Buddy Miller has mastered the sound of ruralness. He and wife Julie sound like hill folk singing to each other in metaphors that resonate—they’re gasoline and matches, they say—and he’s figured out how to make his guitar sound like one step up from a tuned rubboard. His strings always sound loosely strung, while the rhythms are stomped on floorboards or tapped out on a washtub. In that way, Written in Chalk evokes the sort of hill country hootenanny we’d like to think exists. Of course, the Millers’ porch sing includes Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin and Regina McCrary.

It’s an appealing vision of real people making real, unschooled art, one that effortlessly combines plain speech with blues, country, folk and rock. Memories of better days sit side by side with plaintive love songs, barely coded lust songs, shared blues tunes, homilies and spiritual mediations—exactly what we’d like to think rural folk are like in their instinctive wisdom and soulfulness. It’s to Buddy Miller’s credit that he crafts music that sounds that way, and that he makes it sound effortless. It isn’t, of course, and there are times when I’m put off by the continuation of the centuries-old myth that country people are somehow real-er than city folk. But while Written in Chalk is playing, that they seem real is enough.