I am not a Weavers fan, never have been, never will be. I suppose, though, that it's true everything gets recycled eventually. In this instance, I can only assume it's a way of giving voice, metaphorical and literal, to personal affection, in particular fond memories of original Weaver Lee Hays (1914-1981), whom Work o' the Weavers singer/banjo/guitar-player David Bernz knew growing up.

According to the liner notes, David's father Harold Bernz "roomed with Lee Hays in New York City when they were both involved in the publication of People's Songs Bulletin." Hays later became a neighbor when the Bernz family moved out of New York City to the suburbs.

If ever a band was sentimentalized, that band is the Weavers (formed in September 1948, in its original lineup consisting of Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, Pete Seeger and Fred Hellerman). Some of that comes out of the sort of sympathy that no decent observer could not feel. In 1951, at the height of their popularity, after several chart hits over the previous year, they were blacklisted. They were banned from radio and television, their records were no longer played and they lost their contract with Decca. Contrary to sentimentalized mythology -- little about the Weavers is not sentimentalized -- they were not the victims of a "witch hunt," unless you believe that witches exist and can be hunted. The Weavers were Communists, though they were not exactly keen to own up to their longtime affiliation with the slavishly pro-Soviet Communist Party USA. In other words, they were indeed servants of iron-fisted-tyrant/mass-murderer Josef Stalin, not just -- as some still would have you believe -- misunderstood social democrats.

This in no way justifies their blacklisting, of course. Even if they had been singing hymns of Marxist agitprop, they should not have been blacklisted; a blacklist has no place in any society that advertises itself as democratic. But the Weavers were singing nothing of the sort; what they trafficked in were bland, watered-down versions -- amounting almost to chirpy parodies -- of folk songs and Woody Guthrie tunes. There were also white-bread songs, their lyrics coy about their ideological frame of reference (in fact, Popular Front), which unctuously affirmed peace and patriotism. Soon, plodding, clueless orchestrations cluttered the recordings. To listen to such now is to experience something of the sound of aural hell.

After the grotesque McCarthyism/blacklist era faded, the Weavers reunited to headline at a sold-out Christmas concert (captured on a popular Vanguard album) at Carnegie Hall in 1955. Their careers resumed, if no longer at the top of the charts. Pete Seeger, who quit the CPUSA in the mid-1950s but remained a man of the left, went on to become a famous, avuncular presence in American life. Seeger sums up the Weavers' legacy best. Through them, he wrote, "millions of teenagers first heard the words 'folk song.'" And, of course, the folk revival of the late 1950s/early '60s and today followed. Thank you, Weavers. You did us all a solid.

We're Still Here, I guess, in spirit anyway. Wo'W sounds close enough to the Weavers, maybe technically a little better. This generation of Weavers -- Bernz, James Durst, Mark Murphy, Martha Sandefer -- borrows only modestly from the originals' repertoire, here a couple of traditional songs and Weavers originals (e.g., the exquisite "If I Had a Hammer," the gaseous "Wasn't That a Time!"), choosing to feature a fair number of their own compositions, all of which would have fit easily into the old Weavers' repertoire.

I suppose that for what it is, it's what it is -- which is to say all right, perhaps, to those who still respond happily to this sort of thing. If that's dim praise, well, none of this is much to my taste, and some of it (for instance Lorre Wyatt's "Long Time Gone," an earnest but tone-deaf tribute to Lead Belly) is just plain terrible. Mawkish, too, to the point that maybe for a moment there, you'd almost think, peace, love and understanding are funny.

Though played on the usual acoustic instruments, including the inevitable 12-string guitar (as predictable as the fiddle's absence), this doesn't sound much like "folk music" as it's practiced these days, or for that matter in its old natural habitat. The original Weavers had an excuse: they had no model for "folk" performance addressed to a mainstream, middle-class audience. In other words, they had to make it up as they went along, and if what resulted sounds unedifying in 2008, give them credit for being there first.

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