Probably for the best, at least for those who prefer their band monikers succinct, the New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers are not a touring outfit. They are, or were, a gathering of blues and roots musicians who jammed together, tape running, in small-town Mississippi in the summer of 2007. Three were members of the Dickinson family, including patriarch Jim (who would die two years later) and sons Cody and Luther. The elder Dickinson was a legendary record producer, piano player and authority on grassroots Southern music. His sons have made their mark in blues (North Mississippi Allstars and elsewhere) and other grainy American genres. Their friend and regular collaborator Jimbo Mathus was also a presence at the party.

Two other revered figures, longtime blues harmonica player, vocalist and songwriter Charlie Musselwhite and folk-bluesman Alvin Youngblood Hart, join the proceedings, which pick up where Vol. 1 left off. The latter was my favorite and most-spun blues album of last year, and the sequel is already in early competition for this year's. For specifics, check out my review in this space on 12 September 2020, where I praise the joy, knowledge and chops that make the project work so stunningly well. Since I want to repeat myself as little as possible, just let me say the same applies to this one. These aren't, let us stress, the leftovers.

As did Vol. 1, this one opens with a Musselwhite in-the-tradition original, "Blues for Yesterday," which in his usual fashion captures the feeling of mid-century, country-based urban blues in all its beauty and intensity. Musselwhite has been on the scene since the latter 1960s, and it is a mystery to me why everybody hasn't heard him by now, or at least of him. Given the music's racial politics, I imagine it may be because of his skin color (white) and of the specter of "cultural appropriation" -- applicable, no doubt, to others who lack Musselwhite's ferocious talent -- but as anyone versed in his music is aware, none of that is relevant to Musselwhite. His sound, universal and personal, represents a kind of tuning into an eternal blues shaped (of course) by history while also transcending it and the circumstances of its creation. Musselwhite's blues is its own justification, leaving nothing more to be said and soulful music in its wake.

Ordinarily associated with pre-war blues and other black traditional material, Hart has fun with Doug Sahm's 1965 hit "She's About a Mover," which turns out to be in no way out of place. Over his long career Sahm performed in a number of vernacular styles, and "Mover" is bluesier than I'd remembered it. Though a self-written number, Mathus's "Searchlight (Soon in the Morning)" pleases me with just about everything I love about unvarnished blues. Jim Dickinson takes up "Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me," an angst-ridden Cold War-era artifact from Charles Mingus. Dickinson extracts comedy, albeit of a pretty dark kind, from terror, to unsettling effect.

If on a different theme, Hart's "Millionaire Blues (If Blues Was Money)" communicates something of a comparable ambiguity. It answers the parenthetical issue by clarifying it isn't, in case you thought otherwise. Blues geeks will delight in Hart's mastery of the tradition; the song is constructed mostly from floating verses which he assembles into coherent, rueful commentary. In other words, to paraphrase another weathered blues couplet, if you hear him laughing, he's laughing just to keep from crying.

There are 11 cuts here and 53 minutes' worth of music, not one of them wasted. Who says the blues can't make you happy?