It wasn't that the Ebony Hillbillies were new to me, though they were, when I opened the package containing their current CD and experienced a certain shock. Among the discs I receive for possible review, there is no shortage of acts claiming "roots," something of a buzz word in the quarters on which my attention is focused. What startled me is that I'd not so much as heard of this group of seven African-American performers who could be something Alan Lomax recorded in the field while documenting the last of authentic Southern traditional music in the 1950s or thereabouts. Except that, more confusingly, the Hillbillies hail from New York City.

Even more confoundingly, they appear to be working outside the usual confines of urban folk music institutionalized in the generation of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Lead Belly, who invented the occupation of "folk singer." The most famous black string band currently working, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, is connected with that history and that network. So was the trio Martin, Bogan & Armstrong popular a few decades ago, playing mostly at folk clubs and festivals and recording on folk labels. I read here that in the presumably not-recent past the Hillbillies have shared stages with Seeger, Odetta and Harry Belafonte, the first two no longer with us.

The Hillbillies resemble a street band one might have encountered in a town or city below the Mason-Dixon line in a time when musical traditions were older and deeper than the latest radio hits. Their repertoire is what one might have heard from a jug band though -- lacking a jug -- that's not exactly what this outfit is. Still, like the classic jug bands, it communicates the sense of talented but not-all-that polished performers having a whole lot of fun pulling up songs and tunes from multiple genres.

On 5 Miles from Town the material is represented in the deep tradition of rural dance tunes such as "Hog Eye Man" and "Carroll County Blues" (played by bandleader and fiddler Henrique Prince), the moonshiner ballad "Darling Corey," and the spiritual "Where He Leads Me." But there are also the crooning, jazz-tinged modern love songs "I Can't Make You Love Me" and "Fork in the Road." A dozen cuts in all, more than 40 minutes' worth of acoustic music and raggedy vocals that would feel as if beamed from a lost bygone but for the occasional jolting reminder that this is, after all, the 21st century. The Texas prison song "Another Man Done Gone" (first collected more than a hundred years ago by John Lomax, later the template for Big Joe Williams' blues classic "Baby, Please Don't Go") gets some tweaked lyrics inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. The brief "Oh, What a Time!" celebrates political resistance in the Trump era.

In short, remarkable stuff, at moments cheerily playful, at others grimly sober. In their mashing of the contemporary and the antique, the Ebony Hillbillies manage to personify William Faulkner's famous adage that the past is neither dead nor past.