Lindsay Lou Presents Bluegrass Women might be the most-accurate album title in the history of album titles. 

A collection of 10 songs written, co-written or first recorded by women and performed by Lou and a host of bold-faced females of the genre, Bluegrass Women lives up not only to its name, but to its pedigree. For this album is 100 percent authentic and every song—featuring five to eight singers and players each—has exactly what it needs to succeed. 

The resulting sound is big, joyful and a reminder that women, though they rarely get the credit they deserve, are essential musical pioneers and architects.

Guests include banjoists Alison Brown and Allison De Groot; fiddlers Laurie Lewis, Bronwyn and Brittany Haas; mandolinists AJ Lee, Sierra Hull and Sarah Jarosz; guitarist Molly Tuttle; and singer Aoife O’Donovan. Songwriters tapped include Dorothy Skaggs (“All I Ever Loved Was You”), Kate Wolf (“Like a River”) and Elizabeth Cotten, whose “Freight Train” seems an almost-mandatory inclusion on an album such as this.

Often deep, as on Ola Belle Reed’s enduring “I’ve Endured” and Doc and Rosa Lee Watson’s heartbreaking “Your Lone Journey,” Bluegrass Women is also full of whimsy, never more so than on Jean Ritchie’s “Jubilee” on which Lou and a chorus of playful singers do declare:

“Some will come on Saturday night/some will come on Sunday/if you give ’em half a chance/they’ll be back on Monday/swing and turn, jubilee/live and learn, jubilee.”

Hazel Dickens’ “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me” and the traditional “CC Rider,” which Ma Rainey first put to wax, are among the other see-sawing emotions on this album, which is a jubilee unto itself.