From some points of view, Songs of the Mountains, Songs of the Plains is an unlikely creation. Not everybody can easily imagine how it came to be. I have an idea, though. In the 1960s I worked my way back from Bob Dylan to Flatt & Scruggs and then to the New Lost City Ramblers. I loved all of this music, though I have to say Dylan has lost his much of his allure in his late career (I doubt I'm alone there). Still, bluegrass and mountain music continue to move me and remain regular presences on my CD player.

Thing of it is, separated by a few years, Dylan and I grew up in Minnesota. I still live there. The Roe Family Singers are Minnesotans, too. The Old Southern Sound (as the late Mike Seeger called the folk music, known to natives as "old time") is nothing any of us grew up with. To get to it from here, you have to either seek it out or stumble into it by accident. And when you hear it at last, it must speak to you. The appeal of a music that emerged from a historical experience radically unlike your own will be something you'll have a hard time explaining to anyone who doesn't feel it.

Somehow, though, the music always seems, at least to some of us, to be bigger than it is. As the nation has grown ever more polarized, I think morosely of the profound and growing distance that divides me politically and culturally from its creators, and I wonder how oldtime music still has the power to move me not quite as anything else does. There are no ready answers, but I suppose the simplest one is the melodies and the stories, so vivid that they lay claim to an imagined other-reality extant inside my head, if nowhere else.

Kim Roe, who with her husband Quillan leads the group, has obviously grappled with the question. She answers it thus: "All of the songs we write and all the traditional music we play are affected by being Minnesotan. We love the old hillbilly music, but we live here in Minnesota in 2018, not back in the hollers of North Carolina in 1918." Well, on initial exposure the Roes sound at home in the latter. They are not a neo-oldtime band in the mold of Old Crow Medicine Show and its imitators. Through a decade and a half of practice and performance, they've perfected a sound anyone who loves mountain music will recognize and embrace.

While purely in the tradition, "Pretty Fair Miss in the Garden," "Ida Red," "Sweet Fern" and the rest are nonetheless fresh and welcome, and not just because as songs they're so good that you could never tire of them; it's also because the Roes' versions are so blissfully inhabited that they'll make your heart skip.

Then you'll notice the occasional original song that, though rooted, and played and sung accordingly, is not Southern and conservative in its sentiments. I think, for one, of the ballad "John the Messenger" (the title inspired by the older "John the Revelator"), about John Brown. Whether judged a terrorist or a freedom fighter (or some weird combination of both), Brown harbored fierce, anachronistic anti-racist sentiments no one can dispute. They figure prominently in this dark reimagining of his days in "bleeding Kansas," as it was known in the 1850s. The Roes admire Brown's moral convictions, if not his murderous fanaticism, in part, I suspect, because of Sen. Hubert Humphrey's heroic, lifelong crusade -- commenced long before it was fashionable -- for civil rights. If you're Minnesotan and liberal, you have carried memories of that with you all of your life.

The album concludes with Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," sung with patriotic and radical sentiments and a single stirring message.