PETE SEEGER and Bruce Springsteen. These two monumental, quintessentially American artists have much in common, but with their vastly different musical roles and styles they aren't the most obvious bedfellows.
Now they're permanently entwined thanks to Springsteen's new album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions." Due in stores Tuesday, this joyful, moving and somewhat frustrating collection is made up of 13 songs associated with Seeger, the folk-music patriarch.
It's joyful and moving because they're unassailable cornerstones of American music, songs that sprouted from the soil of the nation's experience and tell us how people worked, danced, loved, dealt with disaster, found a voice, inspired themselves and ultimately survived.
And it's frustrating because in choosing these 13 songs from the vast Seeger canon, Springsteen neglects what is perhaps the strongest bond between the two: a vision of music as an engine of social and political change.
Seeger, now 86 and relatively inactive, paid the price for that stance, finding himself blacklisted and marginalized in the 1950s and '60s for his leftist politics. That didn't stop him from becoming an immeasurably influential musical and cultural force.
Starting in the 1940s, Seeger began to gather and promulgate a treasure trove of traditional and topical songs that had no home in the mass media. He recorded and performed them with modest musical gifts and an abundance of earnestness and enthusiasm, lighting the fuse for the folk music boom of the 1960s.
While Seeger wrote few songs and relied on a simple banjo strum and the joined voices of his audience, Springsteen came along in the 1970s as the rock 'n' roll poet, addressing the promise and the pitfalls of American life in his torrents of words, carried at first on the liberating rock power of his E Street Band, later in more tempered and varied frameworks.
But they find common ground in this album, which illuminates the Seeger legacy for a wider audience while further distancing Springsteen from his rock-icon identity of the 1970s and '80s.
Clearly, he's not feeling compelled to keep straight-ahead rock with the E Street Band in the regular rotation. His last album, 2005's "Devils & Dust," was a muted, literary work, a variation on the tradition of his stark solo projects "Nebraska" and "The Ghost of Tom Joad." His last album with the E Street Band was the reflective post-9/11 work, "The Rising," in 2002. He's pretty much consigned the rock 'n' roll to periodic live albums.
