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Nora Jane Struthers and The Bootleggers

Nora Jane Struthers calls her music "Classic Americana." The singer-songwriter's self-titled solo bow, released in June 2010 on her own label, was a revelation to roots music fans: overflowing with affecting, literate original compositions and featuring a complement of top Nashville players, it announces the debut of a major new talent.

Struthers performs her material with a voice as pretty and homespun as the vintage dresses she favors on stage. The 26-year-old vocalist, a full-time teacher of high school English before making a professional leap into music with a move to Nashville in 2008 has formulated a unique fusion of traditional styles. "It's not really bluegrass, it's not really old time, it's not folk, it's all of these things," Struthers says. "In my last year of teaching, we were reading Jane Austen, Shakespeare, classic English literature. The themes in those works and in the music I was listening to, Doc Watson, the Louvin Brothers, Tim O'Brien, came together for me. The universal themes that have been pervasive in storytelling started to develop in my writing. I turned to story-songs."

Struthers comes by her affinity for traditional American styles naturally. Born in Virginia and raised in New Jersey, she grew up singing with her father Alan, a veteran of a Minneapolis bluegrass band who wrote a novel about country-rock titan Gram Parsons as his doctoral thesis in American studies. "That's how folk music and traditional music have been passed down forever, playing and singing with family members," Struthers notes. Trained classically as a teenager, she started writing her own songs in high school, and began her performing career while she was a student at New York University, playing in a folk-rock style at such venues as CBGBs and the Cutting Room.