Long-standing figures on the Arkansas/Ozarks roots scene, Brad Apple & Pam Setser forged a musical partnership in 2017. On this eponymous album they turn their multi-instrumental skills and vocal harmonies to nine folk, country and parlor songs, plus the Buddy Holly classic (from Paul Anka) "It Doesn't Matter Anymore." There is a little bluegrass here (Jim & Jesse's lively "I'll Love Nobody But You"), but mostly Apple & Setser revive the feeling of hillbilly duet singing popular in the 1930s and beyond.

The album reminds us of what we're missing, though less than one might have expected of a fully period-centered approach, which would have had a larger supply of sentimental gush celebrating home and hearth. Like early country songs, Apple's "A Friend You'd Never Met" conjures up a good-old-days revery once ubiquitous in popular song but rarely heard anymore, in part because ours is a more cynical age, the rest that good old days are almost always the deception of selective memory. (One also has to wonder: whose good old days?) Still, Apple's finger-picking and attractive, laid-back vocals make us concede the argument, at least for the duration of the cut.

Setser's "Too Far Gone" (not the only song with that title) is the sort of morose break-up number those of us who grew up with classic mid-20th century country know well, and a worthy instance of same. Setser effectively removes it from the ordinary via nuanced piano-based arrangement and brittle storytelling.

The two musicians are also seriously conversant in traditional folk, offering up outstanding readings of "Hand Me Down My Walking Cane" and "Rake & Rambling Blade." The show closes with a heart-felt, finger-picked instrumental arrangement of the evergreen "When You & I Were Young, Maggie," written in the 1860s and still well known to listeners fortunate enough to have been exposed to it when it was easily encountered. I first heard it when I was a little kid, which was not the other day or even decade, but whenever it plays near me, I am removed to that lost other time and place. Ironically, the real-life Maggie who inspired it did not live into old age but died young, a year after the lyrics were penned.

Tell 'Em You Were Gold is the seventh release Pharis & Jason Romero have issued, their first on the prestigious Smithsonian Folkways label. At the core of their professional life when they're not touring, they build quality banjos in their shop in tiny Horsefly, British Columbia. That's half the purpose of this album: to showcase their products in photographs, prose and performance. If you aren't looking to purchase such an instrument, you'll likely skip the technical details and focus your entire attention on the album's 16 cuts.

About a third are oldtime songs and tunes likely to be recognizable to you if you follow mountain music, though they're encased in banjo arrangements unlike any other. Not that they don't sound in some sense traditional; you could say they're the tradition in a different humor. In the tradition, especially when the banjo is driving it, the music tends to be extroverted, in other words aggressive, angry or (usually good-humoredly, maybe drunkenly) raucous. If you don't love it, it can even get on your nerves. Or so I'm told. I must have loved it the first time I heard it.

But the Romeros are quiet about it. Which is to say they reimagine the material as something to be reflected upon, not shouted about. Contrast, for one example, the reading of "Rolling Mills are Burning Down" with the source recording by North Carolinian George Landers (on John Cohen's 1995 Rounder collection High Atmosphere) with the Romeros'. Landers is alerting us to a five-alarm fire, while the Romeros are ruminating before a campfire. Yet the latter's genius is such that their interpretation comes with its own surprising power and convincing authenticity.

The same is the case with standards such as "Train on the Island," "Going Across the Sea" and "Been All Around This World." One can easily understand why the Romeros chose to reimagine these songs. Instead of rocking them up, however, or otherwise transforming them into something they only vaguely resemble, they elect to tone them down and in so doing make them feel at once fresh and yet true to older selves.

In the past I've had some reservations, fairly or unfairly, about their original cuts and at moments wished there weren't any. Here, however, the composed songs co-exist so comfortably with the competition that they could serve as models for trad-folk-based writing. Trad-based writing is a venerable practice but a whole lot more difficult than it sounds. (When it's not good, it's barely short of horrifying.) The Romeros' distinctive harmonies conjure up some memorable atmospherics, especially in the faux-Child ballad "Cannot Change It All" and in "Souvenir," from which the title quote derives. "Souvenir," by the way, is not to be confused with John Prine's "Souvenirs," nor does either much resemble the other. Both are eminently worth your time, though.

Tell 'Em You Were Gold is blessed with gratifyingly consistent quality and unflaggingly creative energy. It is Pharis & Jason's strongest album to date. The banjos sound great, too.