A set of Americana/banjo songs more NPR than “Deliverance,” Lac La Belle’s “Bring On the Light” is a 12-song audio program designed to ease the downtrodden spirit.

Schlow Centre Region Library will host the folk duo from Motor City to help promote “Between the Covers,” the library’s adult summer reading program. Pittsburgh-based Pairdown will open the show at 7 p.m. Thursday at Sidney Friedman Park on South Fraser Street.

Lac La Belle’s Jennie Knaggs and Nick Schillace are well-versed in music history and tradition. She holds the title of 2000 hollering champion of two counties in Virginia and Kentucky. He wrote a 2002 graduate thesis on primitivist musician John Fahey, one of Rolling Stone magazine's 100 best guitarists ever. But reading between the lines, the songs are odes to transition and modern values. The pair use their backgrounds in music education and appreciation to bring the bluegrass/Americana/folk genres to a new place. The songs marry traditional styles with more ethereal, contemplative musical passages.

Knaggs plays guitar, mandolin, ukulele and accordion; Schillace plays guitars and banjo, and in spite of the musicians’ technical skills and ear for structure, it’s her voice that haunts me. It is a sharp ring that I can only reach if I’m singing in the confines of a steamy shower stall.

I can enjoy world music because, while I don’t usually understand the words, they become instrumental sounds of some caliber. Here, Knaggs’ self-harmonizing voice adds depth to the songs. It’s clean and clear, and she uses it to an almost theramin effect in a few places (“Novocaine” and “A Fine Line”). It’s hymnal, innocent, delicate, breathy, Old World, lulling, lilting and a little bit rock ’n’ roll.

Knaggs’ and Schillace’s voices and instruments make resonant the record’s self-help balladry, conjuring images of man’s internal retreat and journey through menacing tunnels and dark shadows and emerging to light’s promise at the surface.

The duo profess self-love without self-absorption: “You can live in your paradise, but draw your lines”; and summon courage: “We always take to runnin’, when change is comin’. ” They write love notes to loss, Oklahoma and hard truths. But Lac La Belle finger-picks the outcome, wiping away modern world-weary tears with a little help from the stories and styles of yesterday.

Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2012/06/07/3221580/bluegrass-band-lac-la-belle-marries.html#storylink=cpy