There is something, maybe everything, to be said for common decency. It's like true love, something you will want to live and to be wrapped up in. It doesn't follow, however, that it makes for good songs. In traditional folk music of the secular kind, the skies are often cloudy, the moral center fuzzy. What passes for uplift is the gallows for the deserving, with the fires of hell on the other side of the stretched neck. A song about someone's unjust hanging is pretty depressing, yet often morbidly attractive. Other traditional numbers are funny even if they may not pass muster under today's standards of political acceptability. Nobody would dare write "The Farmer's Curst Wife" in the 21st century, but I'm glad somebody did before then. It's still a thoroughly entertaining story.

In the Popular Front era, from the New Deal through World War II, musicians associated with the Communist Party USA started out with hard-hitting protest songs for CPUSA-linked unions, then ventured into anthems of the international struggle, anti-war while Josef Stalin was allied with Adolf Hitler, then pro-war when the latter turned on the former. These days the Hitler-Stalin Pact anti-war songs are at best curiosities, at worst eye-popping odes to political idiocy. The rest are mostly disposable agitprop. And then here and again there's a "Sinking of the Reuben James," written by Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers and destined always to sound great.

As the Cold War chilled the American arts and blacklists sprouted like poisonous weeds throughout the land, CPUSA-linked folk singers were forced into the shadows. No one deserved to be persecuted as they were -- their only "crime" was in holding deeply unpopular positions -- and the episode remains a shameful memory. Still, the position they carved out for themselves was both disingenuous (they were not, as they pretended to be, misunderstood social democrats) and hypocritical (advocating for civil rights and liberties in America while remaining tactfully silent about Soviet horrors). Eventually, largely through Pete Seeger's immense influence, folk songs became associated with uplift and good intentions, with audience participation.

In my younger years, as I was finding my way to the music, I hated that prettification of the tradition, which otherwise did not concern itself with proper behavior and social conscience (not, to be clear, that I thought that in other contexts these are not entirely desirable). Partly, that came out of a life-long antipathy to sentimentality wherever encountered. Also, I knew the real history of ersatz folk music, only ostensibly cut from the American grain. I knew, in short, whose side Guthrie was on during the Korean War. My own path to decades of passionate love for traditional music started elsewhere with Peter, Paul & Mary's recording of "500 Miles," Flatt & Scruggs' of "East Virginia" and Johnny Cash's of "Wreck of the Old 97." Later, as I knew more, I learned that other folk singers, including Bob Dylan, were more interested in the tradition than in the ideological mythology that had grown up around it. Others such as Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez and Ramblin' Jack Elliott held left-of-center beliefs, but no one ever called them Stalinists, sentimental or otherwise.

That as a long-winded way of saying that Facets of Folk took me aback. Mara Levine is no Stalinist, of course, but the messages of uplift that define most of the cuts trace their roots to the history noted above. This is folk music of a specific kind, and its sincerity and kindness are not in doubt. What shocked me is how much I took to it this time. Part of it is Levine's appealing voice and the lovely arrangements, and another is what she isn't: a singer-songwriter. The 13 cuts here are from other writers, most famously Leonard Cohen ("Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye"), Gordon Lightfoot ("Bitter Green") and Paul Simon ("Song for the Asking"), of whom Levine is more than an able interpreter.

More characteristic, though, are Seeger-esque pieces of moral exhortation such as Si Kahn's "Upstream" (a celebration of political activism), Terry Kitchen's "A Perfect Rose" (acceptance of each other's imperfections), Arlon Bennett's "Be the Change" (standing against wrong in one's daily life) and more. Yes, in some obvious, also cynical, sense these are cornball sentiments; sometimes, in a less accomplished reading than Levine's, they would be over the top and unlistenable. In fact, one or two edge pretty close. On the other hand, she has the wisdom and good taste to cover the brilliant "Tree of Life," written by my old friend Eric Peltoniemi.

In an age of cruelty, corruption, mendacity and general rottenness flowing from the White House to the streets of your town, it seems a genuinely radical statement to champion elemental goodness, things like compassion, equality, an awareness of what we owe the next generation and the generations beyond that. It's awful to contemplate that the simple values your mom and dad taught you (or should have taught you) are so under threat that it takes -- what? courage? -- to affirm them. What ghastly times we live in. They need Facets of Folk.

Another facet of folk is the electrified version fashioned in England at the end of the 1960s. It's a style, associated first with Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span (both still around, by the way), that has aged remarkably well. These days it's undergoing something of a renaissance. Even when the form in its straight-ahead iteration grew less dominant on the British folk scene, it opened the way for younger artists to draw in creative contemporary influences into interpretations of traditional and trad-based material.

Debra Cowan, who lives in Massachusetts, joins forces with Fairport's Dave Mattacks, arguably (along with the late Levon Helm) the finest folk drummer ever, for the superb Greening the Dark. Unfortunately, Greening maxes out at six cuts and 24 minutes. When one's gripe is that an album (actually an EP) is too short, one knows one is hearing something all too infrequently experienced.

Though all of the songs sound as if they could be traditional, only "Hills of Greenmore" is actually such. The rest are composed by folk-scene veterans (such as Lal Waterson and John Tams) on the other side of the pond. My favorite performance, however, is Cowan's take on Richard Thompson's "The Old Changing Way," a powerful trad-like ballad about two tinker brothers whom poverty forces into bitter parting.

Beyond that, I hope a full-length album from her and Mattacks is not far off the horizon.