Well, not to put too fine a point on it, bands like Rock Hearts are the reason I have never tired of bluegrass. Based in southern New England, the five members are veterans of regional groups. Joe Deetz, a banjo player for four decades, belonged to the most famous of them, Joe Val & and the New England Bluegrass Boys, among the most fondly remembered outfits in the genre's history. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, when you tire of Joe Val, you have tired of bluegrass.

The late Val's biting tenor led his Bluegrass Boys in the style of Bill Monroe's. Rock Heart's principal lead singer, Alex MacLeod, sings more smoothly and at a more relaxed pace, but he easily falls into the band's downhome approach. He would have fit in as readily with the classic Country Gentlemen. Billy "BT" Thibodeaux (mandolin) also contributes lead and harmony singing. Other members include Danny Musher (fiddler, vocals) and Rick Brodsky (bass). You don't get to be this good if you lack the collective experience and clear vision these guys share.

Starry Southern Nights opens with the sort of cut you wouldn't expect to find on a bluegrass disc, a reworked version of country bluesman Julius Daniels's 1927 recording "99 Year Blues," itself inspired by African-American bad-man ballads then in circulation. This variant owes a whole lot to Lead Belly's famous "On a Monday," which itself drew on pre-existing songs about Southern crime and criminals. They're awfully good, and it's a most gratifying surprise to hear one covered in bluegrass.

The second cut, Cecil Allen Null's "Don't Let Smokey Mountain Smoke Get in Your Eyes," comes out of an unrelated tradition of songs that celebrate places. Often enough, these are grab bags of sentimental cliches, but when they're good, they make you wish you were there. This is one of the good ones, with a melody so sweet that it will return to spin on your psychic jukebox on frequent occasion, where it will invariably be welcome.

The all-too short (27 minutes) album concludes with another ballad from the Black tradition, namely the classic American folksong "Stagger Lee," based on a real-life murder in turn of the last century St. Louis. Before that glorious 3:16, though, there's an entertaining number, from another, odder tradition, Bill Smith's "Wake Up and Smell the Coffee," among the bluegrass and country songs that treat Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs as sex symbols, the joke being that they were nobody's idea of same. The joke, moreover, never amounts to more than good-natured ribbing. Though mean-spirited bluegrass songs exist, fortunately there aren't many of them.

The one misfire on the song-list, in my judgment, is Townes Van Zandt's "Don't Take It Too Bad." When I saw it here, I first reflected that I hadn't heard it in a while. Townes's strongest songs have been widely covered, and I discerned quickly enough why this one has been left to gather dust. It's a clunkily written, borderline offensive romantic ditty that must have arrived when its composer was in a lesser creative state or otherwise had his consciousness preoccupied.

Still, it shouldn't keep you away from Starry Southern Nights, as satisfying an in-the-tradition bluegrass disc as you're likely to encounter in 2020.