As a kid I heard my father talk of the struggles his father (who died before I entered grade school) endured as he and his fellow workers sought to organize a railway union against fierce resistance from the owners. I learned about intolerable conditions, long hours, low wages and callous disregard for the health and safety of employees. By the time Dad was old enough to join the workforce, the Chicago Northwestern had been unionized. He remained a member of the Order of Railroad Telegraphers all of his life.

While I was told more than I can resurrect in memory these many years later, I believe Dad had nothing to say about songs that might have been sung around these events. Nor were songs mentioned in the pages of the union weekly, which I read all through high school, though it was in the letters section that I encountered a discussion of Jimmie Rodgers, the first I heard of this seminal figure in the history of country music. Rodgers, of course, was no militant. His songs were grounded in blues, folk and (mostly) mawkish pop.

Strike and protest songs were something I discovered when as a college student I found my way, through Dylan, to folk music. In the 1960s revival, the topical material a listener was most likely to hear addressed civil-rights and peace issues; there were also, once in a while, Appalachian mining songs such as Billy Edd Wheeler's "Coal Tattoo" and Jean Ritchie's "Blue Diamond Mines." Pete Seeger preserved a handful of protest numbers from other eras, bringing Florence Reece's magnificent "Which Side Are You On?" to audiences far removed from the bloody Kentucky labor wars of the 1930s.

Over the years I've collected a modest number of anthologies of union and other struggle songs, slanted toward the early years of the last century (when the work of Wobbly composers Joe Hill and Ralph Chaplin was central to the identity of the radical Industrial Workers of the World) and the 1930s/'40s when the Communist Party USA discovered old rural music and provided a home to the first major folk stars, Seeger and Woody Guthrie. (The rabidly Stalinist CPUSA has much to answer for, but besides sponsoring the first urban folksong movement, it was on the right side when it came to worker and minority rights, as even unsympathetic observers concede. Any understanding of the Party in its heyday, historian of the left Michael Kazin has observed, "requires a healthy taste for irony.")

The Swiss-born Yvette Moore's research into the songs of Sarah Ogan Gunning (1910-1983), originally of Kentucky though she spent much of her life elsewhere, led to her and writer/activist Mat Callahan's Working-Class Heroes. Gunning sang both traditional and original songs, the latter set to melodies from folk and sacred traditions. Her most noted compositions, "I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow" and "I Hate the Capitalist System," appear here, along with other pre-World War II labor anthems. I'd heard only about half of them, but nearly all of the melodies are instantly recognizable if you know the body of tunes that once circulated throughout the provincial South.

The most succinct of them, attributed to "unknown author," runs as follows:

Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top
When you grow up you'll work in a shop.
When you are married your wife will work too
So that the rich will have nothing to do.

Hush-a-bye baby on the tree top
When you grow old your wages will stop
When you have spent the little you have made
First to the poor house, then to the grave.

These songs from another century are applicable to our time in this sense: the rapacious capitalism of those days eventually won the war and crushed all opposition. We live with the consequences. The defiant spirit evident in Gunning, Guthrie, Jim Garland, Ella Mae Wiggins and the other working-folk balladeers may be inspiring and admirable, but the singers are sadly distant from us who live in the 21st century. The bulk of these songs couldn't be sung from a stage without a spoken introduction, on occasion even an extended one, to clarify the context. That doesn't mean they should go unsung and forgotten, but anybody who contemplates purchasing this album should keep in mind that this is less a stirring call to action (whatever Callahan & Moore's intention) than a history lesson.

Another, bigger problem is performance, which has a generally bouncy, amateur quality like something you'd hear at an impromptu living-room hootenanny. These songs ought to be more moving than they are. Irritatingly, "Girl of Constant Sorrow" borrows the dopey chorus the Stanley Brothers inexplicably put into "Man of Constant Sorrow," one of their few musical misfires, lamentably recycled by the Soggy Bottom Boys in Oh Brother Where Art Thou? half a century hence; at least there it's used for comedy. (In the 1970s Ralph Stanley re-recorded it without the chorus and cut a for-the-ages version.) Even the Stanleys couldn't make that arrangement work, and Callahan & Moore have no chance.

The set-to-music poem "We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years" makes for a long 4:48. The arrangement of the well-known "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad" seems tossed off, missing the disappointment and determination one expects to encounter; instead, we get a weirdly emotion-deprived reading with the ambience of a campfire singalong. I have long judged Ralph Chaplin's "The Commonwealth of Toil" among the greatest, albeit most neglected, of the Wobbly secular hymns. Not this curiously lifeless rendition.

Heroes' intentions are noble. One wants to have these songs at hand. One just wishes that Callahan & Moore had devoted more reflection to the project. In a formal context such as an album, it's not enough just to sing the songs. Musicians need to consider how to present them, to delve beneath their surfaces, and to use them to surprise and touch the listener. If Irish folk singers can still find power and meaning in rebel ballads from 1798, their American counterparts should be able to do that with their own radical affirmations of a century or less ago.