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(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- The morning's first work, even while turning on the computer, was to page through several reference books to try to find out who Gloria Belle is. But she doesn't appear in the Encyclopedia Of Country Music, nor, even, in Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann's standard, Finding Her Voice: Women In Country Music 1800-2000. She merits no real entry on allmusic.com, either.

Well. Thirteen years into this thing, I'd never heard of her, and it's nice still to be surprised, however painful it may also be to reveal one's ignorance.

So...for the record, Ms. Belle is a startlingly powerful East Tennessee bluegrass singer who worked in the late 1960s with Jimmy Martin. And with some other people who amounted to less. She's also a first-rate mandolin chopper. But it's that voice, strong and powerful and distinct. That voice, ah. She has almost forgotten how special that voice is, one fears.

Belle is one of the reasons this small, day-long collection of workshops and performances celebrating women in traditional music was worth attending, though I had time only for the free evening show. Co-sponsored by the three-person Kentucky Center for Traditional Music and the Women's Studies department at Morehead State University, it featured an array of styles, an assortment of traditions, and several quite different generations of performers. The hidebound worlds of traditional music were, one reads, particularly unwelcoming to female performers, or, at least, to those who wished to take charge of their work and their careers. None of that was spoken of on stage, though one suspects the stories told backstage, off-stage, throughout the day, were sad and wonderful and powerful.

Each woman offered two songs with varied accompaniment. Rory Block, arguably the most commercially successful of the ten women (and most tangentially relevant, though she now is said to live in Eastern Kentucky) took three songs, Hazel Dickens finished with three of hers, and then they gathered too quickly for a gospel finale.

Belle, singing with her husband, the guitar maker Mike Long, held the stage with the polish of someone who's been performing since she was three. Their voices twined together like old friends, riding waves of sorrow and joy.

Two others stood out. Carol Elizabeth Jones came to center stage, leaned on her guitar, and delivered an a cappella miner's ballad written by Jean Ritchie. (I went to listen, and didn't take notes; song titles, alas, escaped.) I have underestimated Ms. Jones, and will not do so again. She sang with a high, girlish quiver (in Julie Miller's range, say), and with remarkable poise and power. Later, when she sang harmonies next to Hazel Dickens, the fondness in her eyes as she followed Dickens' lead was tender and moving, even glimpsed from halfway across the audience.

Ginny Hawker, too, sang the old songs without accompaniment. Plain singing, hard songs, even the gospel. Some words held as many as three skittering notes, though none of the flourishes one associates with Reba and her successor American Idols. Just sounds torn from deep inside, shared with stoic poise.

At times the evening was a bit of a folk lecture, but mostly the music won out. Sometimes it was played carefully, as if we were in a museum, but generally (particularly when Uncle Earle fiddler Rayna Gellert, newly settled in Lexington, jumped in) the songs took wing.

One last moment. Just before a fit of coughing took him from the stage, Don Rigsby's head popped up from his mandolin and looked over at Hazel Dickens with a huge, startled grin. Dickens had talked too much all day, she said, and fought her own cough through her trio of songs. But just that one moment her voice caught hold and shot out, a striking singer once more and not the stylist age has made her. Rigsby's not normally a demonstrative fellow on stage, and if that one phrase is all we were to get of Dickens' special gifts, it was enough.

-- GRANT ALDEN