Formed in 2007, the award-winning Carolina Blue, based in Brevard, North Carolina, splits the difference between Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs. That's sort of like standing between two towering mountains. A statement inside specifies that the band is "dedicated to the preservation of bluegrass music" in the Monroe style. Carolina Blue doesn't try to imitate Bill Monroe's biting high-lonesome tenor; its smoother harmonies and relatively less intense approach are closer to Lester & Earl's. Still, the band's considerable ambitions are more than met on Take Me Back.

In a recent interview Bob Dylan was asked if he had ever considered cutting a bluegrass album. He said no, observing that in his experience bluegrass is something you practically have to be born with. Other performers can play it but not interestingly; they always end up like tourists or outsiders. Having heard would-be bluegrass albums by non-bluegrass musicians I ordinarily like (e.g., Merle Haggard, Alan Jackson), I get the point. It's the same with blues, which though unlike bluegrass floats in something of the same spiritual and sonic atmosphere.

Carolina Blue consists of five young-ish pickers, all possessed of old souls, revisiting first-generation ways. Timmy Jones, the outfit's mandolin picker and one of its three vocalists, writes the bulk of the material, all of it infused with an oldtime sensibility. The themes are eternal: heartbreak, homesickness, death, faith. There's even a song about an accidental encounter with an old man who has a sad story to tell. Possibly, my memory is fooling me, but I could swear that once it was a legal obligation to feature such a song on every bluegrass album.

If you care about a particular kind of grounded music -- it's also true of blues -- you don't go to it seeking novelty or reinvention. You want the comfort of the familiar. What you require of it is that the artists find a way to make it exciting and true, stroking that corner of your brain that shivered in wonder and delight when the music first found its way to the vicinity of you. It is not just the immediate picking and singing in your ears -- however thrilling they may be -- but the connection with the happiness this sound has given you over the course of your life with it. For those of us who love bluegrass at its most fundamental, it is a long journey home.