Marienne Kreitlow lives in what residents of the Twin Cities metropolitan complex identify, with barely concealed collective sneer, as "Outstate," that large mass of Minnesota whose population still insists on living in small towns and on farms. Like anywhere else, Outstate once boasted distinctive music traditions, in this instance ones that lived on for a while after the great immigration from northern Europe (mostly Germany and Scandinavia) that brought tens of thousands to the state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That music, which I (then and now an Outstater) remember from my early childhood, was played on accordions, pianos and (more rarely) fiddles. It was mostly dance music, primarily schottisches, polkas and waltzes. It was referred to as "oldtime music." (The late Mike Seeger: "'Oldtime' is what the folk call folk music.") Today, Outstate's people's music is whatever's popular on the radio at the moment. Garbage, usually.

If I may judge from her photo and other evidence -- I've never met her -- I shall presume that Kreitlow learned of something known as "folk music" around the time I did and from the same sources. That folk music was not local. It came to us from records and, yes, radio, in an era when the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, and the like delivered songs about things that felt more interesting than teenage romantic angst. On our separate courses Kreitlow and I went on to explore the music both of the revival and of its sources -- along with other aspects of culture outside rural Minnesota -- and to incorporate it into our daily lives. In due course we became published writers, and some of what we wrote were songs.

Except that, being musically gifted as I assuredly am not, Kreitlow got to sing. Her own songs, however, are, with a single exception, absent from Like Noah's Dove, her interpretation of material familiar, for the most part, from the core repertoire of 1960s neo-traditionalists: "House of the Rising Sun," "Wild Mountain Thyme," "The Parting Glass," "The Cuckoo" and the like. (Her previous albums, unheard by me, consist of her own compositions.) The arrangements take Dove into the sub-genre "chamber folk," in other words to antique songs performed inside small-ensemble, semi-classical settings. Kreitlow's trained voice does not much resemble a hard-bitten mountain balladeer's.

Among Kreitlow's accompanists is the enchanting Gaelic harpist Ann Heymann, an Outstater with a deserved international reputation. She lends her instrument to one of the grandest and strangest of all the Child ballads, "The Great Silkie" (#113 in the good professor's collection, where it is given its full title, "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry"). A supernatural tale in the darkest hues, it is based on an ancient belief in seal people little known outside the remote regions of the North Atlantic, in this case the Shetland Islands. Kreitlow and Heymann's brittle, unsettling version will leave you chilled, possibly even disoriented. It's the stand-out cut.

I like this album very much, and I like it better each time I hear it. Its intelligence and passion are everywhere apparent. In one case Kreitlow manages to improve on the original, Lucy Simon's setting to music of Eugene Field's children's rhyme "Wynken, Blynken & Nod." It must be conceded, though, that the Simon Sisters' version -- Lucy cut it in 1964 with her sister Carly -- is pretty awful, the singing so wooden that it rivals the Weavers' unlistenable "Wasn't That a Time." Elsewhere, the message of "Deportee," among Woody Guthrie's fiercest protest ballads, doesn't get lost in Kreitlow's far more formal-than-usual reading.

The title quotes a lyric from a song John Lomax collected in Texas in 1904. Essentially a narrative built around floating verses, it's named after the woman who sang it. We know her only as Dink, thus "Dink's Song," famously recorded by Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan and others. Lomax met her only once, and when next he returned to the area, he was informed that she had died. Oddly, Kreitlow lists it as "The Dink's Song," which makes no sense. As I was growing up, a "dink" was a slang term for an unpleasant or difficult individual. Even so, Kreitlow's is a lovely version whose power she communicates in her own voice, very different from the mysterious, lost Dink's.