I reviewed the Whitetop Mountain Band's 2008 album Loafer's Dream, on the since-vanished Mountain Roads label, in this space on 14 March 2009. The WMB, at its core a family ensemble led by fiddler Thornton Spencer and his multi-instrumentalist wife Emily, also featured the Spencers' teenaged daughter Martha. From Grayson County in southwestern Virginia, the outfit was as authentic as one could wish, in other words a local product as opposed to an urban revival group. Its handling of traditional tunes and songs, bluegrass and hard-core country was masterly and electrifying.

Last year Thornton Spencer passed on, though not before contributing to Martha's eponymous debut solo release, specifically on "Ruby," a traditional song out of the "Reuben's Train" cluster as reworked by Cousin Emmy and later arranged to spectacular effect by the Osborne Brothers in the mid-1950s. Happily, Martha preserves the Spencer sound, while this time around composing half of the 14 cuts. "Country," albeit of a kind that hasn't been aired on what passes for country radio in decades, defines many of the numbers. Meanwhile, a robust oldtime mountain sensibility pervades just about everywhere, and the instruments are nearly all acoustic and stringed.

Spencer's singing is sweetly, gloriously Appalachian, reminiscent of Dolly Parton's, able to communicate humor and sorrow at equal levels of skill and conviction. Combine that with first-rate material, and you have one of the year's most exciting Southern folk/country recordings. Spencer's own songs highlight her impressive writing talents, opening the set with "Blue Ridge Mountain Lullaby," a poignant testament to her family's culturally rooted yet personal musical tradition. "Tree of Heaven" boasts a melody that feels as if it were more than a century old, and it may be for all I know, though I haven't been able to figure out where I've heard it before. The narrative could be out of a sad Carter Family ballad of the sort that would evoke love, parting, death and hope of reunion on the other side.

She resurrects some seldom-heard material from others, for example Wynn Stewart's heart song "Wishful Thinking" and Bill Carlisle's rambunctious "No Help Wanted." On Claude Demetrius's "Hard Headed Woman" she shows off her rockabilly chops. Through it all she has the backing of a more than able set of pickers, among them guitarist/bassist Frank Rische, fiddler Billy Hurt Jr., guitarist/banjoist Alex Leach and other graduates of the old school. Hearing this album in these dispiriting, mendacious times, I felt my hopes surging, powered by joy in the thought that truthful music is still there to be performed, celebrated and carried into another century.