A presence on the East Coast folk scene since the late 1960s, Paul Kaplan is a carrier of the Pete Seeger style -- or is that a tradition by now? Since Seeger has lost his (literal) voice, singers like Kaplan are left to keep politicized yet audience-friendly, folk-inspired music alive.

In my own listening these days, I hear the genre dividing along generational lines, with the most interesting of the younger artists engaged in experimentation even as they delve deeper into the music's rural roots. While not entirely absent, politics is not at the forefront of their approach. Kaplan, whose likes (i.e., performers who trace their artistic lineage to the Almanac Singers and the Weavers) I rarely encounter anymore, reminds me of what folk singers typically sounded like when I first started to hear them. That was around the time Kaplan was first stepping onto stages with guitar in hand.

Singing in a pleasant tenor voice, he offers up 14 songs from 30 years of recording. The cuts are all originals, some borrowing from older models. "Halls of a Hospice," for example, about a young man dying of AIDS, is set to the familiar "Streets of Laredo" melody. (In its original, 18th-century broadside version as "The Unfortunate Rake," the cause of impending death was syphilis.) "Call Me the Whale" is an anti-whaling ballad, sung from the whale's point of view and based on the centuries-old "Greenland Whale Fisheries."

Perhaps the most striking song is "The Voice of Pete," last name Seeger (what else?), a parody of "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," in which he sings, "Says Pete, I lost my vocal cords, my voice is doing fine / ... Though some would say my voice has died / It's never been as strong." Though Seeger is not quite the secular saint he's too often represented to be (as Seeger himself has tried to inform too-adoring fans), he's still a good guy to whom all of us who love folk music owe a considerable debt, and this song is a fitting tribute. In a sense, so is all of The Folk Process.

On the whole I prefer folk music with a rougher, unsentimental edge -- in other words, from an earlier stage of the folk process than the one Kaplan boarded. Even so, his CD has its charms. It's a gentle reminder of how the music got to those of us who didn't grow up in the traditional cultures that created it. And if you can fight war and injustice with good melodies, as Seeger did and Kaplan does, where's the complaint?