When a modern bluegrass band is identified as "traditional," a 21st-century listener learns that the adjective is relative. The likely meaning is that while a specific act has absorbed influences from outside the genre Bill Monroe invented decades ago, it still echoes (albeit only partially recreating) first-generation bluegrass. (An outstanding recent example is Barry Abernathy & Friends, reviewed here this past 10 April.) In many ways aside from the effects of recording technology, mid-century bluegrass is different from the current iteration. In our time "traditional" is more accurately "neotraditional."

But not always. Except for the brighter, multi-dimensional contemporary sound, Danny Paisley, Kody Norris and their associates produce a bluegrass deeply rooted in another era. Yet it is fully alive and joyful, not for a moment hinting at redundancy. These guys know what they're communicating, which is the opposite of datedness. The surprised hearer wonders, but does not complain about, how something so familiar could sound so fresh.

Born in North Carolina though a resident of Pennsylvania from childhood on, Bob Paisley founded Southern Grass in 1980, after years in partnership with Ted Lundy in the acclaimed Southern Mountain Boys. Fifteen-year-old Danny Paisley, a budding guitarist and harmony singer, joined the latter in 1974 and stayed with it when it took its present name and after his father's death in 2004. The present incarnation features not only Danny's son Ryan (mandolin, vocals) but Ted Lundy's son Bobby (stand-up bass, vocals) along with Mark Delaney (banjo) and Matt Hooper (fiddle). Note the absence of percussion and electric bass, ubiquitous in no longer purely acoustic bluegrass line-ups.

The songs don't stray much from bluegrass sources, in contrast to many contemporary groups that, with varying degrees of proficiency, flavor their repertoires with material from rock, pop and current country. The oldest numbers here are "May I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?" -- first cut by Charlie Poole in 1925 -- and the venerable spiritual "Eat at the Welcome Table." The most recent are a couple of songs, including the drolly witty "I Never Was Too Much," by Eric Gibson of the Gibson Brothers. Danny's singing of the Gothic country "Long Black Limousine" is so infused with the tragic narrative that if you're not in some secure place, you might fear being thrown against the wall. Troy Spencer's prisoner's song "Forty Years of Trouble," if new to me, feels just as moving as, um, "The Prisoner's Song," a folk ballad of uncertain authorship first recorded in the early years of commercial country music.

The Kody Norris Show, based in east Tennessee, is a four-piece outfit of formidable gifts. It perpetuates the approach the foundational bands -- Monroe, the Stanleys, the Osbornes and especially Jimmy Martin (whom Norris looks and dresses like) -- championed. Beyond that, though a young man born in 1988, guitarist Norris is well-versed in the old folk songs of the mountains. He fuses all of these influences into an impressive Appalachian-centered bluegrass, defined by appropriately tough yet tender vocals comfortable with just about any emotional shading, little of it experienced -- or so one infers -- within city limits.

His handling of the late Bill Grant's unsettling doomed-outlaw ballad "In the Shade of the Big Buffalo" is particularly affecting -- not a song for the timid at either the listening or the performing end -- but the sentimental "Let's Go Strollin'" and the light-hearted "Uncle Bill's Still" stick in the psychic jukebox, nicely representing Norris's warmer side. The opening cut, "Brand New Hit in Nashville," written by Gary Sanders, surely owes a part of its inspiration to Jimmy Martin's classic "Grand Ole Opry Song." I'm sure Martin would have done a fabulous version of it had he lived, but we can be grateful to Norris for stepping up to do the job. "Love Bug," by the way, is not the George Jones novelty tune but an equally bouncy Norris original.

His young band includes his wife Mary Rachel Nalley-Norris, an accomplished fiddler who was pursuing her own career when her and Kody's paths crossed fortuitously a few years ago. Though the photographs in the sleeve depict four group members, only three are listed in the credits, the third being Josiah Tyree (banjo, harmony vocals).

Music doesn't have to make you happy to be worthwhile, we all know, but the two releases here reviewed will do that for you. It's at once bluegrass like they used to and -- as we learn here -- bluegrass like they still do, if given over to those who know what to do with it.