Jemima James - Silver and Gold (2024)

Vermont-born, Colorado-raised, and Martha’s Vineyard, MA-based — via New York City, where her partner Michael Mason and she were staff songwriters for Famous Music Corporation, the music publishing division of Paramount Pictures, in the 1970s — folkie James first caught my ear backing former Family Circus/Plum Nelly roots-rocker Billy Stoner (1944-2024) on his engaging “lost” self-titled 1980 solo album, issued by Team Love in 2017 along with her own 1979 At Longview Farm and 2016’s When You Get Old. (In addition to those, James has recorded at least four other LPs: 2004’s Book Me Back in Your Dreams and 2014’s Nothing New can also be found on streaming platforms, while two others, Jemima James and Slaughterhouse of Love, are referenced in Amazon’s product description of the Book Me Back in Your Dreams CD.)

Now 74, her luxuriant voice has lost nothing in the 45 years since At Longview Farm, as evinced on the cozy, Patsy Cline-hued opener “Silver Rope,” which finds her infatuated and unsure about a new romance. She’s similarly delectable on the scolding “Lazybones,” misbehaving “Oh Henry,” and (fortified by her son Willy Mason’s harmonies) apprehensive “Long Alaska Night.” On the resplendent, Leonard Cohen “Marianne”-tinted “If I Can’t Get the Gold,” her delicately strummed acoustic, Aiden Earley’s warm piano, and Josh Campbell’s twinkly mandolin provide the ideal backdrop for her prudent words, which address the futility of always expecting absolute perfection from love.

Moving renditions of two old cowboy songs, the accordion and sax-spiced (by Anna Barber and Levi Gillis) “Spanish is a Loving Tongue” — a tune with lyrics based on Charles Badger Clark’s 1907 Pacific Monthly poem “A Border Affair,” first set to music by Billy Simon in 1925 — and Bob Palmer and Monte Hall’s 1929 honky-tonk “Utah Trail,” and sweet covers of Jessi Colter’s 1975 #4 “I’m Not Lisa” and (with producer Lilah Larson on lead vocals) Elizabeth Cotten and her 12-year-old great-granddaughter/later Undisputed Truth singer Brenda Evans’s 1965-recorded, 1967-released “Sweet Sugaree,” make Silver and Gold as mollifying as a potful of chamomile.