Jimmie Rodgers makes an ideal folk icon for these troubled times. His brief Depression-era career, cut short by a fatal case of tuberculosis, blurred racial divisions by drawing from white country and black blues traditions. In a world of greedy haves and struggling have-nots (so what's new?), Rodgers – a railroad worker known as the Singing Brakeman – championed the common man Against a backdrop of rapid economic and technological change (so what's new?), he focused with humanity on colorful characters who lived with bravado and self-reliance.

With The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Tribute, Bob Dylan salutes the work of Rodgers while making some dyspeptic points about the modern world: To wit, we live in a country shorn of conviction and substance, and breached from the necessary lessons and worthy lives of its past. The multi-artist tribute, assembled by Dylan and including his labored rasp (on "Sweet Liza Jane"), is offered as a kind of corrective. "We don't salute ourselves in making this record," he writes in the liner notes, "but we point you back there so you can feel it for yourself and see how far off the path we've come." The result is a feast for the ears.

Much of The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers is as effortless and natural as ripe fruit falling off a tree. Bono, one of the youngest bloods in this bevy, delivers a guileless "Dreaming With Tears in My Eyes," and the lack of his recent ironic context and electronic trappings is welcome. Dickey Betts' sweetly countrified "Waiting for a Train" makes Rodgers seem the obvious prototype for the Allman Brothers Band's "Ramblin' Man," John Mellencamp's gruffly sung "Gambling Bar Room Blues" brings to life a character as irascible and engaging as the singer himself.

The match of artists and songs is well-nigh perfect. Willie Nelson sings "Peach Pickin' Time Down in Georgia" with a casual, back-porch élan, while Alison Krauss and Mary Chapin Carpenter fairly float over the lithe picking in their chosen numbers. An unrepentantly rowdy Steve Earle tackles "In the Jailhouse Now." Only Iris DeMent's "Hobo Bill's Last Ride," with its grating, affected hillbilly nasality, fails to charm. The inclusion of a younger alternative artist might have been nice – but, hey, this is a schooling by the elders of the clan.

P.S. to Deadheads: Jerry Garcia's last studio recording, a version of "Blue Yodel #9 (Standin' on the Corner)," with David Grisman and the late John Kahn, appears here. Although Garcia can barely exhale his yodelays, there's a weary nobility in his effort. Like Jimmie Rodgers, he remained a songster till his dying breath. (RS 768)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH