Time Traveller is an apt title for the debut CD from Canberra's Black Mountain String Band, in more ways than one.

First there is the music, which takes us back to earlier times and places. Much of the material is from the American Appalachian tradition. Think of the Coen Brothers' film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, and you're in the right neck of the woods. But there are other traditions and more recent songs and tunes too – by John Hartford, Stephen Spitzer and the band's own Jacqueline Bradley.

In a different mode of time travel, we can follow the band's lineage back to an earlier incarnation of a Canberra band with the same name: the Black Mountain String Band of the 1960s and 1970s. That time line has a strong link to the present. One of the founders of the original Black Mountain String Band, the late Tim Shopen, was the father of Pablo Shopen, who is a member of the reincarnated Black Mountain String Band.

Tim, who taught linguistics at the Australian National University, was one of the first clawhammer, or frailing-style, banjo players in Australia. In the US, Tim had played old-time string-band music with some of the masters of the form, including the well-known fiddler Miles Krassen.

A lovely family story has it that when Tim was at university in Indiana, Krassen came around to his house so often to play music that Tim's son Pablo, then just a toddler who was learning how to speak, thought the word "Miles" meant music!

These days, Pablo has built solidly on the musical tradition he inherited from his father, who died in 2005. On Time Traveller, Pablo plays not only the banjo, in the style of his father, but also some passionate fiddle.

He's joined by Donal Baylor, one of Australia's most accomplished bluegrass fiddle players and an outstanding guitarist; Jacqueline Bradley, who in addition to her song-writing also plays fiddle, banjo and guitar; and bass player Matt Nightingale, who finds time away from his several other bands to hold it all together.

Baylor first met Bradley several years ago when she came to him for lessons on the violin. She was such a quick learner that he soon told her she should be coming around to play in jam sessions, not to have lessons.

Around that time Pablo Shopen and Baylor had been playing together regularly on an informal basis but thinking of forming a band. With Bradley's many talents (she is also an artist who designed the Time Traveller album cover) she was a natural fit.

On Time Traveller the band are joined by two special guests. Kevin Bradley (father of Jacqueline, another cross-generational connection) plays guitar on several tracks, including Black Mountain Rag, a tune that might come from Appalachia but sounds right at home here in Canberra. Canberra percussionist Mick Thompson makes a brief, sparkling appearance on the triangle in Grand Texas.

Grand Texas, as its title implies, is not an Appalachian but a Cajun tune. And Jesusita en Chihuahua was originally a mariachi tune from Mexico that was picked up by the Texas swing bands of the 1930s and transformed into Jesse Polka. It's a high-energy dance tune that features the triple fiddling of Baylor, Shopen and Bradley.

The band likes to keep an ear out for songs and tunes from these diverse traditions and then retool them with a distinctive stamp. A good example is Bonaparte's Retreat, an Appalachian standard that has become almost a cliche of the old-time tradition but which in the hands of the Black Mountain String Band lingers hauntingly in the ear long after the listening.

Together, there is little musically that these four latter-day Black Mountain String Band members can't do. Baylor, an in-demand player who has been the fiddle player for the Perth-based band Bluegrass Parkway for the past 17 years, sets aside his fiddle and guitar to play the banjo on Sourwood Mountain. They all have a go at singing and Bradley's rendition of the title track is a vocal highlight.

They pay homage to Tim Shopen on Boatsman, an old-time Appalachian tune that so many Canberra players first learned from the elder Shopen. It was one of his signature tunes, and Pablo has given it new life with his own distinctive flair.

When the Black Mountain String Band plays back and forth between times and genres, it's paying back earlier generations and paying forward those still to come. It's good-time music, as much fun for listening as for playing.

The band has performed at venues around Canberra and was a crowd-pleaser at this year's National Folk Festival at Easter. Already the CD has received airplay on Radio National in Australia and on Radio Station WNCW in North Carolina, home to another Black Mountain that is closely associated with the old-time music tradition.

Time Traveller will be launched at Smith's Alternative, Canberra, on Friday, May 27, from 9.30pm.

Robert Hefner, a former literary editor of The Canberra Times, played with Tim Shopen and others in The Porch Band, a Canberra old-time music band of the 1990s.