Traditional music captured me before I'd heard of something called "folk songs." As a small kid I listened to cheap paper 78s featuring public-domain material such as "Old Chisholm Trail" and "Arkansas Traveler." Even then I knew this stuff was an improvement on my parents' Kate Smith and Nelson Eddy records. One night when I was in high school, as I was riding in a car with classmates down a rural highway, I heard Peter, Paul & Mary's "500 Miles" wafting from the radio. At that moment I was transformed. As I would learn years later, while the song's origins can be traced to the Reconstruction South, its author will never be known. It is also known in a dizzying assortment of variants.

Old folk music, along with its relatives, has been a close companion since. I've listened to it, studied it, thought about it, read about it, sought out musicians and fellow obsessives, and never tired of it. Most of the other music I listen to is linked, specifically or broadly, to tradition: bluegrass, electric blues, honkytonk, and a range of regional styles. The social critic Greil Marcus (inventor of the phrase "old, weird America"), who has written poetically on folk music's allure, calls the realm in which it dwells "Smithville" after Harry Smith, who compiled the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). To some of us it's our alternate reality, or maybe something like a path to spiritual enlightenment. No less than Bob Dylan has said something of the kind.

I will be listening to folk music until I can't listen to anything at all. Till then, it will move me in a way I cannot put precisely into something so pedestrian as language. That is not to say that a good portion of folk performance isn't boring. A musician friend likes to say that the ditches are littered with bodies of those who thought folk music is easy. They thought so because the songs and tunes are deceptively simple; in fact, a lifetime of listening will not get you to the bottom. If you're a musician and you're seeking an audience, you'd better find how to make a song or a tune distinctive. You'll need to probe deep; a superficial interpretation, one that amounts to no more than a casual recitation, is a false one.

There is the consideration, too, that through the revival of folk music -- that is, its professionalization as middle-class entertainment -- the number of traditional songs performed regularly from the stage or on recording, in America anyway, has been winnowed down to somewhere in the dozens (not a scientific estimate but my informed guess); the number is larger if you incorporate fiddle and other dance tunes into the number. The quantity of songs that circulated orally -- that is, outside any given period's equivalent of a music industry -- is uncountable, obviously. Most were lost, and others so tied to their time and place that they're virtually meaningless out of context. And yes, some express attitudes and prejudices best neglected.

The 11 cuts on All I Got & Gone will ring familiar to anyone conversant in the American tradition. The title itself will be instantly recognizable as a quote from the refrain to "Delia," a murder ballad based on a real-life tragic event in 1900 Savannah, Georgia. Even Dylan has covered it, recycling Blind Willie McTell's telling. The "Diamond Joe" here, not the mordantly humorous cowboy ballad Lee Hays composed to the melody of "State of Arkansas," is the older lament about an aching heart and an approaching river steamer. "One Dime Blues" is from first-generation Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson; Woody Guthrie clipped the melody for his "New York Town." The ubiquitous "Going Across the Sea" is associated in my mind with the more than ordinarily memorable readings of Cousin Emmy and Bill Monroe.

And so on. These and the others that go unmentioned here are all magnificent in themselves. Chicago folksinger/guitarist Chris Walz handles each of them commandingly via powerful solo finger-picking arrangements and perfectly imagined vocals. (I am reminded of the late Happy Traum's 1970s classic Relax Your Mind, still one of the finest albums of the post-revival era.)

Walz is doing things his way, never seeking to emulate some guy on a front porch or a street corner a century or more ago. I mean that as the highest of compliments. His is one way for folk singing and playing to sound in our time, treated as if encountered for the first time and wrapped in its own beauty and authenticity.