As a small child I lived in a tiny Minnesota village -- population around 300 -- where the old people still remembered the popular songs of the latter 19th century. I would hear those songs sung at community gatherings. "Seeing Nellie Home," "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away," "Wait for the Wagon" and others have been stuck inside my head over the many years that have rolled by since. Today, only a relative handful who aren't musical historians will recognize these titles.

While none of the above-mentioned appears on Seldom Sung, these are the same kinds of songs, which I would learn are called parlor ballads. Except for some of Stephen Foster's more polite compositions and unlike the folk songs of the period, none are performed much anywhere anymore. This album would not exist except for John Chaffee's eccentric parents, who eschewed radio and records. As Chaffee remarks in the liner notes, "Mother and Dad had lived through the Depression. They knew that if you needed water you pumped it from the well ... because doing it that way didn't cost any money. And they knew that music was something that could and should be made at home rather than being bought in a store."

Chaffee, a Minneapolis resident, documents -- maybe, given the affection in evidence here, a misleadingly cold-blooded verb -- the songs his parents sang and taught to their children. A chance conversation with Dakota Dave Hull, a local acoustic guitarist with an international reputation, led to the creation, under Hull's production, of this two disc-album, showcasing 35 songs from the Chaffee family repertoire. The most recent of them was published in 1918. On the other side of the spectrum, Robert Burns's poem "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton" goes back to 1790, with melody added in 1837 by Jonathan E. Spilman. Ben Jonson's "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" dates from 1616. The bulk of Seldom Sung, though, spans the 19th century, especially its middle years.

If parlor ballads are a phenomenon unfamiliar to you, that's because (1) you are not a musicologist and (2) from the vantage point of the 21st century (and of most of the 20th) they sound less as if from another time than from another world. The melodies were in good part set in waltz time, influenced by light opera (from Italian singers who toured America in the 1830s), hymns and echoes of Scottish, Irish and German music. It's worth noting that even then, Americans of African ancestry influenced popular song via white "Ethiopian" writers, who provided tunes for minstrel (black-face) entertainments in a way now considered almost unimaginably offensive. The minstrel composers (most famously, Daniel Decatur Emmett, author of "Dixie" [1859]) often borrowed genuine African-American songs and tunes and recycled them in pure or altered form on stages throughout the country. But these, while much sung, were considered crude in polite circles, and their influence on parlor ballads, which were nothing if not polite, was slight.

In the 1800s no recording industry, or for most of the century even recording technology, existed. From written accounts we do have some idea how middle-class music was performed and how it sounded, at least in formal settings (as opposed to something one hummed on the street or growled or yowled in a drinking establishment). Pianos, guitars and mandolins in various combinations provided accompaniment, but we can only draw inferences about what individual arrangements sounded like. Venturing into musical archaeology, Dave Hull conjures up a dazzling yet nuanced soundscape out of period instruments one otherwise would have heard in classical and folk/vernacular contexts. The production fills up the songs with an almost supernatural knowingness that gives rise to the impression that if the songs weren't performed like this back then, they should have been.

There is also Chaffee's craggy baritone suitable for both hearth and saloon in that long-ago America. In my adult life I've heard some of these songs sung in arty or light operatic style, but Chaffee renders them as they surely were by the most gifted non-professionals, and as they were likely enjoyed in quotidian circumstances. His rendering makes them feel like conversational narratives, conveying interesting stories and confiding private emotions. Some of this is somber, even gloomily fatalistic (as in the beautiful Civil War-era "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground"), but there is plenty of humor, too ("A Horse Named Bill," "Over the Garden Wall"). The liner booklet features Chaffee's brief but informative histories of the songs, though he fails to note that "Billy Boy" is a cheery parody of the grim Scottish ballad "Lord Randall" (Child #12; also, by the way, the template for Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall").

Whether supporting comic or serious narratives, the melodies are wonderful. The sentiments are typically romantic, sentimental, and unthreatening to the tender sensibility of the 19th-century middle class. They are also distant from the way we now perceive the world both in life and in imagination. While the folk songs of the era were rife with sex and murder, the latter is nowhere practiced here. Sex appears inarguably once (in a jokey reference to Casey Jones's widow's alleged infidelity) and arguably twice, if one suspects that Nellie of "The Bird on Nellie's Head" is more than just unusually flirtatious. The genteel tradition that defined the social world of parlor ballads keeps openly impolite or grossly unacceptable behavior at bay. Still, however unworldly they may have been even in their time, they yet possess the power to charm, move, and jerk a tear or two. Seldom Sung will deliver the yet-recognizable human feelings of a long-lost America directly to your heart.

If you're interested in the album, which is not widely available, I encourage you to inquire at arabicarecords@gmail.com.