In our time folk music played with fiddles and banjos as lead instruments is assumed, usually with good reason, to be of Southern origin. That would be an incorrect inference, however, where Hurricane Clarice is concerned. These instruments accompanied an array of regional sounds from the early European colonization of North America to maybe the middle of the last century, by which time the music industry had done much to wipe out the communal traditions that had nurtured homegrown songs and dance tunes.

That reality underscores Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves's approach. That they do it with such passion and mastery enhances the power -- you might also say the joy -- that they bring to their new album. I also am impressed that they don't want to be known as breakers of new ground or pushers forward of the tradition. They're just performing an old style of music that in their estimation (my words) doesn't merit that kind of condescension. If you're going to play it, it's there for every single person who takes it up just to bring themselves to it, to communicate its pleasures to any who may be listening, and to keep it alive for whoever wants or needs it in whatever time or place the music finds them.

In the accompanying promotional material De Groot is quoted thus: "I'm tired of the perceived goal being to push the music forward. I don't think that means that much and it's a capitalist idea." I would have found the penultimate word somewhat jarring, not quite apposite, had I not harbored an irritated memory of a book I read a few years ago celebrating the life and legacy of Jimmie Rodgers (often called "the father of country music") who ironically did more than anyone to alter the traditional character of rural music and transform it into perishable Southern pop. The ultimate consequences can be heard on your local country radio station. You know, the one you don't listen to.

In an interview quoted in the book, the late Mike Seeger laments the rise of the modern world's heavily commercialized music (of which Rodgers was a notable early beneficiary) and expresses the wistful preference for the continuance of an organic, local -- i.e., "folk" -- tradition as a vehicle for song transmission. It's clear to the reader (or it should be) that Seeger understands perfectly well how unrealistic this desire is. Still, the author, who has spent a fair part of his volume trashing folk musicians of all varieties (including the oldtime stringband players who were Rodgers' esthetic and market competitors), implies that Seeger is some species of sentimental dolt, even as the author exposes himself as a proud champion of a profit-based mass sound.

It is, of course, simplistic to blame capitalism for every unappealing aspect of contemporary music, or for every lamentable disappearance of an older sound we liked. But it's entirely possible to believe that in view of its enormous role in shaping our tastes, corporate practices have influenced what people can be persuaded they want to hear. Incidentally, if you will pardon a surly aside, I consider many of Rodgers' one hundred or so recordings (from 1927 to 1933) bluntly unlistenable. Whatever the technical and vocal innovations they showcase, the level of sappy sentiment in the songs themselves often threatens to drown the listener in a deep lake of syrup.

Hurricane Clarice is, if one wants to look at it that way, the product of an alternative popular music that could have been. But even if that's no more than fantasy, it is worth bringing into your life. Its way of infusing the familiar with the novel is a constant delight. The one of the nine cuts I've heard before is the old country heart song "Each Season Changes You." The cheery harmonies subvert the gloomy sentiments, and the arrangement seems to add a century to its age.

The album opens with an obscure but stirring Canadian ballad, "Banks of the Miramichi," mixed as if a field recording with the vocals functioning less as narrative carrier than as eccentric instrument. Throughout Hurricane, fiddle and banjo resound like musical thunder, demanding listeners' undivided attention and beating heart while never losing its grip on a keen sense of melody.

Nothing bores. In prosaic truth the CD carries 34 minutes' worth of fiddle tunes, ballads and hymns. Inside the sort of magical glamour the album weaves, however, time may pass quickly, or it may surrender its tyranny entirely as we are drawn into its beguiling alter-reality. In either case the listener is blessed with a happy reminder of the tradition's bottomless charms.