E-Mail This Article to a Friend Almost perfect The Great High Mountain tour BY TED DROZDOWSKI

The name of 2002’s "Down from the Mountain" tour alluded to more than the Appalachian and rural dogpatch roots of the songs its musicians, a slice from the peak of today’s contemporary bluegrass and old-time music scene, performed. It implied that this music, from gospel tunes to profane drinking numbers, has a standing in American culture akin to the missives Moses brought back from Sinai, and that a cappella spirituals like "Po Lazarus" are profound, basic, and timeless treasures awaiting rediscovery.

Now that rediscovery seems well under way. A sequel roadshow, the "Great High Mountain Tour," pulls into FleetBoston Pavilion this Memorial Day. It’s the latest in a chain of events that began with the 2000 success of the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which sold six million copies. To celebrate that CD, producer T-Bone Burnett and his collaborator, the singer-songwriter and Dylan confidant Bob Neuwirth, organized the first "Down from the Mountain" concert as a one-off at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2000. (Burnett and Neuwirth met as musicians on Dylan’s 1975 "Rolling Thunder Revue" tour.) Then came a film and a soundtrack of that event, and their traveling spinoffs. This year’s line-up has Grammy-winning contemporary bluegrass queen Alison Krauss joined by dobro master Jerry Douglas and the reigning bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley, Norman and Nancy Blake, the harmony singing Cox family, the Reeltime Travelers, young new gospel-blues sensations Ollabelle, Cold Mountain soundtrack architect Tim Eriksen (a Massachusetts native), and many others.

"Interest in this kind of music was already building underground for two or three years when we struck a nerve with O Brother," says Burnett over the phone from his Los Angeles office. Burnett remains the overseer of the "Mountain" tour, which he calls "a movable Louisiana Hayride," alluding to the Shreveport-based live radio program that gave Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, June Carter, Hank Williams, and other stars an early-career push in the 1950s.

So why is a sound minted nearly a century ago enjoying such popularity? "This music is imperfect. You hear so much perfect music these days that perfection has become a second-rate idea. A lot of people are tired of being sold this perfect music. That’s why kids are going back to ’70s hard rock, too. Music that’s imperfect has a sense of joy in it and a sense of invincibility in the people who make it. And I think people want to experience that again."

In other words, the very imperfection of a time-pitted voice like Ralph Stanley’s or the sometimes rough but glorious harmonies of Ollabelle is what makes those performers, and others like them, perfect examples of the beauty that humans can achieve without the sanitation of studio trickery like electronic pitch correction and overdubbing. Krauss’s performances are equally prized, though her down-home approach is blessed with near-flawless virtuosity.

Burnett, who along with Neuwirth drafted the performers for the current tour and organized their presentations into roughly 10-minute segments along the lines of a rough "emotional continuity," hopes listeners "come to an understanding of what this music is about. Some of the songs on stage go back 300 years, to the arrival of the colonists in New England, and we’ve structured the show so the musicians can do their own music and then jam with other players outside their usual style, and that’s one of the places where the crossing rivers and tributaries get revealed."

Burnett also reveals that he’s returning to his own roots as a singer-songwriter, a career the native Texan started in 1972, roughly 13 years before he began producing albums for artists like Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, and Counting Crows. It’ll be his first solo CD since 1992’s The Criminal Under My Own Hat (Columbia). "I’ve been working on it over the last two years, but I really need to take some time to go into the studio and finish, which I’m planning to do in July," he says, after the "Great High Mountain Tour" has concluded.

The "Great High Mountain Tour" comes to FleetBoston Pavilion this Monday, May 31, at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35.50 to $57.50; call (617) 931-2000.