Bards of America

It's the American ballad that concerns Sean Wilentz, Greil Marcus, and their fellow contributors to ''The Rose and the Briar." The title comes from the old ballad ''Barbara Allen," which ends with the image of rose and briar entwined over the graves of the title character and the lover she rejected.

Of course, ''Barbara Allen" (or ''Barbary Allen" or ''Barbry Ellen") long predates the United States and came from Britain. What's so American about that? This is precisely the point: The genius of American music lies in its power to transform. From Appalachian hollows to Delta cotton fields, an ''incontestably mulatto" culture -- to use the novelist-critic Albert Murray's matchless formulation -- created an incontestably mulatto music.

Wilentz and Marcus are connoisseurs of both that culture and music. In addition to being professor of history at Princeton, Wilentz is historian in residence at the site bobdylan.com. Marcus's books include the groundbreaking ''Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music" and ''Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession."

Above and beyond the sheer musical appeal of these songs, what draws Wilentz and Marcus to them is ''the versions and visions of America they describe." The ballads can be new as well as old: Randy Newman's ''Sail Away" and Marty Robbins's ''El Paso" as well as ''The Water Is Wide" and ''Pretty Polly." The term ''ballad," Wilentz and Marcus write, now ''connotes any narrative song, no matter its stanza structure -- a promiscuous definition we were happy to adopt." The point isn't to be traditional. It's to belong to a tradition. If anything, it's more important artistically to further a tradition -- that's what keeps it alive -- than simply curate it.