On her newest album fiddler/singer April Verch, born and raised north of the border, now living in North Carolina, offers up 13 country songs and two instrumentals. This is not, however, a generic country record.

First, Verch's fiddling bears accents you won't hear in Nashville. Her approach is shaped by oldtime tradition and newer country music as they were played in Canada in the middle of the last century. Once a Day is particularly striking -- it's never quite ordinary or expected -- when it showcases the sounds she created with her dad, Ralph Verch (who makes a guest appearance), a longtime band-leader in the dancehalls of Canada's Ottawa Valley on the Ontario-Quebec border.

Wistful numbers such as "The French Song," "Lake Dore Waltz," "Let's Make a Fair Trade" and "Laurel Lee" look back to the heart song, descended from the 19th-century parlor ballad. Heart songs, which celebrated love gained and lost, attached themselves to melodies of sentimental abandon sufficient to trigger torrents of tears in any human beings within hearing distance. By the latter 1950s rock 'n' roll had driven them out of commercial country, and even their ghosts seem to have been banished from country radio since.

Nobody sounds much like Verch. She possesses a voice unlike any likely to well up in memory, certainly in country music. Every time I've listened to her -- prior to this one, I've reviewed three of her albums, most recently The April Verch Anthology (4 March 2017), in this space -- I struggle for an adjective that does justice to that unique instrument. In the liner notes Craig Havighurst manages an approximation when he retrieves a quasi-mystical "gossamer," which is what angel's wings are supposed to be made of. More prosaically, Verch may have something like a little girl's voice, though not in any cloying definition. It's not necessarily a country voice, but it's not not a country voice either. It does get your attention.

I'm not sure, though, that it's suited to Loretta Lynn's "You Ain't Woman Enough," so linked to Lynn's persona that it's hard to imagine a successful cover not a wholesale re-invention. "The Lord Knows I'm Drinking," written by honkytonk classicist Bill Anderson but known from Cal Smith's early 1970s hit, gives the impression of a different song without Smith's perfectly articulated borderline snarl, directed at a local busybody who objects to the bars and women in his life. Verch's version seems more polite than Mrs. Johnson deserves.

I was exposed to country music when I was a small kid. I started listening to it seriously in my college years. Over time I've been at the receiving end of a mass of it, not all of it pleasurably; as with so much else, the mediocre and worse always outweigh the pleasurable. But with country the good repays the patience, and the great stays with you to spin on the psychic jukebox whenever you need it, usually when things are getting rough. Once a Day is a little treasury of songs you mostly haven't heard before, done with a grace that you'll remember, from someone who truly loves the music.

Oh yes, did I mention that Redd Volkaert, Al Perkins and Kenny Sears are here, too? If you're a country fan, you'll need no more encouragement. April Verch knows how to pick 'em, and I don't mean just the songs.