Nora Jean Wallace was singing Howlin' Wolf songs at the age of 4. Born into a Mississippi Delta sharecropping family of blues musicians (once an assumed rite of passage for previous generations), she moved to Chicago's West Side in the 1970s and began playing in the clubs and accumulating rapturous reviews and regular gigs with popular bluesmen of the time, most prominently Jimmy Dawkins. She toured internationally with Dawkins and his band and did some recording with them before dropping out in 1991 to attend to family concerns. A few years later she effected a limited comeback. She did some recording under her then-married name, Nora Jean Bruso, before disappearing largely from the scene.

Blues Woman marks a triumphal return, the kind of album suited perfectly to the hard-core blues geek and the newly curious alike. Wallace has a powerful vocal style combined with a commendably restrained way of not showing it off; thus, it's conversational and attuned to the events she's telling, usually of no-good men who have tormented her life but only deepened her determination to prevail regardless. This is one of blues' most elemental themes, present at the creation, and Wallace has it mastered. In other words, she's a natural storyteller. The plots may not be elaborate, but she carries the emotions that underlie the narratives with remarkable nuance.

In my listening, blues is best served straightforward, with lyrics and melodies integrated for human-sized communication. That communication, serious or humorous, despairing or resigned, should feel sincere enough that listeners can believe that if the sung-about experience did not literally happen to the singer, it could have. I've played Blues Woman at least half a dozen times since it arrived in my mail, and at some point it occurred to me that I'd been assuming, while engaging in no particular reflection that would lead to the conclusion, that every one of the 10 songs is true, though Wallace herself composed fewer than half of them.

A particular marvel among many here is Stanley Banks' "Rag & Bucket," a post-love song with a brilliantly compelling, if sweetly homely, metaphor and a startlingly vivid treatment by Wallace. And that's not to mention guest Kim Wilson's outstanding harmonica punctuation, which carries an already smart arrangement into an emphatically articulated other dimension of emotional truth. Overall, these are some of the strongest blues songs I've heard in the last year.

Except for Wilson, the musicians comprise Severn's house band. Her producer, also guitarist on four cuts, is label head David Earl. Banks is the outfit's keyboardist. Severn's standards are always high, and Blues Woman sails the upper atmosphere with the best of them. If you have heard the album, I'm sure you'll join me in hoping that Wallace's return to the blues is permanent this time.