I was drawn to folk music via the Nashville hits I heard when I was young. Specifically, it was through Flatt & Scruggs' version of the traditional "East Virginia." I still am in awe of the way they imagined that old song, though I've heard it many times in many versions in the decades since. For most folk fans of my generation, however, Pete Seeger, not country and bluegrass, was their guiding light, an attraction that long baffled me. I saw Seeger as a product of the Stalinist culture of the Popular Front and, just as unpalatably, an unapologetic sentimentalist. Eventually, albeit with countless bumps and twists, I worked out my Seeger problem, which you can read about if you're interested in a review of a couple of his late albums in Rambles.NET on 9 February 2013.

Even so, when I hear someone refer to him as "St. Pete," or just the faux-familiar "Pete" for that matter, I still cringe. Yet I have come to admire Seeger as, for one, a superb and underrated interpreter of genuine folk songs, a proposition for which you will hear abundant evidence on his five-disc American Favorite Ballads. With some honorable exceptions (a handful of undisputed masterpieces) he diverted his songwriting talent to disposable topical material intended for reverential audience singalongs. If this was folk music to some, to me it was just pallid imitation.

Then again, at various levels of guilt, I look around at all the genuinely venal politicians, tyrants, lying liars and just plain evil sons of bitches out there, and I wonder at my pettiness. For all his rhetorical fogginess, Seeger did far more genuine good in the world than I ever will. There can be nothing morally objectionable in a song that holds us to our highest selves as individuals, communities and countries. Unlike the monsters and hypocrites who sometimes get called it for suspect reasons, he was indeed a great American by any authentic definition.

A recording like We Shall Stay Here wouldn't exist without Seeger's example. Boston's Paul Kaplan sings in a smooth low tenor in a style that had gone out of fashion well before Seeger's death in 2014. In fact, it is almost never heard since the glory days of the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, the Brothers Four and the like. All took their inspiration (and much of their repertoire) from Seeger's former group, the Weavers. When rock returned to resume control of popular music in the mid-1960s, their approach offered a ripe target to those who disdained -- a word of their invention, spewed with contempt -- "folkies."

The songs here are all Kaplan originals. His familiarity with actual trad-folk is apparent throughout, often indulged in a worn running gag in which modern lyrics are set to traditional melodies. The new words take the original radically out of context, now set in a world the first-generation writers and singers could never have imagined. Generally speaking, the joke is a fleeting one. Here, for example, there's "The Frozen Blogger," a comic ballad first known as "The Frozen Logger." On the other hand, Kaplan's heartfelt, not at all funny "A Song for Pete" borrows lyrics and melody from the Industrial Workers of the World-linked anthem "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill."

Over history, as anybody who is conversant in the music knows, many topical and protest songs have been written and sung. A tiny number have survived the circumstances of their birth, usually because they're amusing or because they maintain timeless meaning (e.g., "Which Side Are You On?"). Mostly, topical songs, though, have a few seconds of lifespan. Once upon a time, destitute farmers, angry strikers and courageous civil-rights marchers sang them. Not recently, unfortunately. I don't doubt we're all the worse off for that.

Kaplan clearly has a kind heart, and his songs will appeal to those with a Seegeresque definition of folk music. Or you may feel as I do, concurring with Kaplan's perspective but not with the use to which he has put it. My idea of folk music does not overlap with my political convictions. I don't expect the former to affirm the latter, or vice versa, and I don't seek out advocacy songs that as often as not devolve into a litany of slogans. You are free to feel differently, of course, and if you do, you're part of the intended audience.