"The Twa Sisters" -- also known as "The Cruel Sister," "The Bonny Swans" and more -- has been sung in Northern Europe since at least the mid-16th century, which makes it very old indeed. A ballad of the supernatural (#10 in Prof. Child's collection), it is strikingly beautiful, eerie and gruesome. It does not appear on Don't You Marry No Railroad Man, though JP Harris incorporates its chorus, known to everyone who loves traditional music, into the name of his ... one wants to say group or band. But it's just him and Chance McCoy (late of Old Crow Medicine Show), and behind them a long friendship and profound engagement with Appalachian folk songs.

I have known Harris as a gifted honkytonk singer-songwriter in what was once called alt.country, and I have reviewed previous releases in this space. It did not occur to me that his first love might be what the late Mike Seeger called the Old Southern Sound. I have known my share of "country" musicians over the years; practically none were or are versed in anything older than the Opry artists of a few decades ago. (Younger ones even define "roots" as George Strait.) Aside from some stray fiddle tunes, even many bluegrass pickers have only a hazy sense, if that, of mountain music before Bill Monroe.

The cultural critic Greil Marcus famously defined the world of our native folk music as "the old, weird America." Not all have embraced that characterization. Once, as we were discussing the phrase, the revered but never reverent folksinger Dave Van Ronk growled, "America's always been weird." Be that as it may, Don't You Marry does indeed sound weird, even unsettling, yet lovely and moving in the fashion of "Twa Sisters." The 10 cuts are mostly ballads, sung in a style that may cause you to think it is coming out of trackless time.

Most of the material arose in the 19th century, though the closer, "Otto Wood," was cut in 1932 by the Carolina Buddies. To put a fine point on it, the original title was "Otto Wood the Bandit," which most of us first heard on an early Doc Watson album. A separate song, titled simply "Otto Wood" and recorded on Jan. 27, 1931, was waxed a month after a gunfight between Wood and a small-town police chief ended Wood's presence on Earth, not to mention his career as a one-man crime wave. Cranford & Thompson's version appears on the collection In the Pines (Old Hat, 2008) if you're interested.

A good part of Harris and McCoy's charm is its stylistic roughness and occasional imperfection, affording it the feeling of an authentic field recording. Harris is playing a fretless banjo, which takes the instrument far from the showy, propulsive instrument in bluegrass bands. When my kids were little, they used to complain that my oldtime records sounded like "ghosts singing." (Elsewhere, in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Marcus remarked that these recordings seemed as if sung by people who had died but who decided to stay around a little longer because they still had something to say. My children, the oldest of them maybe 5 years old, had never heard that interview, nor of course would they have understood it if they had.) Well, if you don't have Roscoe Holcomb or Dock Boggs in your collection, Harris will let you know how discarnate vocals sound. You'll wonder why you ever preferred live performers.

Okay, all seriousness aside, I love this album. Besides its obvious virtues (instantly evident to anyone immersed in oldtime), I am impressed that I have heard only seven of the 10 songs before this. I rarely heard a hoary Appalachian song that is new to me. To find three at once ("Closer to the Mill," "Last Chance" and "The Little Carpenter" to be specific) and to hear them so affectingly interpreted ... well, it makes a long-time man feel good. Even the familiar "House Carpenter," "Mole in the Ground," "Barbry Ellen" and "Wild Bill Jones" feel like revelations.

This is my favorite recording of the first half of 2021. I also hope it is not Harris's last excursion into the soul of mountain folk music.