This time last year, Music Row was abuzz with talk of two honky-tonk hopefuls, Lee Ann Womack and Sara Evans. Womack’s debut hit stores first, charting a pair of Top Ten singles, one of which reached No. 1. The album’s sales were on track for gold, even platinum, certification. Evans’ record didn’t fare nearly as well; however, critics and music-bizzers hailed the hard country of both singers as a sign that the industry pendulum was finally swinging back toward sawdust and steel guitar.

A year later, less twang still means more airplay. The last thing programmers of “hot new country” radio want to hear is some nasal or throaty honky-tonker. And now, perhaps because Garth, Faith, and Shania are bum-rushing the pop-singles charts, even traditionalists have started making concessions to country’s pop mind-set. To varying degrees, such compromises are evident on Womack’s and Evans’ sophomore releases. Fortunately, a couple other new releases, by Allison Moorer and Heather Myles, prove that it’s possible to draw on country music’s rich past while remaining resolutely contemporary.

Evans’ new album, No Place That Far (RCA) offers little more than warmed-over L.A. country-rock. The only tracks that prove her love of “really sad, tear-your-heart-out country, Tammy Wynette songs,” as she puts it in the album’s press release, are a roadhouse romp with George Jones and a couple of bluegrass-flavored originals.

Evans’ about-face makes me wonder. After her first album moved barely 30,000 units—hardly the half-million that constitutes a break-even proposition on Music Row these days—did her handlers sit her down and give her a talking to? “Look, we loved your first record,” I can hear them saying, “but your numbers are killing us. The only way we’re gonna be able to keep you around is if we can get you played on radio—and that means downplaying the twang factor.”

Whatever happened, and despite her undeniable pipes, Evans wears her Ronstadt and Eagles knock-offs about as well as she does the sex-kitten pose that she strikes on the CD cover—naked Nashville, indeed.

Womack’s new record, Some Things I Know (Decca), is at once stronger and less expedient than Evans’ album. In fact, given better production that would have let Womack’s Dolly-like soprano soar, it might have been the best down-home album to come from Music Row all year. As it is, the record at times feels clinical and self-conscious.

Witness the handful of tracks that try to recreate the countrypolitan magic of producer Billy Sherrill. Exuding none of the warmth or presence of Sherrill’s best work with Jones and Wynette, these songs instead smack of hackwork. You can just imagine the guy behind the board calling out the name of this or that Tammy hit and the pickers proceeding to copy rather than feel the music.

Worse are the echoey rock tom-toms on “The Man Who Made My Mama Cry” and “I’d Rather Have What We Had.” The latter, a duet with Joe Diffie, opens with a wrenching steel run, only to have booming drums stomp the feeling out of the song’s chorus.

While Music Row tries to convince itself that Womack’s record is pure country, and Evans pretends that she’s not, Allison Moorer and Heather Myles have made rough-country diamonds. Moorer, a Tony Brown protégé who plays Caffè Milano Monday night, and Myles, a Left Coast shitkicker (her parents raise horses), have little in common except that they write their own material and picked their producers—that, and that they made the records they wanted to make.

Moorer’s debut, Alabama Song (MCA), isn’t so much a honky-tonk record as a wedding of late-’60s and early-’70s country, rock, and pop sensibilities. Bob Dylan’s Nashville sessions, Bobbie Gentry’s sultry Delta soul, Gram Parsons’ stoner country, and the fiery independence of Waylon and Willie all jump to mind on first listen.

Moorer, whose “A Soft Place to Fall” was the first single from The Horse Whisperer soundtrack, has so thoroughly internalized her sources that it never sounds as if she’s aping them, not even when she invokes them directly. “Long Black Train,” for example, opens with the cascading guitar figure from Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.” The familiar reference functions much as a well-chosen sample might, drawing listeners in, only to take them down an unforeseen path—in this case, into the teeth of Moorer’s self-doubt.

“I Found a Letter” makes good on the promise of Womack’s Billy Sherrill revival, while the title track is a Southern rewrite of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” set to the resolute cadence of the Band’s “The Weight.” These allusions are seductive: It takes a handful of listens to suss them out, at which point one has already succumbed to the longing in Moorer’s humid contralto.

As a vocalist, Moorer avoids the histrionics that mar the records of her sister, Shelby Lynne. Instead, she reveals an understated command of the full-throated styles of country greats Connie Smith and Tammy Wynette. But filtered through 25 years of rock and pop music—most notably, Aretha, Dusty, and Bonnie—Moorer’s singing never sounds retro or studied.

It helps that the A&R department at her label didn’t just hand her a bunch of by-the-numbers ditties. Moorer cowrote all but one of the album’s songs, most of them with husband Butch Primm. Many of the songs are deeply personal. Plumbing, among other things, her mother’s violent death (“Is Heaven Good Enough for You”) and heartache on the edge of madness (“Call My Name”), Moorer conveys a sense of herself—vulnerable, tough, and, most of all, complicated—that’s as indelible as her flaming-red hair.

On Highways and Honky Tonks (Rounder), her third studio LP, Heather Myles updates the hard-driving Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard by lacing it with all manner of roots music. Take, for example, the rockabilly-charged “You’ve Taken Me Places I Wish I’ve Never Been,” the gut-bucket blues of “Mr. Lonesome,” and the 4/4 shuffles “Broken Heart for Sale” and “Playin’ Every Honky-Tonk in Town.”

Blessed with a clear, throaty belt reminiscent of another Bakersfield star, Jean Shepard, Myles even sounds at home on the Tex-Mex of “Who Did You Call Darlin’ ” and on a cover of Ray Price’s Cajun-inflected hit, “I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me by Your Side).” She also endows “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” with an eroticism not present in Charley Pride’s hit recording of the song.

Despite her debt to tradition, Myles is no mere throwback. Although twangier than Lucinda Williams’ self-titled 1988 album for Rough Trade, Highways and Honky Tonks has much the same immediacy—the guitars sting, the fiddle and steel cry, and the drums kick throughout.

“Now it’s my turn to find somebody new/So you can have your darlin’ make your bed and wait for you,” Myles fumes as her two-timing lover stumbles in “at half past 3 smellin’ like a perfume factory” on “Who Did You Call Darlin’.” Rather than singing about cheating and heartbreak as if she were plundering the Kitty Wells songbook, Myles attacks these themes with the authority of someone who has lived them.

Myles, of course, records for an indie label, and given the creative freedom she enjoys there, perhaps she always will. Whether Moorer ends up on a smaller imprint herself—following the likes of the decade’s grittiest country women, among them Joy Lynn White, Kelly Willis, and Rosie Flores—is only Tony Brown’s guess.