Before this retrospective showed up, I had heard a cut or two of Leon Rosselson on some overview or other of the British folk scene. Nowhere else, though. He has released only one solo album in the United States, and that in 1981, and it has never crossed my pathway. Those of us curious about his career will welcome this generous, intelligently curated 17-cut treatment.

Chronicling the Times, those who have not heard of Rosselson will want to know, documents a songwriter focused on the British political and cultural scene, present and occasionally past. This is topical, sometimes labeled (or dismissed as) protest, music. With rare exception such music ages quickly, as popular attention, experience and memory roll on elsewhere. That's why, for example, so few of Phil Ochs' songs survive and only one, the non-political "Changes," continues to be covered from time to time. No doubt the young Bob Dylan, noting the short shelf life of protest material, had some of that in mind when he turned to another approach.

In any event, the American folk revival began as one element of the Popular Front, a 1930s attempt initiated by the Kremlin to unite left parties and movements of all stripes into an anti-fascist alliance. (Anyone inclined to see nobility in this effort is encouraged not to. The Popular Front was terminated when Stalin and Hitler joined forces from 1939 to 1940, and it resumed only after Germany mounted a surprise attack on the Soviet Union.) The Popular Front's most enduring contribution, ironically, proved to be a movement centered on "people's music" (folk music to the rest of us). Though hounded by Red hunters and blacklisters, the Communist Party USA managed to be a defining influence on the folk movement until Dylan appeared on the scene and upended it. No Popular Front hack could have written "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," and he was just getting started.

Think of a stronger hard-left presence in Britain, and you've got the milieu out of which Rosselson emerged, along with Ewan MacColl, Bert Lloyd, Roy Bailey and other seminal figures. It's not hard to see injustices needing to be addressed even in nations deemed democratic; it's all but impossible, on the other hand, to conceive why any rational human being would have judged the Soviet system to be the solution to democracy's flaws.

Rosselson attempts to answer the question in "Song of the Old Communist," a crediting of the Stalinist generation with at least good intentions. The narrator does eventually concede that any notion of Soviet moral superiority amounted to a misreading of the available evidence, to put it politely. Then again, who would have thought that Communism's reactionary counterpart, fascism, would reemerge in our own time to menace the world's democracies, including our own?

Though Rosselson is often cited as a Phil Ochs across the water, Ochs for all of his 1960s lefty swagger was at heart a Kennedy liberal. If chastened by the last century's brutal lessons, Rosselson nonetheless remains a more or less unrepentant socialist of that era. Inevitably, some of this songs amount to sermons set to threadbare melodies -- a hazard of the topical trade wherever practiced -- but there are also some outstanding compositions here, among them "Bringing the News from Nowhere," which honors the 19th-century English radical William Morris, and "The World Turned Upside Down," another history-inspired ballad, an unlikely hit for a British rock band some years ago.

To his credit Rosselson has a sense of humor to balance the indignation. Unfortunately, the furious anti-Christian rant "Stand Up for Judas" is not exactly iconoclastic satire. Not for nothing is it the final cut. I am an agnostic by disposition, but really, Jesus doesn't deserve this.

In any event, some of the content will puzzle American listeners because we Americans tend to be self-absorbed and barely engaged with our own politics, much less conversant in a major fellow democracy's. Still, if you've educated yourself above and beyond provincial ignorance, Chronicling the Times is well worth your time.