WANDA JACKSON  Unfinished Business [Sugar Hill] At 75, Wanda Jackson has nothing left to prove. Since emerging in the ’50s as a female Elvis, she’s weathered fallow periods, but the Queen of Rockabilly has never really disappeared. In 2009, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and two years later, Jack White stepped up to produce The Party Ain’t Over, a problematic album that said as much about White’s ambitions as it did... 

MARTY STUART AND HIS FABULOUS SUPERLATIVES Nashville, Vol. 1: Tear the Woodpile Down [Sugar Hill] Over the course of his four decades in Nashville, Marty Stuart has transformed from 13-year-old bluegrass prodigy to radio hit-maker and finally elder statesman. He’s one of the genre’s protectors now, amassing a museum’s worth of memorabilia, hosting his own TV variety show and championing a sound that’s all but vanished from mainstream country.... 

NICK 13 Nick 13 [Sugar Hill] Twelve years ago, Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness released his country-tinged first solo album—and thanks to Ness’ distinctive, SoCal-sunbaked voice, it still sounded a lot like Social Distortion. Nick 13, whose Berkeley-based psychobilly band Tiger Army is cut from the same cloth as Social D, gets a very different result on his own self-titled solo debut. A straightforward traditional effort co-produced by roots... 

JIM LAUDERDALE Reason and Rhyme [Sugar Hill] Jim Lauderdale is the Pixar of Americana: Like the animation giant, he’s had such a winning streak of releases that one can’t help but look for chinks in the armor whenever he resurfaces with a new project (of which there have been many). Fortunately, Reason and Rhyme, his 20th full-length and fourth bluegrass album in as many years, won’t go down in history as his Cars 2-esque fall-off point. Collaborating... 

SARAH JAROSZ Follow Me Down [Sugar Hill] If repeating yourself is a sure way to invite the sophomore jinx, then 19-year-old wunderkind Sarah Jarosz has blown that sucker to smithereens on her second album. Follow Me Down finds the Texas native branching out into adventurous newgrass styles with the help of Dobro king Jerry Douglas, banjo pioneer Béla Fleck, violin ace Stuart Duncan and other instrumental luminaries. Jarosz establishes a spooky ambiance... 

THE INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS Things That Fly [Sugar Hill] Since the late ’60s, acoustic string bands have taken the bluegrass format and pushed it beyond its strict confines. The Infamous Stringdusters fall somewhere between traditional bluegrass and those genre-blasting progressives—Things That Fly, the sextet’s third album, wouldn’t sound entirely alien to Bill Monroe, but neither should the jam-band crowd shy away from it. The basic instrumentation—guitar,...