This is an album with the best of intentions. Its virtues are several: there are standout performances by Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, John Cougar Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen and U2, burnished gospel turns by Sweet Honey in the Rock and a tossed-off jewel by Willie Nelson. Those unacquainted with the work of Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly will be edified to some extent by these interpretations of fourteen of their songs. And all should be gladdened to know that profits from this project will help to keep in print the great and fabled catalog of Folkways Records, for which both artists recorded extensively. As part of a larger cultural agenda, this LP is a laudable artifact.

In terms of delivering on the promise of its title, however, Folkways: A Vision Shared is a bit muddled. Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter – "Leadbelly" to the ages – seem naturally bracketed in the folk pantheon. They were key figures in the urban folk revival of the 1940s, and they were also friends who frequently performed together. Each, it is true, was a giant of American music – but for very different reasons. Guthrie, the poet of the dust bowl and the Great Depression, was an impassioned champion of the down and out and a merciless scourge of feckless politicians and fat-cat businessmen. A sometime columnist for Communist-party newspapers, Guthrie had a pamphleteer's zeal for topical communication: as Joe Klein observed in his superb biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life, Guthrie's main instrument was the typewriter. He was a mediocre guitarist and a technically limited (though unforgettable) singer, and many of his melodies were lifted from the folk canon. Guthrie's stature derives from the fact that he had something radical to say, and he said it in songs that could be sung by anyone.

Leadbelly, on the other hand, was a force of nature. A good generation older than Guthrie, he had over the course of an often brutal life soaked up an encyclopedic range of black American music in cotton fields, bordellos and prisons. He was a master of the twelve-string guitar, a wild barrelhouse piano player and a singer of almost primeval power. Unlike Guthrie, his presence was an inextricable component of his music. To appreciate Leadbelly's art, one has to hear Leadbelly.

This is why Folkways: A Vision Shared ends up with nine tracks devoted to Guthrie's songs and only five to Leadbelly's – and why Guthrie fares by far the best.

Bob Dylan kicks off the Guthrie tributes with a rendition of "Pretty Boy Floyd." Dylan is Guthrie's most gifted acolyte, and his reading of this classic gangster ballad – an enduring critique of American moral hypocrisy – is commanding in a way that only Dylan at his best can be. Accompanying himself with acoustic guitar and harmonica and singing with all the commitment and artful abandon of his earliest records, he sounds like a longtime traveler who's finally found his way back home.

Following Dylan at the peak of his form is an unenviable task, but John Cougar Mellencamp not only pulls it off, he stakes his own convincing claim on the Guthrie heritage with an inspired version of "Do Re Mi." Mellencamp's band, with its dobro, fiddle and accordion, turns the tune into a neo-hoe-down, and Mellencamp himself, with one of his loosest vocals ever, manages to capture both the bite and the buoyancy of the Guthrie original.

Bruce Springsteen contributes two Guthrie covers in very different styles. Accompanied by only acoustic guitar, minimal accordion and faraway tambourine, he offers an exquisitely spare rendition of "I Ain't Got No Home," Woody's heartbreaking-ballad of drift and despair. If its effect seems slightly anticlimactic, it may be because Springsteen went through his own Grapes of Wrath period a half dozen years ago on his album Nebraska. Springsteen's take on "Vigilante Man," on the other hand, is a reinvention of the tune in rock terms, and it adds a new dimension of malevolence and menace to the original.

The biggest surprise among the Guthrie covers is U2's transformation of "Jesus Christ." One might be forgiven for dreading this particular conflation of sensibilities – the last thing U2 needs is another overlay of social significance. But the gist of the song (if Jesus were to return today preaching his original message, he'd be crucified anew) is irresistible, and the band plays it straight and hard on this track, which was recorded at the Sun Studio, in Memphis.

Willie Nelson turns in an evocative cowboy rendition of Guthrie's "Philadelphia Lawyer," a slyly ironic tale of jealousy and death.

The three remaining Guthrie tracks constitute the weakest of the bunch. One is Emmylou Harris's genteel coffeehouse version of "Hobo's Lullaby"; the other two are sentimental inevitabilities. Arlo Guthrie – Woody's son – has the album's longest song, a straightforward reading of "East Texas Red." This is not one of Guthrie's more memorable melodies, and it's hardly improved by the flatness of the folkie arrangement. Pete Seeger, who performed with Guthrie in the Almanac Singers and who later with the Weavers scored a pop hit with Guthrie's "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," contributes a sing-along version of Guthrie's best-known song, "This Land Is Your Land." Seeger is joined by Doc Watson, among many others, and the result is a cluttered production that, oddly, omits the more "radical" verses that Guthrie always feared would be deleted. (For example, "As I was walking, I saw a sign there/And on the sign it said, no trespassing/But on the other side, it didn't say nothing/That side was made for you and me.")

Which brings us at last to Leadbelly. Since there is nobody alive today who can replicate this great singer's style, a decision appears to have been made to allow a scattershot assemblage of performers to take its best shot at his songs and hope for something interesting to happen. In at least one case it worked perfectly: Taj Mahal's terrific roadhouse rendition of "The Bourgeois Blues" may be the most impressive track on the album. The guitar and piano effectively suggest Leadbelly's own style on those instruments, and the result is a barroom whomper topped by a great, gritty vocal that avoids simple mimicry but still manages to catch the unfettered spirit of the original.

The gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock turns Leadbelly's "Sylvie" and "Gray Goose" into cleverly arranged and beautifully sung inspirational tunes. There's a lovely purity to the a cappella arrangements, but the results – appealing as they are – have very little to do with Leadbelly's own inimitably charismatic versions.

Getting Little Richard to take a stab at "Rock Island Line" probably seemed like a great idea, but it doesn't work. Backed by Fishbone, Richard tears through the song with all his customary frenzy – and he's terrific. But the song becomes almost irrelevant. The entire focus of this track is Little Richard – which is maybe the way it should be, but not in this particular context.

The biggest gamble with the Leadbelly material – which led to the greatest disappointment – was assigning Brian Wilson to cover "Goodnight Irene." This, too, must have seemed like a grand idea – after all, with the Beach Boys, Wilson once whipped up a wonderful version of Leadbelly's "Cotton Fields." But his "Irene" is dim, perfunctory, skeletal Spectoriana – big drums and strangely distant guitars.

The good stuff outweighs the misconceived on this album, though, and any objections are likely to be lodged mainly by those who know and love this music in its original form. To the extent that Folkways: A Vision Shared helps to enlarge that group, it must ultimately be deemed an ambitious and admirable success. (RS 535)

KURT LODER