Buck & Company “This Old Barn” (Emerald Sky Records)

Who says you have to be an A-rated bluegrass band with a big label behind you to put out a top-notch CD package?

Certainly not Buck & Company, a West Virginia band that has just released, “This Old Barn,” a new CD on regional label Emerald Sky Records.

Buck McCumber formed the group in 2002 in Parkersburg, W. Va. Since then, they’ve gone from playing in their home region to a wider circle that seems to be crossing more and more state lines. “This Old Barn” has the potential to take them even farther from home.

First, there’s one very professional packaging effort, much more than you’d expect from Joe, the banjo player across the street, who just cut a CD with his pickin’ buddies. The out-front art work is a polarized photo of a crumbling barn. It’s the cover of an eight-page insert that includes lyrics for the tunes on the CD and color art work. It’s a first-class package.

But a pretty cover does not make a CD a success. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, in this case the songs and the performances. Well, they pretty match the cover — tastefully done with tight vocals and nice instrumental work that seldom dazzles but always satisfies.

The track listing contains an impressive amount of original material. McCumbers, who plays mandolin and fiddle, wrote seven of the 13 songs, while Dobro player Ramie Bennett contributed two of his tunes and guitarist Lance Gainer gets songwriter credits on one track, an instrumental.

Bass player Jeff Somerville does a bulk of the lead vocal work here, while McCumbers handles the lead singing on three songs, including the title cut, “This Old Barn,” which he wrote. In many ways, it’s a familiar tale — about growing up with buddies around Grandpa’s old barn, living through the horror of war claiming the buddies’ lives and longing for those days of youth and the buddies to return to the now-crumbling barn. It’s a touching song.

McCumbers also has another gem on here, “San Antone,” told through the eyes of a wrongly convicted man who’s spent years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. Certainly, there’s been too many such cases in the news to provide inspiration for such a song.

Playing to the regional crowd, Buck & Company offer up another McCumbers tune that salutes Ohio’s great bluegrass family. It’s aptly entitled “Buckeye Bluegrass.” And McCumbers shows he can write bluegrass gospel very well, thank you, with his composition, “Heaven’s Holy Chorus,” which features some nice quartet singing.

Truly, the CD is a songwriters showcase for this band. There’s not an original song on here that has anything less than some pretty thoughtful and well-thought-out lyrics.

If there’s an instrumental standout on this project, it would be Bennett’s fine and intricate Dobro picking. Bennett also has one, dead-on bluegrass voice. It would have been nice to have heard him take the lead vocal on a couple more numbers here.

McCumbers is more than adequate on his mandolin work as is banjo picker Danny Murray’s fine solo and backup work. Gainer also gets in some very tasty guitar licks, especially on his instrumental, “Bugtussle.”

This is pretty much traditional-sounding bluegrass with the exceptions of “Bugtussle,” which has plenty of contemporary shading.

“This Old Barn” was produced by the band and recorded in John Titus’s fine West Virginia facility, J&V Audio. Titus also did the final mastering on the project. The sound, it should be said, is as professional as the songwriting, performances and the CD’s packaging.

Information on purchasing the CD is available at www.buckandcompany.com.