If your head is full of folksong lyrics, you'll know where the quote cited in After the Morning is likely to come from: the poetic opening verse of the Irish ballad usually titled "Streets of Derry." It relates a would-be hanging victim's last-minute rescue from the gallows by a sweetheart (in this case female) with pardon papers. As a song and a story it has spread all over the world in traditional and modern iterations. Originally a broadside titled "The Maid Freed from the Gallows," till the Bothy Band's almost defining 1970s reading, it boasted a range of melodies and lyrics with approximately the same narrative. Led Zeppelin cut one of them, a cover of Lead Belly's "Gallis Pole," in the band's early days. That variant -- a fine one with, as in the original, a woman as near-victim -- did not sound remotely Irish.

In the revival decades of the 1950s and '60s, it was not unusual for singers to cover material from a range of traditions, related or otherwise. Except for the recordings of the English folksinger-guitarist Martin Simpson and of the ex-Old Crow Willie Watson, one doesn't hear much of that approach anymore. So Morning comes as a surprise, that last word having differing albeit overlapping meanings that depend upon the depth of the listener's knowledge of the traditional repertoire. If one's brain and memory are as full of it as my own, the surprise will be that somebody with the imposing name of Wyndham Baird, at the moment pretty much a complete unknown (Dylan phrase chosen incidentally for biopic now in production), has picked up the practice.

But even if your knowledge of songs multiple decades or centuries old is not ridiculously excessive, if you have proceeded far enough in the process to be listening to this recording, I am confident that you will enjoy it at a more than normal level of pleasure and fulfillment.

Mostly, these are standards from Ireland, Britain, Appalachia and American neo-folk (e.g., Eric Von Schmidt's often-covered "Joshua Gone Barbados," about a real-life cane-cutters' strike on the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent). There is a generous supply of familiar ballads: "The Water is Wide," "House Carpenter," "The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore," not to mention morose oldtime love songs: "Meet Me by the Moonlight, Alone," "Oh My Little Darling," also the venerable hobo's lament "Waiting for a Train" and the coal-miner's "Dark as a Dungeon" (written by Merle Travis). And there's more, not least a heart-ripping account of how love went wrong in Dublin, "On Raglan Road."

Save for the final cut ("She Chose Me," a countryish number that strikes me as at least vaguely familiar), these are all well known to me. I am fully capable of loving a song immensely, then tiring of it after repeated hearings. Such songs amount to practically none of the above-mentioned, and they will not fade out of affection.

An evocative vocalist and guitar/banjo player from Brooklyn, Baird both locates and distributes these songs for a new generation to cherish, perhaps, for the rest of their lives. But even if you've already carried this body of songs with you for most of your days, Baird gives you reason to go back for more. He draws from a bottomless well.