Born in Vermont, living in London these days, Sam Amidon offers up another album of traditional and trad-related songs arranged in mostly non-trad settings. I guess you might call it art-folk, of which he is not the only, or even most recent, practitioner, though he has a distinctive approach which falls pleasantly on the ear.

You could argue that by now standard, which is to say trad-based, performances of "Cuckoo," "Reuben," "Maggie" and "Pretty Polly" (all cuts on Sam Amidon) have been pretty much exhausted. Urban folk singers have been forced into creative ways of doing them, at times taking them to places source singers would not have been able to imagine. Aside from the artists' understandable restlessness, market forces dictate change, which is why the oldtime music of the 1920s had begun to evolve into early country by the next decade and into a genre barely recognizable even from the latter by the 21st century.

At one point in the history of the revival, it did not seem entirely unreasonable for some fans to complain that they wanted their folk songs to sound like folk songs. The reality was that traditional songs have varied histories, sometimes originating in period popular songs or broadsides. In other words, they are not always the inventions of unlettered rural people even if these singers played a significant role in shaping the songs to their tastes and expectations. Sometimes the alteration is so radical that for all practical purposes they are different songs. There is, for example, an enormous distance between the 1880s Tin Pan Alley version and Lead Belly's of the song known as "Irene Goodnight."

On this eponymous recording Amidon leads with banjo and guitar, sometimes mixed at the forefront, other times dominated by non-standard instruments such as alto saxophone, Moog bass, piano, flute and percussion. Amidon, who produces with the assistance of Leo Abrahams, fashions a kind of wall of sound suited to folk song as opposed to the pop iteration associated with Phil Spector in his prime.

The result is intelligent and appealing. It works to particularly lovely effect on the gospel song "Time Has Made a Change" and on Taj Mahal's "Light Rain Blues" (assembled in good part from floating verses any serious blues buff will recognize). Nothing here fails, but as with any collection, different songs -- in my case the relatively less familiar ones -- will engage listeners differently. And it serves to validate the principle, sometimes credited to Britain's Martin Carthy (who denies authorship while not disavowing the sentiment), "The worst thing you can do to a folk song is not to sing it."

[ visit Sam Amidon's website ]