Even in its most traditional forms, music is elusive. It’s boundless in nature, yet tethered to the place where it’s written. With her beautiful new bluegrass album, Follow the Music, singer/songwriter Alice Gerrard offers a work that speaks to the many intersecting roads of the folk narrative.

For Gerrard—born in Seattle, raised in California, and now based in Durham, N.C.—music was always a family member. She was influenced by her parents: “My mother was a singer and classical pianist and my father was a singer,” she told Seattle Weekly recently on the phone. “I grew up with a sense of music as being something you could do yourself for yourself, with friends. That played right into the folk-traditional scenario. Love the sound, listen to the sound, learn it by ear, and play it with friends.”

Simple, bare, and powerful, Follow the Music could only have been written by someone as experienced as Gerrard, who at 80 can look back on a career of 13 albums and multiple entries in the revered Smithsonian Folkways catalog. A number of recordings she made with music partner Hazel Dickens are considered some of the most influential in folk-music history and have touched the likes of Emmylou Harris, who said earlier this year, “[Alice] is the real deal with the right stuff, and hasn’t forgotten where country music came from.”

Gerrard started playing professionally during the ’60s folk revival, and took up with the famed Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, a biannual tour, founded by Anne Romaine and Bernice Johnson Reagon, of traditional musicians travelling the South. She took part every year from 1969 to 1982, singing and playing banjo and guitar.

Between tours, she gravitated toward the Northeast. “I’m always influenced by what’s around me,” she says. “My influences started from the times during the 1950s and ’60s when I met people who liked traditional music, played it, and knew others who played it. When I moved to the Washington-Baltimore area, it was a hotbed of musical growth, being a crossroads of young, middle-class kids who were interested in mainly bluegrass music and Southern transplants who were playing mainly in bars all over the area.”

There she began to collaborate with Dickens and other celebrated folkies, like Jeremy Foster (her first husband), Pete Kuykendall, and Dick Spottswood, along with songwriter and folk-music historian Mike Seeger (whom she married after Foster died in a car accident). In 1989, making her way down to Durham, she found her own sense of place to write and tour from.

She hasn’t been idle since then. 2013 brought forth the excellent Bittersweet, and Follow the Music is produced by fellow Durham resident MC Taylor of cult folk-rock group Hiss Golden Messenger, who approached her to do a project.

“He was my graduate-student assistant when I taught one semester at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University,” Gerrard says. “He was recording for [record label] Tompkins Square (TS) at the time, and said he wanted to produce a recording of me for TS. He has a definite idea of what he wanted for the album, and I just sort of gave over to that and trusted him for the most part.”

Backed by an amazing ensemble comprising brothers Brad and Phil Cook of psych-folk group Megafaun as well as Taylor himself, Gerrard’s voice on opening track “Bear Me Away” captures a sincerity in every recorded breath over a worn, mournful fiddle. Her banjo playing is also a force to be reckoned with. In the traditional song “Boll Weevil,” each stringed instrument weaves an impeccable sonic tapestry, rustic, haunting, and steeped with dusty charm.

Gerrard seems satisfied with it, and hopes others will be too. Her desire is that listeners will “enjoy the music, [and develop] a desire to explore traditional music further and be open to other worlds of music, a sense that imperfection is perfection in this world of AutoTune.” That’s sage advice from an artist, on the folk circuit from Seattle to Baltimore, who’s always followed the sound herself. Follow the Music

is out Sept. 30th via Tompkins Square, tompkinssquare.com.

music@seattleweekly.com