On October 19, 1952, Hank Williams married his second wife onstage at Municipal Auditorium, and the crowd at the matinee loved it so much he married her again at the 7 p. m. show.

Those were the second and third times he married Billie Jean Jones—the first marriage took place the night before in Minden before a J.P.—and a story like that bestows on this city a country pedigree that’s hard to improve on. Still, we don’t support country particularly well, which is a shame because Kim Carson is as fine a roots/country singer as someone like Rosie Flores. Her new album, Calle de Orleans, is a mature, intelligent country rock album that is traditional without being retro.

Recorded in Nashville, the album is not made to keep the dancers moving, though there are a few New Orleans-inflected honky-tonk numbers to scuffle about to. Instead, producer Dutch has put Carson in a context that shows off her honesty as a singer.

On the self-penned “No One to Blame,” a cheating song, Carson sounds wistful for the relationship she broke up, but there’s a life in her voice that suggests she isn’t entirely sorry she did it. Similarly, when she sings, “He’s a work of art” admiring a singer in “Honky-Tonk Girl,” the growl in her voice says she is thinking about more than just sitting on the verandah to sip minty iced tea and talk Faulkner.

While Carson wrote half of Calle de Orleans, her cover choices are interesting and effective. Her version of Barbara Mandrell’s “Midnight Angel” features Carson celebrating the sexual freedom that a cheating husband allows her, and she inhabits the Continental Drifters’ “Heart/Home” as if she wrote it.

The only dubious step is Stevie Nicks’ “After the Glitter Fades,” which in theory is a good idea. After all, reclaiming a lost gem can make an artist’s reputation, but the song’s Californian origins make its sadness sound suspiciously like bourgeois self-pity. Carson 99% makes it work, but next to the working class honesty of the rest of the record, it sounds a little out of place.