A Bogtrotters band cut field recordings of mountain songs for the Library of Congress in the latter 1930s and early 1940s. In our time a handful of groups have adopted the wryly amusing moniker. A few of them play Irish music, as befits the nation known for its bogs as well as for its influence on the Southern folkways of America. Traditional Irish sounds helped shape the sound of Appalachia and the presentations of American folk songs and tunes everywhere.

For several years some decades ago, I lived in Lake County in northeastern Illinois, where the small town of Volo (pop. 6,122 in the 2020 census) is located. I may have passed through it at one time or another, though I have no specific memory of doing so. I do recall, however, standing in the front lawn with my family as a parade passed by on our street. As if out of nowhere a fiddle tune swirled through the air and into my ears. It was emanating from an oldtime string band -- the suburb where I then resided would have been among the last places I'd have expected to hear anything of the kind -- as it jammed on a nearby float. A sign identified the players as the Volo Bogtrotters. Probably because it was so surprising, this brief event even now manages to retain space inside my head.

Later, following a divorce and a move much closer to Chicago (the group's actual home), I started hanging out in folk and blues clubs. I heard a lot of music and got to know some of the city's roots-based musicians -- though by then the two most famous, John Prine and Steve Goodman, had moved on -- but I never met a Volo Bogtrotter or heard Bogtrotters performing collectively.

A few weeks ago, the two-disc retrospective Hell Broke Loose in Volo -- a joking reference to a fiddle tune whose title ordinarily ends in "Georgia" -- showed up in my mail. It did not disappoint. I had learned long since that the Bogtrotters had a solid reputation, the reasons for which the album amply documents. I wasn't aware, however, that the band boasts a double-fiddle approach, something I've always favored. In the Bogtrotters' hands it proves a joyful noise indeed.

The first disc features 27 cuts, the second 25, all from their releases on the tiny, defunct traditional label Marimac issued between 1987 and 1991. Much of the content draws on standards ("Shady Grove," "Riley the Furniture Man," "Going Across the Sea," "Cumberland Gap" and the like), performed with verve and conviction. These are the kinds of songs that never cease to touch me in the distinctive manner I first encountered when I heard Peter, Paul & Mary sing "500 Miles" on a car radio one evening long ago. Old folk songs amount to communications from a lost world, which is precisely what they are; the past is a lost world after all. The songs and tunes do us the courtesy of opening a door ordinarily closed. We don't have to live on the other side of it -- few of us would want to -- but oldtime music allows us to hear evocative portrayals of what life felt like then.

It is also true that even "authentic"-seeming recreations of stringband sounds carry with them more of modernity than many listeners might suspect. The revivalist approach entered modern urban culture (or at least a fringe of it) in the late 1950s when Mike Seeger, John Cohen and Tom Paley (later replaced by Tracy Schwarz) formed the New Lost City Ramblers and for the next 40 years reproduced material found on 1920s/1930s 78s. In those days no one imagined that the records Seeger et al. were listening to, available only to collectors or to listeners to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, would one day appear by the countless hundreds on vinyl and CD reissues, and now via free downloads on our computers. The NLCR shaped a version of oldtime made up of traditional ballads, antique songs comic and tragic, and dances from the 19th century and earlier.

Access to the full oldtime repertoire soon clarified that the "folk" part of this music is often no more than its homemade quality. Much of the stuff that got recorded is, frankly, not all that interesting. A good part of it is period pop music first cranked out by citified hacks who trafficked in the sentimental and the cloying, meant for other instruments than fiddles, banjos, guitars and raw, untrained voices. In his Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records (2021), to cite an example, British cultural historian Tony Russell documents how some of the songs can be linked to the English music hall. I don't know about you, but I'd walk miles not to be exposed to the English music hall.

Yes, traditional material is there to be uncovered without undue trouble, but contrary to the impression I formed from NLCR and comparable modern interpreters, it is not the default source to which mountain musicians deferred when it came time to enter the studio. I presume that what they were cutting depended upon who they were and what was immediately around them. The more exposed to the modern world they were (i.e., if they lived in towns), the more likely they were to cover popular songs; the deeper in the hills, the more reflexive the turning to venerable, durable stuff. "Oldtime" is not always as the legend has it.

To paraphrase the celebrated quote from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Volo Bogtrotters perform the legend. Their debt in this and other ways to the NLCR is not hard to discern, which is not a criticism by any stretch. All urban oldtime string bands owe something to what that outfit created: an idealized style defined by deep roots and contemporary sensibility. Still, the effect is fully faithful to a fundamental truth about traditional music: it survives because it is adaptable. The NLCR and those it influenced, including the big-city artists who comprised the Volo Bogtrotters, adapted brilliantly and made a living music out of an all but dead one.