My first concentrated exposure to the ballad repertoire was the late Doc Watson's Home Again! (Vanguard, 1966). To this day it remains among the most treasured of my albums of pure oldtime folk music. It wasn't just that it introduced me to something that would travel with me the rest of my life, though that was certainly part of it. It was that these venerable story-songs felt instantly like a profound truth, able to shake the soul and dwell forevermore within the heart.

Martin Simpson & Thomm Jutz's Nothing But Green Willow highlights ballads that were born in Britain and sailed to North America, in this instance Appalachia, to find new life, here thanks to English folksong scholars who in 1916 encountered the singing of two rural North Carolina women, Mary Sands and Jane Gentry, who -- loving the "ballets" they had grown up with -- saved scores of them. Cecil Sharp and Maude Karpeles had collected ballads in rural England but only lately learned that the songs survived intact in the Southern Mountains. Soon, these and other pieces were written down in Sharp's classic English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians (1917). I am pleased to observe that Home Again! shares two cuts -- "Pretty Saro" and "Geordie" ("Georgie" in Watson's version) -- with Green Willow.

Simpson (a guitarist prominent on the British folk scene) and Jutz (born in Germany, trained academically in Appalachian music and lore) are fully in charge of three of the 13 cuts. On the other 10, they accompany and fashion arrangements for guest vocalists, roots-influenced professionals from both sides of the pond. Those who follow current English folk will recognize the likes of Fay Hield, Seth Lakeman, Angela Morrison and more. The American participants are mostly Nashville sorts, including bluegrass and country figures such as Tim O'Brien, Tammy Rogers and Dale Ann Bradley. Technically, "Jacob's Ladder" is a spiritual, not a ballad, but Bradley (with Blue Highway's Tim Stafford) gives no sane listener any reason or right to complain (to quote an American ballad not recorded here).

Besides acoustic guitars, a fiddle or a banjo or a slide shows up infrequently to fill out the sound, sparely but affectingly. Only one contributor, Odessa Settles, is new to me, and I am grateful to make her acquaintance. The name led me to a web search and a video of her performing "Oh Freedom" in the most compelling reading I've heard since Odetta's. I learn that she's a Nashville-based gospel singer with a particular interest in early Black-American music. Here she cuts a memorable "Pretty Saro."

There are no second-rate cuts to be endured, only fine work from the soulful and informed. Some cuts stood out to me, for no particular reason than that they struck a chord, but you can decide upon your own favorites. I will say, however, that Cara Dillon's reading of "Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies" does nothing to change my impression that the universe holds few songs more perfect. As Dr. Johnson might have said, to tire of it and its companions is to tire of life.