Big Iron World.

BIG IRON WORLD Old Crow Medicine Show (Nettwerk, 2006)

Old Crow Medicine Show (OCMS for short) consists of five twenty-something white guys who play banjos, fiddles, and other acoustic string instruments. So, you're thinking, here come the next bluegrass prodigies, chasing Alison Krauss and Nickel Creek. Wrong.

OCMS plays music older and funkier than bluegrass. They go back to the jug bands that played on street corners in the days before recordings. Unlike bluegrass, this tradition is biracial; the Mississippi Sheiks areas important as Appalachian banjo basher Uncle Dave Macon. In fact, OCMS makes us remember that the banjo was originally an African instrument and a staple of early African American jazz bands.

On Big Iron World, OCMS plays a string band version of the rhythm and blues classic "Down Home Girl" and a couple of traditional jug band songs. But their originals are just as deeply rooted as the covers. They play Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid" and they wrote a song called "James River Blues" about a Virginia boatman put out of work by the railroad (the "big iron" of the title). And both songs make perfect sense in this post-industrial Wal-Mart century.

Traditional American music has always wrestled with injustice, and with sin and redemption. OCMS has that covered, too. There's an original gospel tune called "God's Got It" But the high point of the album is "I Hear Them All," a Whitmanesque incantation in which the singer hears "the lowliest gathered in their stalls ... the flowers growing in the rubble of the towers ... the lamb of Judah sleeping at the feet of Buddha"--and pulls them all together in a mystic vision of unity.

Listen to Big Iron World a few times, and you'll start to wonder if perhaps the best rock 'n' roll band in America today plays without a drummer.--Danny Duncan Collum