If you're wondering what happened to well-written political folk songs, the answer can be found on this album. Si Kahn, a North Carolina cotton-mill organizer, writes with a poetic detail and an ironic understatement unknown in political folk music since Dylan's early folkie days. Kahn's songs aren't about textbook ideology; rather, he presents the daily work and family life of Alabama field hands and Kentucky coal miners with beguiling realism.

On Doing My Job, his third album, his lyrics and arrangements are more ambitious and successful than ever. In "Blue Ridge Mountain Refugee," an unemployed Appalachian boy picks up a twine-wrapped bundle as a train nears to take him and others to a northern factory. "They say they'll be back," sings Kahn, "but they're leaving for all time."

"Mississippi Summer," the lament of a tenant farmer, ends with this forlorn image: "Thought I heard the angel of death overhead/But it's only the crop-duster's plane/Hoes rise and fall like the beating of wings." Kahn also has a sharp wit, which he flashes on "Black Gold." Explaining work on the loading dock, he sings: "You know the boss was always loaded... the boys was always docked."

On this LP, the southern rural roots of his songs are fleshed out by the Red Clay Ramblers and dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas. Kahn himself is a sturdy, if unspectacular, guitarist and singer. Despite the presence of a few singalong chants that don't work so well on vinyl and two awkward attempts at brass arrangements, the bulk of these songs have the timeless quality of Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. (RS 377)

GEOFFREY HIMES