If you are blessed to count as friends the all-star performers who shine on this disc, you yourself may not be a household name, but you'll have conclusive evidence that you have lived your life the right way. Mitch Woods is a longtime blues-piano ace ordinarily associated with a crackerjack band called the Rocket 88s. This time, though, he's sharing various studios with some of his generation's most legitimately honored blues men and women.

If you're literate in the genre, you will recognize each name on the two discs that comprise Friends Along the Way. The first opens with songs that stretch back to blues' folk roots, namely "C.C. Rider" and "Take This Hammer," which I first heard on Lead Belly records a long time ago. Here they're done in partnership with no less than Van Morrison and Taj Mahal. I am sure all concerned have been playing and singing these songs all of their lives, which no doubt explains why they feel at once comfortably lived in and emotionally staggering.

Charlie Musselwhite, who is among my favorite living bluesmen, delivers "Cryin' for My Baby" as a thundering early Delta number such as one might expect to hear on a 1920s commercial 78 or on a Lomax field recording. The credits, however, inform us Woods wrote it, in itself establishing Woods' credentials as a master of instrument and tradition.

In the liner notes Woods remarks simply, "I have always kept a historical sense about my music. I reach backwards to the roots rather than forward for my inspiration." So do the other artists present for the occasion, whether they are acoustic or electric in their choice of guitar or they play nothing beyond well-honed, soul-touching voices. The artists grew up at a time this style of blues defined the genre's first half-century, from the first commercial releases of the 1920s, spanning everything from Black Southern folk music to piano-led or small-band jazz ensembles, to loud, electrified dance music, urban in sound and sensibility but rooted in the country.

To me -- I like to think I am anything but a sentimentalist, let me be clear -- this was and remains the blues. Its echoes could be easily heard when I lived in Chicago in the latter 1970s through the 1980s and frequented the clubs. But other strains, most influentially from England, had begun to influence -- maybe colonize is the word -- the blues. Not all of this made for bad or uninteresting music, but its practitioners' insistence that this wasn't just rock made it a definition of the blues for many naive listeners. Now played at full volume and articulated (more or less) by vocals at heavy-metal screech level, blues has provided employment to once-popular rock guitarists and those who would emulate them. In my most cynical moments, I wonder if that was the point all along.

What had once been blues has begun to feel like a subgenre of hard rock. The blues did not show off. It communicated true-to-life experience and emotion. It had a great wit. It could make you feel better, or it could make you feel worse. Nobody who performed in its name tried to play more notes per minute than should have been humanly possible.

If you hear this very special music as I do, Friends Along the Way will feel like a friend from a better, more honest musical world. From James Cotton to John Lee Hooker, from the generation of Woods, Kenny Neal, Maria Muldaur and Elvin Bishop, and on to the tradition-based modernism of Joe Louis Walker, the blues lives again in all its complex simplicity, yet with no hint of rote resurrection or dusty archive. In the right hands, and these are the right hands, the blues is, as it always was, eternal.