Every few years, longtime Woodstock, New York, resident Happy Traum releases another album. Each rests on a template established in the mid-century folk revival, when Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk and lesser-known but equally worthy artists, Traum among them, fashioned an approach at once tied to the past and yet alive in the moment. The usually acoustic guitar-centered arrangements didn't much resemble field recordings, of course, but they honored the older rural sounds -- British balladry, oldtime songs, downhome blues and more -- while rendering them accessible to an urban middle-class audience. At the same time nobody would mistake these recordings for the treacly pop-inflected works of the Weavers and the Kingston Trio.

Dylan and his contemporaries represented a stirring synthesis that drove me to fall head over heels in love with folk and folk-based music just as it was being ushered out of popular fashion. (I'm always late to the party.) Still, the best of those albums stand up remarkably even today. From time to time I read interviews with young players who have found their way to them and been rocked on their heels.

I last reviewed a Happy Traum album, Just for the Love of It, in this space on 20 February 2016. Six years later we have There's a Bright Side Somewhere, no doubt a nod to these dire times, also the title of the opening cut. Bright Side is largely more of the Traum same if with a larger supply of participants than usual. As before, we have a line-up of trad numbers, well-chosen covers and a couple of originals, 13 cuts' worth, of which three are creatively conceived instrumentals.

Arguably the most beautiful of all Appalachian songs (rivaled only by "Storms are on the Ocean" and "A-Rovin' on a Winter's Night" in my humble judgment), "Come All You Fair & Tender Ladies" gets a rare non-vocal arrangement, with 21st-century touches provided by violinist Darol Anger, who is definitely not a fiddler in the present context. "How are Things in Glocca Morra?", an ersatz Irish tune from the Broadway stage popular decades ago, led my nose to crinkle on first perusal of the table of contents. Taste, intelligence and finger-picking skills lead Traum, however, to transform it into an unlikely heart-stopper.

There's also Dylan's "Farewell," not on any of his official albums but familiar to folk fans as a grandly melodramatic reworking of "The Leaving of Liverpool," which Dylan learned from the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. "Dry Bones" is courtesy of North Carolina's songster/collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. While they share titles, this one is not the better-known Black spiritual. Eric Andersen's "Mary, I'm Comin' Back Home" takes a well-worn subject -- a homesick musician on the road -- and attaches to it a powerful melody and unusually compelling lyrics. The result is a song with the resonance of a first-rate short story.

As usual Traum showcases his keenly melody-focused reading of blues standards. In this case it's Brownie McGhee's "Living with the Blues" as well as "In the Wee Midnight Hour." Confusingly to me, he credits the latter to Blind Willie McTell. I hesitate to quarrel with someone of Traum's deep knowledge, but my understanding is that the number was composed and recorded (as the piano-based "Midnight Hour Blues") by Leroy Carr in March 1932.

The closer, "Love Song to a Girl in an Old Photograph," a Traum original, is a well-told, almost literally haunting meditation on the title character. Smartly, he never quite addresses the core questions, leaving listeners to weigh them for themselves.

A legendarily nice guy with a wide circle of friends, on Bright Side Traum counts among his collaborators such luminaries as Geoff Muldaur, John Sebastian, Bruce Molsky, Amy Helm, Tony Trishka, Abby Newton, Jay Ungar and others. There may be something not to like here, but if so, I haven't figured it out yet.

[ visit Happy Traum's website ]