Billed as the "golden anniversary album," Orach celebrates Scotland's most enduring folk band with an hour's worth of traditional and tradition-inspired music. Those of you who know the Tannahill Weavers (whom I've been admiring a good part of my life) will know generally what to expect: an approach that both honors the old and enlivens it with the new, always with splendid taste, superior musicianship and cliche-untainted material. Besides, the liner notes contain the usual Scottish-to-English glossary, a particularly endearing Tannies practice.

So, beyond urging you, if you are drawn to such, to pick up the album at first chance, I'll mention that the band, which has had a bewildering change of personnel (not quite matching Fairport Convention's but near enough) over the decades, numbers four members in its present-day iteration. Guests from earlier days help fill out Orach's sound.

From the evidence of the current disc, the 2018 iteration has chosen to tone down the rhythms, turning from the familiar charging, pipe-driven sound that resembles something like acoustic folk-rock. On this lovely recording the emphasis is on melody and on quieter readings of the ballads, always at the core of the Tannies' sung repertoire. Here it's old stuff such as "The Battle of Sheriffmuir" and Robert Tannahill's based-on-tradition "Fragment of a Scottish Ballad," alongside Daithi Rua's World War I-themed "The Ghost of Mick McConnell" and the late Matt McGinn's "Jenny A'Things."

Since everything warms ear and heart, the picking of a favorite number is pointless exercise which I'll indulge regardless. To my hearing the version of the late Stan Rogers' "The Jeannie C." has special resonance. It is a perfectly told story of a sea-going tragedy. One is led to gloomy thoughts of the songs Rogers, who died tragically well before his time, would have bestowed us if circumstances had been otherwise. Around the time Orach showed up in my mail, I was listening to a new bluegrass album which, surprisingly to me, featured another of Rogers' compositions; his work is not ordinarily arranged for fiddle and Scruggs-style banjo. Though Rogers has been gone for almost four decades, one hopes that his songs are set to undergo a deserved revival.

The band takes its name from Paisley, Scotland, where the Tannies became who they are in an inspired studio session. Paisley boasts a history of weaving, and its most honored literary figure is "Weaver Poet" Robert Tannahill (1774-1810), best remembered in our time as composer of the words that, set subsequently to a venerable melody, became "The Wild Mountain Thyme."

Most of us won't be around half a century from now, of course. Even so, one wishes for this estimable outfit's 100-year anniversary and an audience that yet appreciates the Tannahill Weavers' unique contribution to Scotland's singular musical heritage.