Virginia-born and -bred Junior Sisk (formally Harry Sisk Jr.), a prominent figure on the present century's bluegrass scene, says he never strays far from the Stanley Brothers. Their approach helped define the first two decades of bluegrass, from the mid-1940s to Carter Stanley's death in December 1966.

Among the most talented and most underrated hillbilly songwriters, Carter wanted to push the band's material, at least thematically, into more contemporary honkytonk. His sibling and partner Ralph, on the other hand, was more rooted in the oldtime music the two had grown up with. Their classic fusion sound, still revered within the bluegrass realm and beyond, amounted to an artistic compromise linking old and new. After Carter was no longer around, Ralph reshaped what had been their band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, into a brilliantly uncompromising Appalachian outfit, with much of the output consisting of clawhammer banjo-driven ballads, lyric folk songs, mountain hymns and fiddle tunes.

On either side of the divide between traditional and modern, Stanley recordings remain as noteworthy as any envisioned and cut in the course of American life. Like the Brothers', Sisk's music is often set in bars and unspecified locales that listeners infer, from the instruments and vocal accents, are to be found in the South; they could as easily be on a city street as in a rural backwater, however. In a style clearly learned from Carter's example, Sisk sings of love, loss and lamentable behavior, while adding an ode to the old home place (Bob Minner's "Sweeter Than Tupelo Honey") plus a grassed-up tribute, Cliff Carlisle's "The Devil's Train," to the late James King, a bluegrass star and onetime friendly competitor to Sisk. The latter track is one of a number of stern, admonitory gospel songs that derive from the 19th-century "Hell Bound Train."

Happily, Sisk is possessed of an amiable sense of humor, exemplified in Tim O'Brien's gently lustful "Weather Woman" and Daniel Solyer's comically rueful "An Eye for an I Do," both of which shoot beams of light through the darkness generated by ill-considered misdeeds. The mournful "Breaking His Heart Again," composed by Joe Isaacs and David Marshall, is not quite the standard severed-relationship song one is likely to anticipate. This is a hymn (a good one), and "His Heart" belongs to Jesus, not to a spurned mortal lover. It also feels more well-traveled than in fact it is. The slowly rolling, mournful melody is in the vein of those a listener swears he or she has heard before but can't quite place.

One expects solid work from Sisk and his small but crack band (here expanded slightly by notables Ron Stewart, Don Rigsby and more), and It's All Fun & Games delivers with the deceptive ease of the thoroughly adept. Wherever they are, Carter and Ralph may rest content that the Stanley tradition lives on in the best of hands.