These three recordings feel like a year's worth of solid traditional bluegrass, with everything blessedly covered: the vocals, the tight, tough instrumentation, the strong songs, the sense of where the music comes from and how it should present itself in the second decade of the 21st century. I am also caused to reflect that as much bluegrass as I've heard over the course of a lifetime, I can't get blase about it when it's done right. Right it is done right here.

From my perspective it helps, too, that each of these discs nods to the deeper tradition of Appalachian folk music. In fact, Sideline celebrates it in "Old Time Way," evoking the feeling of a Saturday-night dance a hundred years ago or more, written around a tune knowledgeable listeners will recognize as "Groundhog." Front & Center closes with a lively, perfectly conceived instrumental arrangement of "Cotton Eyed Joe." From the old style Sideline takes a taste for ballads, as in story-songs, opening proceedings with Josh Manning's "Thunder Dan," a noirish tale of madness and murder. Beth Husband/Milan Miller's "Lysander Hayes" is played on a brisk, updated clawhammer banjo, another sign that Sideline is fishing in deep waters.

There is also an affecting reading of Dudley Connell's "Memories That We Shared," with its melodic and lyric echoes -- conscious or unconscious -- of my favorite Hank Williams song, "My Sweet Love Ain't Around," though without Hank's images of night trains and aimless ramblin' which made the song sound older than it was. Sideline's one, er, sideline from the straight track of hard-core bluegrass is Gordon Lightfoot's "Song for a Winter's Night," learned -- as I lately realized from all the Lightfoot covers in bluegrass in recent years -- not from Lightfoot but from revered bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice's cover. Rice is something of a Lightfoot obsessive. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It has certainly elevated the overall bluegrass repertoire.

Flashback used to be J.D. Crowe's band, known first as New South, then (for reasons that must have made sense to somebody) Newsouth. Anyway, banjoist Crowe, one of bluegrass' towering talents, retired a few years ago. The band went on under a new name, and man, is it a wonder. Denver Snow is the sort of disc, rarely encountered, that once it's played through, your natural reflex is to play it again, immediately. Flashback has four members, and three of them are Richard Bennett, Don Rigsby and Stuart Wyrick. If you know anything about 'grass, that should get your eyeballs to popping like a character's in a cartoon.

These guys, I shouldn't have to tell you, know what a fine song is and how to treat it. The title number, a Bennett original, has the resonance (both in the music and in the performance) of what Lightfoot would have sounded like if he'd sought a career as a bluegrass artist. It's followed by the wonderful Rigsby/Bennett collaboration "A Rose (From Time to Time)," a new composition but in the vein of the heart songs that so influenced country and bluegrass acts of another time. "Take This Hammer," which is a Southern prison song from the African-American tradition, is credited to the Osborne Brothers for reasons having more to do with copyright law than with actual musical history.

James Taylor did not write (as claimed here) "One Morning in May," nor did Jim Rooney, from whom Taylor learned it. Taylor recorded it and accepted the royalty checks till Rooney complained and the money was routed in the proper direction. Actually, "One Morning," aka "The Nightingale" and "Wild Rippling Water," is at least 300 years old, and nobody who heard it in those days thought that the "fiddle" mentioned therein was supposed to be a musical instrument. But if you want to believe it is, God bless you. I think we can agree that this is a most pleasing performance of it.

Between 1924 and 1952 Chicago hosted the National Barn Dance, broadcast through radio station WLS. For a time it rivaled Nashville's Grand Old Opry in popularity. It put Chicago firmly into any history of country music, but after it passed, it left little trace in the city. When I lived there, roaming the streets seeking out the kind of music I like, I heard lots of blues, folk and jazz, but precious little country. (I left before the Bloodshot label and "alternative country" became a thing.) Bluegrass was born on the Opry stage in the late 1940s, but when it intersected with the folk revival a decade or more later, it split from mainstream country to become an independent genre.

Special Consensus, founded in 1975 and led for these many years by banjo picker Greg Cahill, would have been at home on the National Barn Dance, though of course the singing and playing reflect more modern ways of approaching tradition-based music. Still, Cahill and associates are undeniably rooted, and in some ways Rivers & Roads honors the late John Hartford, whose knowledge of old fiddle tunes amounted to the encyclopedic. In fact, the first cut rips and roars through an exhilarating piece credited to Hartford, though in fact from Uncle Dave Macon, though in fact from traditional sources. It's a cousin to "Bound to Ride" and any number of others, all of which generate happiness and good will when you hear them. Special Consensus makes me overflow with happiness and good will.

The band also pulls off a plausible bluegrass arrangement of the Johnny Cash chestnut "Big River" and applies gospel harmonies to the terrific old spiritual "Travelin' Shoes." I'm delighted to hear a number I hadn't heard in quite a while, "Early," Greg Brown's gloriously romantic tribute to Midwestern small-town life, here in the instance of Early, Iowa. I can attest from abundant personal experience, alas, that Midwestern small-town life isn't gloriously romantic, but I can assure you that you'll always have a place to park.