Jenny Brooks breaks my heart. She makes a form of country that the marketplace doesn’t seem to have any place for these days, and it’s worse for it. She’s so gung-ho and committed to it that it’s hard not to worry that this will all end in frustration for her. She’s not making honky-tonk; there’s a market for that, though it’s called Americana. She’s making a modern, pop-oriented country, but like all pop, what’s considered contemporary changes quarterly, and anything even five minutes behind the moment is dismissed by Nashville, while the honky-tonk blow it off as too modern and shiny.

The irony is that Down on the Bayou is spirited fun with songs that work every time. Titles that promise too much cleverness (“Cadillaction,” “Dixie for the Chicks”) don’t lean too hard on the gimmick and make it on solid song craft. Clichés turn up more often than you’d like, but there’s no pretense to profundity here, and Brooks sings with such spunk and energy that at least a third of them are forgiven. Her songs are also the sort that will find fans when she plays, and they’ll rightly wonder why she’s not a bigger star. But in Nashville, the country-to-rock ratio changes hourly, and if your ratio’s a fragment off, it and country radio pass you by.