As I read the promotional material that accompanied this CD, I noticed the name Johnny Shines. It turns out that Debbie Bond launched her blues career in the 1980s accompanying Shines for several years until his death in 1992. Shines' reputation as a bluesman is overshadowed by his youthful association with Robert Johnson, with whom he rambled the continent, playing on street corners and in juke joints, in the 1930s. The victim of a notorious murder in 1938, Johnson would go on to immortality as the most famous of all downhome blues singers. Shines lived long enough to release an impressive number of albums, solo and band, acoustic and electric, on independent roots labels. They attest to his own notable but unfairly overlooked talent.

Shines, who was Black, was a product of the South. Bond, who is white, was born in California but moved at a young age to Europe, then to Sierra Leone in West Africa, where she first performed on stage at age 13. From there she landed in Alabama and started playing blues with local musicians, including Shines. After he left the scene, she ended up in other outfits, most prominently Eddie Kirkland's. From her base in Alabama, she continues to perform regularly on the Southern circuit and throughout Europe.

I am embarrassed to confess that till Live at the Song Theater showed up in mail, I had not heard of her. This says nothing about her. This speaks to my mainly historical outlook on her chosen genre, also to the fact that nearly all of my live listening to later blues took place during my Chicago years (1970s and '80s) in what felt like a golden age of hanging out in clubs dominated by Alligator and Delmark artists.

Song Theater does not bear a close resemblance to these hard-edged styles, and certainly not to Shines'. Jazz is a part of it, though, as are r&b, vintage pop and a usually lighter, accessible blues at times leavened with humor. Every once in a while a blues, usually a bawdy one, will make me laugh, sometimes out loud. The original "Wishbone" (written with Bond's husband and band member Radiator Rick Asherson) does that to me and, unless you're prudish, should do it to you, too: I got a wishbone where my backbone should be. In context that line is quite hilarious.

That's the 11th track. The next (and last), "Blues without Borders," another original, bluntly addresses the deeply unfunny American social/political moment. All the distance through, the album boasts songs with memorable melodies and lyrics. Wherever it's doing, none fails to charm. The covers are exceptionally well chosen, among them Ann Peebles' "Playhouse Down" (an image borrowed from an older folk song) and Delbert McClinton's wise "Been Around a Long Time." Bond is a spectacular song interpreter, able to enter the soul -- grim or comic or celebratory -- of a song and intensify it on just about every level.

You can discern Bond and associates' influences, but they don't sound particularly imitative. They've fashioned a strikingly original sound out of appealing recognizable elements. It seems friendly, fun and close somehow, as if they're letting you into the joy undergirding the enterprise. Part of it is the small, intimate band, and I imagine some other part of it is some very good engineering. And then there's the live element. Not to mention an assembly of smartly arranged first-rate material.

It's all that and more. There's plenty of good music out there, of course, but this is good in a voice that delivers its own unique sort of lasting pleasure.