Amanda Cook and Jaelee Roberts represent a new generation of bluegrass musicians. They also underscore the growing prominence of women in a genre mostly populated by males since its invention after World War II, and beyond that they affirm the boundless influence of Alison Krauss.

Krauss brought a pop-flavored bluegrass, sung in a sweet but distinctive voice and with a more contemporary approach to songwriting, not to mention first-rate picking that stopped well short of hard-driving. For her efforts she has become the most famous bluegrass figure of our time, even when she has strayed into a kind of neo-folk-rock with Robert Plant on a couple of best-selling releases. For a hardcore, pre-Krauss style, you need to go to a new Smithsonian Folkways reissue, Pioneering Women of Bluegrass, by Alice Gerrard and the late Hazel Dickens.

Amanda Cook's Changes is in a recognizably Kraussian vein. That said, it's hardly the beginning and end of its shadings. For one thing, Cook's has an occasionally discernible traditional edge in some of its material, for example the story-song "Ohio," which happens to be the first to grab my own attention. The songs are not originals but the creations of composers, familiar enough if your eyesight allows you to read often tiny-print credits, such as Paula Breedlove, Thomm Jutz, Kim Richey, Becky Buller and others, none of them exactly a hard-core Bill Monroe or Stanley Brothers acolyte but able enough in their own ways.

Over multiple listenings the strength of the project becomes ever more evident. "Lay Me to Rest" starts to feel like an oldtime bluegrass number dressed up in 21st-century garb, while the exquisite "Stars," more like the creation of a singer-songwriter vaguely influenced by the English folk tradition, betrays not a lick, literal or metaphorical, of bluegrass. Still, it's a chance to hear Cook's voice at its most ethereal. "Walk the Way of Light," the inevitable gospel number, is a pretty decent example of such.

Like Cook, Jaelee Roberts stands and sings in Krauss's shadow. It leads one to wonder if for a young group of female bluegrassers Krauss is already proving to be what Bill Monroe was to the music's founding generation. Something You Didn't Count On is far from the high-lonesome stuff that once ruled the domain, but something to which you could introduce friends not otherwise enamored of the genre.

That's not to say that fans, even grizzled ones like the undersigned, won't find something to enjoy in what Roberts does, mostly country-pop songs by modern-day bluegrass writers (though none overlapping with those on Cook's disc) focused on relationships and religion. Not -- her label's name notwithstanding -- the old mountain home, or for that matter trains, rambling, murder and the other subjects ubiquitous when bluegrass was less removed from its roots in oldtime music and rural America.

I grew up with that archaic kind of bluegrass. Flatt & Scruggs' version, even now moving to me, of the Appalachian ballad "East Virginia" changed the course of my life, or at least the listening part of it. I guess it has helped keep me loyal to bluegrass through its decades' long march toward a more mainstream sound. If it's not always to my taste, I recognize well-executed music when I hear it (and it's definitely audible in Roberts's metaphorical grooves) and tell myself it is, if no longer specifically the spawn of an older music, still bluegrass.