's Driftwood -- favorably -- in this space on 11 January 2014, I observed that it "feels as if dispatched through a time portal from 1963." Pernille Quigg grew up in Denmark enamored of the popular American folk music of the early 1960s. In her adult life she met and married Scottish musician Stephen Quigg, a member of the McCalmans folk group. Since 2013 the two have toured as a duo, and River of Time is their first album.

As a kid I was exposed to something identified as "folk music" from AM radio, where I heard the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, the Limeliters and comparable groups, pleasant enough but no more than background sounds. Folk music didn't register until I happened to see Bob Dylan on television -- he was singing "Only a Pawn in Their Game" -- and found myself thrilled and shaken. After buying every Dylan album then available, I went on to explore Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and the New Lost City Ramblers, having read that they'd influenced Dylan. I say this to establish that I came to folk from a rather different place from the one represented on River.

As I've listened to revival music from that era, I have come to think of it as occurring on three levels. The most visible was the one that presented folk as a non-rock 'n' roll pop genre, with no attention paid to traditional performance requirements. That was the stuff on AM radio. On the other extreme were artists striving toward some notion of authenticity, inspired by Harry Smith's seminal Anthology of American Folk Music as well as Library of Congress field recordings of balladeers, downhome bluesmen and mountain string bands. This is where Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Hedy West, Mike Seeger and the like operated.

There was also an approach, a third level that is the Quiggs' proximate inspiration, that split the difference between these. It sought to capture an audience that transcended the coffeehouse crowd but without compromising itself excessively either. In other words, a smoother version of folk music that yet retained folk's integrity. Here, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, Judy Collins and like acts lived and worked. At its most successful such an approach appropriated the charms of both folk and pop. Though Dylan is usually thought of as the inventor of folk-rock, folk-rock as a popular genre in the later 1960s actually had its roots in this hybrid style.

Like Pernille's solo album before it, River is a whole lot like 1963 as it played in the better popular folk music of Scotland. There's Pernille's limpid voice, and then there's Stephen's rolling tenor, assured as a wave on clear water. There are her guitar and his banjo and guitar. The 15 songs, even the unfamiliar ones, feel as if you've always known them. Well, some you probably have, notably the Pete Seeger warhorse "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" -- the one number that hasn't aged well. Judging from the curtly abridged version Seeger was singing by the 1960s, I gather that even he had wearied of it.

Still, no reasonable listener could complain about those gorgeous harmonies on an unaccompanied "Johnny's Gone to Hilo," a standout cut, learned (the notes attest) from the singing of the Clancys & Makem. In fact, they got it from the singing of their friend Paul Clayton, a once-influential but now nearly forgotten revival figure. The often-covered Irish traditional "She Moved Through the Fair" also affords the couple a chance to sing without instruments, manifestly a special strength of theirs. Stephen delivers an impassioned reading of the transport ballad "Jamie Raeburn," which from the first time I heard it (on a long-ago Ewan MacColl LP) has struck me as among the saddest songs ever conceived.

Other offerings include "Up the Noran Water," which sounds a century or two older than it is, and the World War I-era lament "Only Remembered." Others -- two by Matt McGinn, one each by Colum Sands and Gordon Menzies -- are new to me but apparently not to the audiences the Quiggs entertain. According to the liner notes, Alan Bell's "Bread & Fishes," which I hadn't heard till now either, "became a regular song at folk clubs and has often been mistaken for a traditional song." Four cuts are Pernille originals, some expressing the openly left-of-center political sensibility integral to the revival, one of whose admirable qualities was its keen social conscience.

River of Time and Stephen & Pernille Quigg exist a universe apart from the quasi-orchestral music marketed as "Celtic" in the 1970s and '80s. Each approach -- the Quiggs's back-to-basics one, the more complex (you might say sophisticated) one -- borrows from authenticity what it deems important and disregards the rest. Nothing should call us to judge one better or worse than the other. The Quiggs, who know what they want to do, do it just fine.