Listening to Acorns, I call up three thoughts, only broadly related. The first is from a decades-long friend, the folksinger Robin Williams, who in conversation once wryly observed: "The ditches are littered with the bodies of people who thought folk music is easy."

The second, which may surprise younger readers, is how unfashionable folk music was not all that long ago. The third is how popular, relatively speaking, "folk music" has become these past years. As a fan most of my life, I'm glad to see that, albeit in a qualified way. The term, which should mean something like traditional or at least trad-based music, is applied to a wide range of acoustic or quasi-acoustic styles, as often as not performed by artists who wouldn't know a genuine folk song if it punched them in the chops.

In short, whenever I receive a CD in the mail, frequently the work of a performer I haven't heard before, I don't blithely presume the cogency of the promo sheet's characterization of him or her as a "folk singer." It still seems ironic to me that whereas once many folk singers fled the label (the usual dodge being that they were really "country" or "unclassifiable"), these days non-folk artists claim it because they want be thought of as folk singers. Even if you possess long-term memory of the ebbs and flows of pop music, that will seem something like a miracle.

In 1974, when folk was in the deep end of the deep freeze, Spider John Koerner, who had been a star of the 1960s revival (and has lived on to become a revered musical cult figure), more or less self-released an album titled Some American Folk Songs Like They Used To. Folk's popularity was less than a decade in the cultural rear-view mirror, but it felt half a century gone, a genre that had not survived Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly or Charlie Patton.

The point of this meandering discourse is simply that an album like Ben Winship's Acorns reminds those who care about such things how good it is that folk has returned, not just as a phrase but as the real thing, or anyway as close as the revived version gets. Not to mention in the right hands, too. Winship, in company with some leading figures on the current scene (among them Pharis Romero, Brittany Haas, Mollie O'Brien, Eli West), assembles trad songs, trad-like originals and hybrids (e.g., "Fit to Be Tied," which takes off from "Sail Away, Ladies") to fashion 46 minutes' worth of amiable yet soul-stirring stuff unlikely soon to wear out its power.

The approach bears some resemblance to what you might hear on an album by Tim O'Brien (Mollie's brother) or the late John Hartford. Nothing wrong with that. I put Acorns on my Best of 2019 list. To paraphrase a line from folk song: If you want any more, you'll have to listen yourself.