JUNE 6 James McMurtry & the Heartless Bastards and Justin Townes EarleBirchmere, $25

There's a good chance that McMurtry's "Just Us Kids" will be the best album of 2008. Angry and scathing in this year of war, recession and presidential campaigns, the disc transcends mere sloganeering by offering the kind of complicated characters and visual description you might expect from the son of novelist Larry McMurtry. But this is much more than literature set to folkie guitar; these tangled tales of dead-end teenagers, burned-out boomers, cynical politicians, divorced loners, drunken roadies and homeless survivors are pushed along by a twitchy John Lee Hooker-like boogie that keeps you hungry for the next line. Opening the show will be Steve Earle's son, who has just released his first full-length album, "The Good Life."

JUNE 13 Robert Plant and Alison KraussMerriweather Post Pavilion, $40-$125

Plant, the demonic wailer of Led Zeppelin, might seem an odd duet partner for Krauss, the angelic crooner of bluegrass. But Krauss has never lost her enthusiasm for the hard-rock bands she listened to as a Southern Illinois teenager in the '80s; she even recorded Bad Company's "Oh, Atlanta" in 1995. Plant's 1984 side project, the Honeydrippers, hinted at a record collector who loved old R&B singles. Producer T Bone Burnett made the Plant-Krauss combination work on R&B songs by Allen Toussaint and Little Milton and on country songs by Doc Watson and ex-Byrd Gene Clark. The resulting album, "Raising Sand," was so successful that a Led Zeppelin reunion tour was put off so that Plant, Krauss, Burnett, guitarist Buddy Miller, fiddler Stuart Duncan and a rhythm section could hit the road.

JUNE 21 Frog Holler and Sarah Borges & the Broken SinglesIota, $15

A lot of bands have tried to combine electric guitar and banjo, drums and mandolin, but few have done it as well as Frog Holler. The glue holding the rock and bluegrass elements together has been the band's terrific singer-songwriter, Darren Schlappich, and the musicians' roots in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. Their latest album, "Haywire," is full of performances that eclipse the better-known work of My Morning Jacket and Son Volt. Boston roots-rocker Borges displays strong melodic instincts and the big soprano to back them up on her latest album, "Diamonds in the Dark."

JUNE 25 Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby, Kentucky Thunder and Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow QuartetWolf Trap, $22-$40

When Skaggs and Hornsby performed at Baltimore's Lyric Opera House in April to promote their recent duo album, "Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby," the two shared the stage the entire time, backed by Skaggs's terrific bluegrass band, Kentucky Thunder. When he introduced a pair of classic Bill Monroe tunes, Skaggs said, "This is what they would have sounded like if they'd had a really hot piano player." When Hornsby sorted through audience requests on the scraps of paper atop his piano and picked out "White-Wheeled Limousine" and "The Way It Is," the younger pickers in Kentucky Thunder (especially fiddler Andy Leftwich and guitarist Cody Kilby) jumped at the chance to stretch. It was as if they'd temporarily joined the Grateful Dead, the band Hornsby so often played with.

When Washburn, of the all-woman band Uncle Earl, brought her Sparrow Quartet to the South by Southwest Music festival in Austin in March, she was joined by fellow banjoist Béla Fleck as well as fiddler Casey Driessen and cellist Ben Sollee. Banjo and cello are not a common combination, but the performance had elements of bluegrass and classical chamber music. The four musicians sat in a semicircle, and over much of the picking, Washburn raised her lovely soprano, not only in the style of old-time Appalachia but also in the Mandarin language she learned during her many trips to China.

JULY 6-8 John Hiatt & the Ageless Beauties And Tom WilsonBirchmere, $49.50

Singer-songwriter Hiatt is best known for such enduring tunes as "Thing Called Love," "Have a Little Faith in Me" and "Angel Eyes." He has a knack for picking up terrific backing bands, including the North Mississippi All Stars. For his new album, "Same Old Man," Hiatt sings with the trio of guitarist Luther Dickinson, drummer Kenny Blevins and former Frank Zappa bassist Patrick O'Hearn. Several of the funny, barbed songs concern growing old, and on "Old Days," he concludes, "Old days are coming back to me/I don't know what was so good about 'em."

-- Geoffrey Himes