In my misspent life as a young adult, I spent my weekend evenings in honkytonks that featured live country bands. Not all the bands were all that good, as I recall, but the best attracted the finest players and vocalists in the small Upper Midwestern city where I lived. In those cases one or more of the participants had some sense of hillbilly history; thus, each song in their repertoire was not a current radio hit, and there were occasional surprises retrieved from the genre's deep, if mostly neglected, catalogue. If there wasn't much in the way of self-written material, these bands performed what they had been hired to do with satisfying conviction and competence.

On Honky Tonk the veteran West Coast outfit Marley's Ghost brings those long-ago nights back to mind. Its six members have chosen a dozen numbers that rose to prominence on the charts in the middle years of the last century, highlighting the work of fondly remembered composers such as Roger Miller, Mel Tillis, Tommy Hill, Merle Haggard, Bobby Bare, Webb Pierce and others. There is not a second-rate song here. Moreover, the album resurrects the otherworldly "Waltz of the Angels," cut by Wynn Stewart in 1956, now almost forgotten and seldom covered; yet it remains a beloved classic to those of us fortunate enough to have had it touch us.

Like those bands of yesteryear, Marley's Ghost sometimes drops an unexpected instrument -- an accordion -- into the mix, tipping the hat to 1940s groups that did the same before accordions became severely unfashionable as too uncool even for hillbillies. This was around the period, if memory serves, when fiddles grew rare on records for the same reason. In my opinion, as one who spent my formative years in a tiny rural hamlet and who heard accordions before he knew what a guitar might be, I continue to insist that, if played right, an accordion is a perfectly respectable instrument. It certainly is on Honky Tonk.

Probably it's unwise to overthink this album, which is at once enjoyable and modest and no more, at least if you know the original recordings from which Marley's Ghost doesn't depart radically. No one would call this an ambitious project. One may go so far as to infer that it was engineered to entertain band members as much as its potential audience, which is likely to be small. Not that the group doesn't deserve a larger one. It's just that its crowd is out of the folk ranks, which don't interact much with their country counterparts, and vice versa.

I last encountered Marley's Ghost when I reviewed its Spooked in this space two decades ago (on 3 June 2006 specifically). There I characterized it as evincing the "sound of an old-time string band wedded to a 19th-century village brass ensemble." It was stocked with hilarious parodies of venerable folk songs along with thoughtful numbers including the abolitionist hymn "Get Off the Track" and Dylan's brilliant allegory "The Wicked Messenger." It worthily exemplified creative concept, rich humor and unexpected content. The current disc does none of that. Not that it's devoid of pleasures, of course, but its are the more ordinary ones.