These two albums represent the work of hard-core traditionalists. The two strains, however, speak to different if generally connected varieties. Each incorporates elements of bluegrass without being a bluegrass record of any standard kind. Dale Ann Bradley & Tina Adair's Oh Darlin nods to a sound of early hillbilly, while Kate MacKenzie & Dale Adkins's resurrect mid-century country and revival folk. The second Dale, by the way, is male.

Not that all of the material draws from earlier times, even if much does. Oh Darlin, cut by two well-regarded genre veterans who are also occasional co-members of the all-female Sister Sadie, features classic post-old time, pre-honkytonk numbers such as "Rockin' Alone in an Old Rocking Chair" and "Mommy, Please Stay Home with Me" but also later country masterworks like Johnny Paycheck's "Apartment #9" and Ray Price's "Pick Me Up on Your Way Down," a Harlan Howard composition. They're sung in rural, pre-Music City harmonies, however, in the way they used to do it in the 1930s.

Respectable hillbilly then prominently focused on sentimental and sacred matters, not (as starting in the open in the 1940s) divorce, drinking and sexual misbehavior. (For examples of the not-respectable, under-the-counter 1930s last, you might seek out the anthology She's Selling What She Used to Give Away [Bear Family, 2018] -- that is, if you're sufficiently shockproof.)

Oh Darlin surprises me with its inclusion of Hank Williams's fierce folk-style ballad "The Log Train," practically never covered yet surely among his outstanding songs. It also features Hank's "Singing Waterfall," more in the fashion of a 19th-century parlor song, a sweet, sad piece unlike his later humorous or hard-edged barroom plaints. Bradley & Adair reprise Jennie Ellen's hymn "Hold to God's Unchanging Hand" (from close to the turn of the last century) in a performance that may affect even unbelievers. The most recent cut is from the current progressive-country Texas band Reckless Kelly, "Wicked Twisted Road," composed by member Willy Braun as a sort of tougher "Lost Highway."

There is nothing you won't like, but you may wish for more. Its 10 numbers don't quite reach half an hour's playing time. Still, you can't argue with the proposition that it's better to leave them wishing for more than exhausted by too much. I'm a particular fan of the golden-throated Bradley, yet I've been known to complain about her sometimes uneven taste in material. No such complaints are to be registered this time around.

It has been more than two decades since Kate MacKenzie released an album. Before moving to Oregon some years ago, she was a Twin Cities musician who cut albums for the then-local (now Nashville-located) Red House Records. Dale Adkins is a multi-instrumentalist and his wife Suzanne Adkins a bass player, whom MacKenzie met after her move. All three are accomplished singers and pickers, with roots in bluegrass, country and folk. Their first album together wanders among the three genres (plus the 1940s jazz-pop "Cow Cow Boogie") with happy results, even Nashville Skyline's "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You," not among my Dylan favorites but made acceptable in MacKenzie's on-the-mark vocal. Still, to my ear it's an inferior rewrite of "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" on his previous John Wesley Harding, approximately comparable to "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and its thematically indistinguishable "It Ain't Me, Babe."

MacKenzie & Adair opens with Suzanne's tradition-accented "The Flood," sung by Dale, a solid bluegrass number strung together by a cliche-free metaphor that renders it superior to by-the-numbers bluegrass writing. On the folk side the album covers a nearly perfect farewell anthem, the Civil War-era "Going Across the Mountain," sung by Suzanne, associated with North Carolina's Frank Proffitt, as well as Kate MacKenzie's reading of Woody Guthrie's "Deportee," urgently worth recalling in this unwelcomely returned age of racism and xenophobia powered from the highest levels of government.

Approximately half of the songs will be known to well-traveled listeners, no problem when the covers hold their own, which they certainly do. MacKenzie and Adkins know roots music well enough, too, not to pick up anything too road-worn. One can't hear "Don't Neglect the Rose" and "More and More," from bluegrass legend Larry Sparks and honkytonk hero Webb Pierce respectively, without the experience of descending chills. Some heart songs actually threaten to stop the heart, and these are two of them.