THERE ARE FEW genuinely timeless albums There are few ...

MacColl, a Scot, grew up listening to his family singing a cappella songs that had existed for generations. By the time of this album?recorded in his mid-40s?they had become second nature. He'd already produced numerous records and become a byword for Scots-English ballad singing.

Seeger is half-sister to folk popularizer Pete Seeger and full sister to the more traditionalist Mike (about whom, more another time). She adds restrained vocals plus guitar and banjo accompaniment. The MacColl/Seeger collaboration?which extended into a 40-year professional and romantic amalgam?produced a body of work with few equals anywhere in the world.

Many of the songs on Classic Scots Ballads are variants of the ballads collected by Francis Child, a professor at Harvard in the 1880s (a heady time, which also produced the seminal works of William James and Moncure Daniel Conway's sadly neglected study of history's underside, Demonology and Devil Lore). What makes the album unique is its superb blending of the purist impulse to preserve with the desire to make the songs accessible to a wide audience. Despite MacColl's insistence on singing in full Scots dialect?my ancestors had the habit of shifting the sound of every single vowel variant, probably out of spite?the full value of every song comes through not only clearly, but enriched. MacColl's vibrant, balanced baritone, with its soft tremolo, could be the highlands themselves singing.

Seeger's influence comes through strongest in the song selection. In her own right, she's most noted for her feminist compositions. Several of the ballads on the original album's first side are "strong woman" songs: In "The False Lover Won Back," the heroine leaps on her horse, chases down the would-be rake and wins his acceptance; in "The Gairdener Chyld," she flays his arrogant posturing; in "The Elfin Knight," she pounds him flat at an old-style version of playing the dozens.

The one sad touch is Peggy Seeger's notes to the CD reissue, written eight years after MacColl's death. Speaking of her contribution to the album, she says, "I look on these accompaniments as competent and probably fairly sensitive assaults on the songs?but assaults nonetheless." Her feeling (and apparently MacColl's) was that they had drifted from traditionalism into unwarranted interpretation.

I disagree right down to my shoes. What they did was encourage the tradition to grow and blossom, as Shakespeare encouraged the language of his day to expand. MacColl learned these songs as unaccompanied tunes; Seeger's backing?both as singer and instrumentalist?varies from understated support to natural extension.

Most of her vocal work is simple harmonizing on the choruses or the repeated lines the Scots are fond of, never intrusive but lending body. Her guitar work is undistinguished background but, again, gives fullness. On the banjo, though, Seeger comes alive, especially on "Glasgow Peggy" and "The Trooper and the Maid." Here, Southern-style picking runs around behind MacColl's voice like a mouse in the wainscoting at tea. It's nothing you could predict, nothing you'd call for, but it's truly inspired. Most of all, traditional or not, it's what it should be.

This album was only the beginning for MacColl and Seeger. My own later favorites are their two volumes of the New Briton Gazette (Folkways), a compilation of the best of MacColl's achingly beautiful ballads about working life, which were done for the BBC. I don't think anyone's ever surpassed the bruising wistfulness of "The Shoals of Herring."

What's Out There: It's humbling to see how much MacColl and Seeger have done and how little of it I know. Classic Scots Ballads is easy to get; all of the MacColl/Seeger Folkways work is available on custom CDs from www.si.edu/folkways.