Though hardly a household name, Peter Rowan is well known as an American roots artist to those versed in bluegrass and folk. These genres comprise the bulk of his output over a dizzying number of albums released under his own name or in his association with others (including a period in the mid-1960s as a Blue Grass Boy in Bill Monroe's band, during which he and Monroe co-wrote the magnificent "Walls of Time"). In earlier years Rowan occasionally stretched into rock, pop, country and even conjunto, but for some while now he seems content to stick to the two styles that define his most memorable recordings.

Calling You from My Mountain follows from his 2018 Carter Stanley's Eyes, also on the esteemed Rebel label, its catalogue boasting some of the strongest traditional bluegrass preserved on wax or its modern-day equivalent. I loved Eyes, impressive even to this 'grass fan of mumbledy-mumbledy years. If I may judge from the reviews, that response was hardly mine alone. Rowan is too experienced and imaginative an artist ever to sound more than passingly like anybody else, and in the end Eyes is at its core oldtime bluegrass as filtered through Rowan's striking sensibility. Which is why, of course, we who are attracted to his sound have his albums in our collections. In any case, it's a stunner. If you missed it at the time, it's not too late to claim it.

In the liner notes to the new release Rowan reports that he had a generally like-minded sequel, inspired in part by Hank Williams' Luke the Drifter series, in mind. Then the COVID epidemic stalled the project. When Rowan was ready to enter a Nashville studio, little of the original concept remained. Good thing, though, his original "The Song That Made Hank Williams Dance" survived, possibly the only warm-hearted profile of the woman whose volatile relationship with Hank inspired all those evocations of cheatin', heartbreak and suicidal sentiment. Such sympathy for the notorious Audrey is not a tact Hank's biographers take (though in fairness most aren't soft on Hank either), but Rowan understands that even the worst romantic associations start out as giddy adventures. There was a time, he reminds us, when Hank and Audrey weren't suffering.

Calling opens with an arrangement of Woody Guthrie's "New York Town," in fact Woody's lyrics set to the melody Blind Lemon Jefferson applied to "One Dime Blues." But Rowan's version doesn't sound like that at all. After multiple listenings I began hearing another melody, which connected with the old hobo anthem "Cannon Ball Blues," sometimes called "Solid Gone." A dozen cuts follow, the bulk of them originals but peppered with others from Monroe, Tex Logan, the Carter Family and Lightnin' Hopkins.

The last, a surprising choice if it had come from just about anybody but Rowan, is the legendary Houston bluesman's variant of the Texas prison song "Ain't No More Cane on This Brazos." Hopkins titled it "Penitentiary Blues (Big Brazos)," and so does Rowan. It is difficult to imagine it in a bluegrass arrangement, and Rowan doesn't even try. It's good, though, befitting Crying's overall approach, which is not to fuse bluegrass and folk songs but to let them repose comfortably beside each other. Hopkins's one other bluegrass link, a little-known one, was his close if unlikely friendship with Uncle Josh Graves, Flatt & Scruggs' celebrated dobro player.

Some of the album reflects the continuing influence on Rowan's politics of the mid-century revival's worldview -- liberal to leftwing -- on our deeply messed-up nation and world. Perhaps owing to the effects of maturity or maybe just despair at how hopeless our current ills seem, Rowan resists the temptation to preach. His anti-war "The Red, the White and the Blue," for example, is far removed in tone from its Dylan equivalents "Masters of War" and "With God on Our Side." Rather, Rowan chooses sorrow and compassion over rage, and he looks on from something like a religious-spiritual perspective. That distances him from his subject while paradoxically engaging him with it on another, more profound level.

Again, he is not preaching, but if you hear him, he will be moving you. He means it when he says he's calling you from his mountain.