It isn't easy to write a traditional song. I know that because in my songwriting days I tried it more than once. To those who carry an enduring love of the vernacular music in circulation before today's publishing industry, folk songs possess an elusive quality shaped by all the voices that sang them and altered them in a continuing oral process, from a sensibility that is not ours except in the sense that it is the product of a common humanity. But if common in the broad sense, it's a differently lived human experience, and the landscape -- geographical, cultural and internal -- is hardly the same. Dropped there, practically none of us could swim those waters.

Jody Stecher is an exceedingly rare sort of artist, one who has survived decades honing and recording mostly traditional material. Meantime, nearly all of his colleagues have either fallen off the map, abandoned folk for other, more mainstream pop genres, or become singer-songwriters. Stecher has done none of these in any ordinarily understood sense.

In this and his previous CD, Mile 77 (reviewed in this space on 22 June 2024), he links up with Mile Twelve, a young acoustic outfit that is bluegrass-adjacent but closer to neo-oldtime string band, to cut mostly his own songs. Stecher, however, defines the possessive adjective in a relative sense. The "originals" owe so much to the tradition that if Instant Lonesome and its predecessor were marketed as newly recovered songs sung a century and a half ago, I might just believe it. So might you.

We would believe it precisely because we know the old music, out of which hardly anybody succeeds at making plausible modern music if its ambition is to mimic its older counterparts. (I acknowledge a very few have succeeded. I think of Tom Campbell and Steve Gillette who wrote the memorable, often covered pseudo-trad Western ballad "Darcy Farrow." Maybe I can add Ian Tyson's "Four Rode By," John Jacob Niles' "Black is the Color," and enough others to enumerate on not quite all 10 of our fingers.) Traditional music is a study in often minimally audible nuances, dropped into our midst like visitors from not just another time but another reality.

Every Stecher album (many recorded with Kate Brislin) is a treat. Among the outstanding performers not born into the tradition, he has fashioned a style out of profound literacy in the folk repertoire as well as an intuitive grasp of its veiled meanings. His succeeds as both contemporary reading and historical interpretation of an America that appears weird only because we weren't there to live in it. In his handling a song communicates Stecher's apparent memory of things that have slipped from collective memory. To my taste his greatest album is Oh the Wind & the Rain: Eleven Ballads (1999), which reaches back centuries to bring a long-dead past unsettlingly yet radiantly close.

More currently, the 14 cuts of Instant Lonesome & the Twinkle Brigade amount -- with some exceptions (e.g., the gorgeous 19th-century popular ballad "Fare Thee Well, Cold Winter," sometimes known as, or at least related to, "I'll Be All Smiles Tonight") -- to Stecher's respectful reworking of the narrative details of the old music. If many (by no means all) of the lyrics are new, the melodies are as often borrowed from another era, while the sensibility is ... well, I guess you'd call it liminal: in other words, this and that incongruously rubbing shoulders, at once fresh and traveled, strangely easy in each other's company.

Put another way: disparate elements you can create powerful songs out of even in a world that you would have thought would no longer know how to receive them.