Here are two decidedly different takes on American traditional music, both reverent of the tradition but in different ways and with different results.

Roger McGuinn was one of the founders of the folk-rock giants, The Byrds, which earned him a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But before he strapped on and plugged in his Rickenbacker 12-string, he was a pure, banjo-strumming folkie. In recent years he has continued to record in the folk-rock vein, and did a short U.S. tour with Richard Thompson in the mid-90s.

Folk has always remained McGuinn's first love, though, and in the early days of the World Wide Web, he founded the Folk Den an online digital archive of folk songs as an outgrowth of a Byrds fan Web site. He promised to record a folk song every month and make it available for free download, a service he has more or less kept up, with frequent upgrades as the technology has grown.

This CD is an offshoot from the Folk Den Web site, collecting some of the songs on the site and others that McGuinn recorded specially for the project. It has a raft of big names from at least three generations of folk musicians helping out, including Pete Seeger, Odetta, Frank and Mary Hamilton, Tommy Makem, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Josh White Jr., and Eliza Carthy. And it has a fine roster of memorable songs worth preserving, such as "Wagoner's Lad," "Bonnie Ship the Diamond," "Cane Blues," "John the Revelator," "Alabama Bound," "Willie Moore," "The Brazos River," "Sail Away Lady," and "Trouble in Mind."

It's doubly disappointing then, that the CD is a dud. Hardly any of the singing or playing really sparkles, which must be at least partly due to the recording and production, which apparently took place mostly under field conditions, using a professionally equipped Macintosh computer. Everything sounds flat, muted and indistinct, voices and instruments fade in and out and cross from speaker to speaker seemingly at random. McGuinn's multi-tracked vocals, reedy under the best of conditions, are muddy and inert.

One of the few bright spots is the playing of Carthy, on an instrumental reel and on "Willie Moore," on which she plays fiddle and Baez plays guitar behind McGuinn's vocals. Josh White's slow and bluesy take on "Trouble in Mind" is a keeper, as is McGuinn's arrangement of "The Virgin Mary," the sole track which features his signature 12-string.

Curiously, McGuinn writes in the voluminous liner notes that he included the lovely "Brazos" because it was in danger of being lost, although both Mason Williams and Lyle Lovett have recently recorded very nice versions of it.

The Folk Den has a worthy aim, and I'm all for preserving folk songs, but this CD makes them sound like they belong locked away in some musty archive somewhere.

The Red Mountain White Trash, on the other hand, plays old-time Southern string-band as what it is: energetic dance music. From their name, you might think them some kind of a joke band, or perhaps a bunch of kids making fun of Southern music. What they are is a bunch (eight at last count) of aging Boomers who are more in tune with the roots of the Old South than with its current trend toward gentrification as epitomized by Dallas, Atlanta and Nashville.

On Sweet Bama, their third album, the Trash again gather a passel of old-time jigs, reels, blues, waltzes and ballads, much like their previous outing, Chickens Don't Roost Too High. It's quite well produced for an independent recording. With two fiddles, guitar, mandolin, banjo uke, autoharp, harmonica and bass on most tracks, it doesn't sound cluttered or muddy. Jim Cauthen and Ed Baggott provide the twin fiddle attack, with Joyce Cauthen on guitar setting a solid rhythmic and chordal structure behind them, and color and rhythm added by all the other instruments.

It's a fine lot of tunes and songs they've chosen. Most are relatively obscure titles that the Trash have discovered on old records or learned from old musicians, including several from Charlie Stripling, who recorded in the 1930s. These include the lively opening track, "Coal Valley," and "Lost Child," which features some of the hottest fiddling on the album, a mix of bowing and picking that reveals Cauthen as a fiddler to contend with.

Others are more well known, sch as "Walk Right in Belmont," an interesting variation on "The Midnight Special" set in a factory instead of a prison, the Carter Family's "You've Got to Righten That Wrong," Uncle Dave Macon's "Mourning Blues," and Dock Boggs' "Oh Death," which has taken on new life recently as the signature song of Ralph Stanley. This one is sung as a trio, with vocals shared by Joyce Cauthen, Philip Foster and Jamie Finley, which highlights its nature as a dialogue between Death and a person who isn't ready for that inevitable call.

The Red Mountain White Trash love this music, and they communicate that love by the way they play it, as part of a living tradition, not as museum-pieces.

[Gary Whitehouse]