The Osborne Brothers' influence in Larry Stephenson has always been apparent. You could do a whole lot worse. The Osbornes are revered as one of bluegrass's foundational bands, right after Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs. As the title informs us, 30 marks the Stephenson band's third decade (in varying configurations) as performers and recording artists.

For an anniversary release it's pretty low key. The sole guest is Ronnie Bowman, who joins Stephenson on the light-hearted "Two Ol' Country Boys Like Us." Otherwise, it's the working band members who provide the soulful picking and the Osborne-style harmonies on a journey through the traditional side of the genre.

The dozen cuts reflect the usual Stephenson fare, in other words not radically unexpected but adequate to the task. Perhaps the best of them is the 19th-century "Little Joe," previously recorded by Monroe among others, the wrenching testimony of a dying little boy. Possessed of arguably the finest tenor of any living bluegrass singer, Stephenson takes care to remove any listener's ability to sustain a good mood as it plays. (It's easy in our time to be cynical about such things, dismissable as cheap exploitation; but given the awful prevalence of child mortality in an earlier America, songs like these had to have had a terrible immediacy to many listeners.) Fortunately, Bobby Helms's cheery "Sweet Little Miss Blue Eyes," which most bluegrass geeks associate with Jim & Jesse, follows it.

Inspired by Barbara Mandrell's 1981 hit "I Was Country (When Country Wasn't Cool)" -- which wasn't cool, and barely country -- Stephenson offers up his own composition "I Was Bluegrass (When Bluegrass Wasn't Cool)" to close the album. At least it's bluegrass. On the other hand, writing as a lifelong fan, I suspect that any hint of fashionableness would destroy everything that makes bluegrass (in common with hard-core honkytonk) what it is, a genre untainted by any pretension to hipness. Bluegrass has always been best being its own authentic self, trafficking in broken hearts, the old home place, Mother, God and freight trains.

Merle Monroe's Back to the Country is more neo-traditional than 30's unhyphenated equivalent. Not a complaint, just an observation. The five band members, led by guitarist Tim Raybon and banjo man Daniel Grindstaff, do not falter; they know what they're doing every step of the way. This is also the band's debut release, an effort (as its very name, a nod to bossmen Merle Haggard and Bill Monroe, lets us know) to blend bluegrass and country albeit with arrangements and instruments solely from the former genre.

A relaxed, good-natured album, it balances originals with covers by Haggard, Roger Miller, and Bobby Bond. The band's reading of "Hungry Eyes" (which Haggard unhiply titled "Mama's Hungry Eyes") is a particular joy, a country song done in bluegrass style while sounding in either case like a Depression-era folk ballad. Raybon's original "Singing Crazy (Like Patsy Cline)" revives old-fashioned country word play like they used to. If you don't smile as you're listening, you might have your facial muscles checked.