How to put this delicately: It took some time, but the folks at the musicians' healthcare fund Sweet Relief have actually found a worthy singer/songwriter in need who has an even less commercial voice than Victoria Williams.

He's Vic Chesnutt, a wheelchair-bound Georgia native whose grand songs of loyalty and betrayal have long been worshiped by scores of better-known talents. Chesnutt's songs are the focus of Sweet Relief II – the follow-up to the 1993 album that celebrated Williams' songwriting and brought Williams, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, much-needed funds to cover her medical expenses.

A side effect of the first Sweet Relief, which featured Williams covers by artists including Pearl Jam, Lou Reed, Matthew Sweet and the Jayhawks, was that it nudged Williams into the mainstream and created new career opportunities for her. That's now an important part of Sweet Relief's game plan. Chesnutt, who became paralyzed from the waist down after an auto accident when he was a teenager, has released four highly praised but commercially ignored albums. But after years of obscurity, he's getting to hear what some of the rock world's most respected – and polished – voices do with his catalog. His meandering, homemadeacoustic material has been blown up to larger-than-life proportions here by, among others, R.E.M., Garbage, Hootie and the Blowfish (stop snickering), Live, Smashing Pumpkins and Indigo Girls.

The result is the kind of tribute usually reserved for dead icons. No matter how far these simple songs are stretched, the blood-and-guts emotion remains. As they approach his tales of honor, morality and greed, the artists sound as though they've measured the distance between their own best songs and Chesnutt's – and are a little humbled, maybe even a bit scared. With good reason. Chesnutt's work is more than the sum of its parts. He remains largely unnoticed partially because of the unkempt way he sings. At the same time, his songs are compelling precisely because of the way he sings.

On his own records – Little (1990), West of Rome (1992), Drunk (1993) and Is the Actor Happy? (1995) – Chesnutt is a kind of anti-vocalist. "I'm just pushing the paint around," he mopes on the Happy? track "Sad Peter Pan." And, indeed, Chesnutt mewls as much as he sings, in a voice that is small and plain and perpetually startled. Then there are Chesnutt's loopy, elliptical lyrics, loaded with the ephemeral stuff most writers leave in their journals. "Bricks are dirty, lakes are dead/The family dog is mad/Baby brother's science beakers are all broken/Now the yard peacocks are all sad," he sings in "Free of Hope." Sometimes it's hard to find the universal nugget buried in that kind of rubble, but the search is always rewarding.

R.E.M.'s version of Chesnutt's "Sponge" sets the musical tone for Sweet Relief II. The band's hard electric sound severs all ties to Chesnutt's usual folkie conventions, while the lean, uncluttered production forces his haunted lines to the surface. Michael Stipe – a longtime supporter who worked with Chesnutt on Little and West of Rome – emulates Chesnutt's detached vocal delivery, cultivating tension with the spaces between the words. As Peter Buck's guitar wails and curls around a single sustained note, Stipe strikes a perfect apocalyptic stance, aware of but unmoved by impending doom.

The other stars on the album approach Chesnutt's work with similar respect. Indigo Girls capture the hymnlike quality of "Free of Hope" and expand it with a dissonant cornet that reinforces the song's message of quiet despair. In easily their most compelling recording since Grave Dancers Union, Soul Asylum transform "When I Ran Off and Left Her" into an elegiac, tightly focused rock ballad. Smashing Pumpkins join with Chicago noise boys Red Red Meat to paint a tremolo-filled portrait of "Sad Peter Pan." Alas, Red Red Meat vocalist Tim Rutili gets to sing a line tailor-made for Billy Corgan: "I'm a reluctant rebel/I just want to be Aaron Neville."

Both Sparklehorse, who cover "West of Rome," and Joe Henry, who recruits sister-in-law Madonna for a duet on "Guilty by Association," mimic Chesnutt's whimsical phrasing and offbeat pronunciations to give their selections authenticity. And it took Chesnutt's woeful lyrics to inspire Darius Rucker to stop blubbering and actually enunciate; the Hootie singer's track with Nanci Griffith, an upbeat rendition of "Gravity of the Situation," is a rousing success that finds the Blowfish pulling off a credible imitation of the Band.

The album ends with "God Is Good," a new collaboration between Chesnutt and Victoria Williams. It's a simple folk song built on the ideas that underpin Chesnutt's best writing – faith, stoicism and honor. But the performance is slightly out of place among the other artists' radical rearrangements of his songs. After hearing bands like R.E.M., the Pumpkins and Garbage transform the poignant, personal stuff of Chesnutt's life into loud, triumphant, extroverted music, it's tough to go back to the campfire. (RS 741)

TOM MOON