Before Bob Dylan made it essential for folk singers to write in a highly personalized, confessional voice, folk music was a far more public affair. Whether or not they wrote songs themselves, singers would borrow other performers' tunes, and everyone would draw on a common repertoire that seemed to belong to the culture at large more than to particular composers. Rather than exclusively expressing the inner struggles of the singer-songwriter, songs often addressed social concerns and distilled tales of love and death into stories that penetrated the universal human heart.

Irish singer Christy Moore is a product of that older conception of folk music. Christy Moore, which draws on four solo records the singer has put out over the past five years, is the first album he has released in this country. It should broaden the core audience he has already garnered here.

Moore sings songs by twelve different writers – including himself – on this album. The personal stamp he places on those tunes results from the intimate conviction of his tenor voice and his willingness to allow songs to reveal themselves without a lot of fussiness.

Moore's stirring rendition of Peter Hames's "Ordinary Man" – a tale of factory closings that ends with the line "There's one law for the rich, one for the poor" – could be set as easily in America's industrial heartland as in Ireland. Barry Moore's song "The City of Chicago" chronicles the generations of Irish people who have made the crossing to the United States to escape famine. But its poetic observation that amid Chicago's urban landscape "there are people dreaming/Of the Hills of Donegal" expresses the longing of immigrants and exiles anywhere. Peter Cadle's "Unfinished Revolution" draws connections between Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, while "Biko Drum" hails South African freedom fighters Steven Biko and Nelson Mandela.

Moore's resonant voice and delicate acoustic guitar are the core of the arrangements, but keyboards, mandolin and Celtic pipes and whistles provide evocative coloring. In the rich simplicity of his interpretations, Moore leaves comfortable room for listeners to enter each of his songs and find new parts of themselves – and of the world. It's a journey well worth taking. (RS 527)

ANTHONY DECURTIS