If you've been looking for the kind of album you always knew Dale Ann Bradley had in her, it's here. Not, of course, that anybody has ever doubted her huge talent. With her crystalline voice and nuanced vocal style, she is as good as any singer on the 21st-century bluegrass scene.

The problem, as I've complained in the past in this space, is that her albums tend to be littered with second-rate material. I have no idea how songs get to her -- in other words, whether she picks them herself or has someone else choose them for her -- but whatever the process, it has often served her poorly. Too many of the selections are love or failed-love pieces of no distinction, the sorts of ditties Nashville hacks could conjure up in their sleep, and maybe do.

The Hard Way, on the other hand, boasts solid song-craft and even manages to end on a note of soaring beauty. OK, I confess to not being wildly fond of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe" (here credited to J. Wilson and M. Corda, who I presume now own the rights to the Gentry-penned ballad). What follows, I am aware, is very much a minority opinion, and I certainly don't hold it against Bradley for wanting to cut "Billy Joe"; in fact, she does it just fine. Unfortunately, from the first time I heard it on the radio many years ago, its story and lyrics have never failed to strike me as cringe-inducing kitsch, Southern-gothic division. If my experience with other listeners is any guide, you probably don't feel that way, for which God bless you.

Eight of the other 10 cuts I am hearing for the first time. They range interestingly in subject matter. Some are set in Appalachian landscapes, including the murder ballad "Pretty, Dark Hearted Emma Brown," which happens to be the one song credited to Bradley. "Wheel in the Sky," the product of four contributors (usually meaning a song was composed within a band), boasts a recurring image that drives the narrative in an intriguingly enigmatic direction. Other outstanding numbers are Carla Gover's "The Redbird River" and "One Good Wiper Blade," credited to Warm Women of the North, an Internet search for which turns up nothing except stylish cold-weather wear.

The stunner, though, is Bradley's reading of a song that has moved me since it appeared on the Grateful Dead's beloved 1970 American Beauty, an acoustic, folk-oriented album as far from psychedelia as a band known for same could remove itself. "Ripple," a collaboration between the Dead's guitarist Jerry Garcia and its lyricist Robert Hunter, attaches a heart-stopping melody to words that form a secular hymn with a meaning at once apparent and opaque. It hosts a recurring haiku-like refrain whose power expands and overwhelms each time it comes around: Ripple in still water/ When there is no pebble tossed/ No wind to blow. This is not a song one expects to hear on a bluegrass record (though bluegrass artists have covered Beauty's bouncy outlaw ballad "Friend of the Devil"); indeed, "Ripple" is arranged as a mid-tempo folk song, not a driving bluegrass exercise, which is as it should be. Neither would I expect Bradley to have heard it, or even of it. However it arrived on her to-do list, though, hers turns out to be the reading for the ages. It even helped soothe my soul when, caught in an anxious moment in my affairs, I needed the comfort. Perhaps it will provide you solace, too.

The Ohio-based, five-member Nightflyer is a contemporary bluegrass outfit, though with a strong classic bent. It boasts five lead vocalists, each of whom gets a chance to shine, though none more than guitarist Richard Propps, who commands half of the dozen cuts. The well-chosen songs encompass country tunes associated with Randy Travis ("Send My Body Home on a Freight Train") and Hank Williams (the ubiquitous gospel "House of Gold") while others bear the by-lines of prolific bluegrass songsmiths Paula Breedlove and Mark "Brink" Brinkman.

Pete Wernick's "The Old Rounder" captures a rural sensibility that feels as if from a century ago, the kind of song you might expect to hear on a 1920s stringband 78, or maybe revived 20 or 30 years later on an early bluegrass record. In my considered opinion you can never go wrong with such, and on Flight the boys sail high.

I like the version of the presumably autobiographical "Guitar Man," a 1967 hit from the late Jerry Reed, soon afterwards covered by Elvis. But I don't understand why the trucker anthem "Six Days on the Road" is credited to Boxcar Willie. He learned it, like just about everybody else, from the 1963 Dave Dudley chart-topper written by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery.

Scott Slay's The Rail offers up a contemporary sound which at moments of non-standard chord exploration defies the standard definition of bluegrass. Yet, paradoxically, Slay's grasp of traditional music -- by which I mean not trad bluegrass but old-time folk -- is uniquely deep. I am certain that Dominic Behan's trad-derived "Drink It Up, Men" has never appeared on a bluegrass album before this. Nice to know -- or anyway surmise -- that a young American picker knows something of the Dubliners catalog.

Though Slay sings in a youthful high tenor one associates with certain strains of country-rock and bluegrass-pop, the songs are fully grown-up. Over the decades "Atlanta Blues (Make Me a Pallet)" has been recorded in folk, blues and jazz formats, but Slay's arrangement surprises this listener, even if it's not a particularly radical one. Yet it feels deliciously fresh, possibly owing to the swinging mandolin and the masterly flat-picked guitar. Likewise with the closing "Rye Whiskey," a ubiquitous 19th-century American folk song sung by mountaineers, cowboys and hard drinkers everywhere.

More imaginative, more informed, possibly more intelligent, than many of his compatriots on the scene, Slay is not just another hot shot, of whom there is never any shortage at any given moment. I think he'll be worth keeping an eye on.