In Martin Scorsese’s Dylan-documentary No Direction Home, it’s Pete Seeger who emerges as the villain of the piece — his objections to Dylan’s new electric dawn culminating in a failed attempt to cut his power supply in mid-concert.

It was also Seeger who helped to bring civil rights and folk music together, popularising the Baptist hymn We Shall Overcome just in time for Joan Baez to unleash her repellent vibrato moo upon it at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. With all of this in mind, it’s hard not to feel suddenly very, very sleepy when alighting on the title of Bruce Springsteen’s 14th album.

And yet it’s a measure of Springsteen’s achievement here that he takes on that song and, well, makes it live again. How so? Virtually all of The Seeger Sessions is the result of two days spent with players introduced to him through the E-Street Band’s violinist Soozie Tyrell. No rehearsals, apparently, and arrangements devised on the hoof. At times you can hear as much. When the fiddler Sam Bardfield opens on O Mary Don’t You Weep, you get an audibly tentative evocation of small hours in an imagined Jewish speakeasy — which gains confidence when a benign, boozy wave of musicians surges in and picks up the initiative.

At the core of every performance here is a simple principle that all white musicians playing black spirituals should be legally bound to observe. Music born of misery doesn’t need to be dispensed like an act of masochism between consenting partners.

The hymn Eyes on the Prize swells magnificently from a hushed accordion meditation to a tender ragtime climax. Jacob’s Ladder makes light work of the transition from Genesis xxviii, 11-19 to sozzled, serried singalong. Only on the Dublin broadside Mrs McGrath — on which he borrows Tom Cruise’s Oirish accent from Far and Away — do the singer’s instincts desert him.

For all the folk old guard’s insistence that this music manages very well by itself, it sometimes takes a rock musician to come along once in a while and blow the cobwebs away from these songs.

Similarly, it’s impossible to underestimate what Springsteen’s grizzled, guttural roar brings to these tunes. This is the sound of dusty spectres being shaken out of old forgotten books. “The sound,” as Springsteen himself puts it, “of surprise and the pure joy of playing.”

Columbia

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010