Arlo Guthrie's salient virtue is his modesty—a modesty that can take on steely conviction or loony self-deprecation as the need arises. On his new album, this quality illuminates what amounts to a careful summation of Guthrie's life and career a decade after his rise to prominence with Alice's Restaurant. Though still a young man, Guthrie is naturally haunted by the possibility that he's inherited the disease (Huntington's chorea) that killed his famous father, Woody. In fact, Outlasting the Blues begins with these words: "In the event of my demise/Be sure to include this statement."

It's here that the artist's modesty serves him especially well, because Outlasting the Blues isn't only a meditation on mortality but a chronicle of the cultural history that Arlo Guthrie has lived through. Indeed, the entire first side of the record examines the changes in consciousness wrought by the Sixties, the entrenchment of those changes in the Seventies and a debate over their continued usefulness in the Eighties. If this sounds like a hollow, tedious subject, Guthrie takes full responsibility for keeping things lively. His meditations are couched in comfy country rock and detailed by assiduously precise, affable opinions and asides. In "Prologue," Guthrie states his intention—to think "about what my life meant"—and frames the song as a request to the loved ones who will evaluate that life after he's gone.

"Prologue" is quickly followed by "Which Side," a feisty assertion that the question "Which side are you on?" is even more crucial now than it was during the protests of the Vietnam War; "Wedding Song," a celebration of monogamy that traces Guthrie and his wife back to Adam and Eve (both Arlo and Adam get to chortle, "Just me and you outlasting the blues," to their honeys); and "World Away from Me," a tune about family and a musician's life on the road. Side one concludes with "Epilogue," in which Guthrie decides he regrets nothing he's done so far.

Simple—even simple-minded—stuff. But, thanks to Guthrie's earnest wit and passionate sincerity, it really works. The result is a complete, premature autobiography.

The second side of Outlasting the Blues is a collection of curiosities that complement the first side's reflectiveness. There are cover versions of romances by Pete Seeger and Hoyt Axton that show us just how dreamy and easygoing Guthrie still is. In the remaining originals, one overwrought image ("Drowning Man") is done to death, and a banal one ("Underground") is revitalized. A haunting pastorale, "Underground" refers to the path a river has taken, not to underground politics. "Carry Me Over" is a loping rocker that could afford to rock a lot more, while "Telephone" continues the line of novelty numbers that have been Guthrie's burden since Alice's Restaurant. This one sports a corny lyric almost redeemed by the singer's sly, gritty vocal.

Throughout, Guthrie is backed by Shenandoah, the five-piece band that has accompanied him on recent tours. In concert, Shenandoah's idea of roots music is to offer a perky rendition of John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy." Here, Guthrie's withering nasality often manages to puncture the group's puffy playing and make its bounce seem like the blissfulness of idiots. But when some instrumental backbone is needed, Shenandoah's guitars go all flabby. When the singer wants to celebrate one of his little revelations, the band's boogie becomes automatic. This is what renders Outlasting the Blues a much duller and more ordinary LP than its informing intelligence should have allowed it to become. Which ought to be especially frustrating for both Guthrie and producer John Pilla after the terse, tough music the pair made on 1976's Amigo, in many ways the artist's finest, most neglected album in a long career of unjustly neglected good work.

Despite Shenandoah, Outlasting the Blues coheres as a jovial, optimistic, determined and impressive statement. Though there's nothing as politically astute here as Amigo's "Victor Jara" (as incisive and unsparing a protest song as has been written in this decade), Arlo Guthrie's overall talents have both broadened and deepened. Our last vital folk singer, he's making his small, specific points with greater authority now, and with a heightened sense of the drama that pervades even what he seems to want most for himself: a modest life—and a good one. (RS 303)

KEN TUCKER