‘All Star Tribute’ to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly Plays on Showtime

It’s probably inevitable that the validation of Big Rock Stars is needed to get the music and story of ancients like Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly to the youth of the ‘80s.

If that’s what it takes, “An All Star Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly,” which begins a series of six screenings Saturday at 10 p.m. on the Showtime cable channel, is as good a way to go as any. The program has an occasional tone of: “Come on kids, this is good for you, really,” but when the music of the two folk giants is center stage, there’s no need for hard sell.

The show is tied to the new “Folkways: A Vision Shared” album and features most of the artists on the record--performing several songs that aren’t. It could have been subtitled “The Boss on the Bard,” because Bruce Springsteen tends to dominate the hour, discussing the “idealism” and “realism” of Guthrie’s writing and delivering a rip-roaring “Vigilante Man” with the E Street Band.

U2’s Bono Hewson brings his usual intensity to ruminations on “the poetry of ordinary life” in Guthrie’s work. Even Bob Dylan gets into the act, though the camera-shy singer is a voice-only presence as he recalls his early days as “a Woody Guthrie jukebox.”

The exposition of Guthrie’s life and legacy is nicely mounted, with period photographs giving some visual context to the music. The material itself is pretty familiar, and the show, directed by Jim Brown, paints Guthrie as less of a radical than he really was.

Leadbelly is a little harder to pin down, because his stature lies more in his unique power as a performer than in an easily transmitted body of material.

But “Tribute” does shed light on his role as a crucial reservoir of disparate black musics, and Bernice Reagon of the group Sweet Honey in the Rock credits him with showing how to take music from the kitchen and the fields and present it on the stage.

In addition, a rare live clip shows Leadbelly spitting out “Pick a Bale o’ Cotton” with the awesome force of some phenomenon of nature.

All of the music comes off with taste and integrity, from Little Richard’s hammy “Rock Island Line” to Sweet Honey’s a cappella “Sylvie” to Emmylou Harris’ “Hobo’s Lullaby”--sweetly presented as a good-night kiss to the dying Woody. Arlo Guthrie--looking a lot like the Maharishi these days--is all over the place, and John Mellencamp’s Cajun-ized “Do Re Mi” shows how adaptable and contemporary in sound and message Guthrie’s music can be.

U2 fans will be disappointed that the lads aren’t shown performing their version of “Jesus Christ,” though Bono and the Edge do participate in the closing montage, in which verses of “This Land Is Your Land” (including the really subversive ones) are passed from singer to singer like the baton in a cross-country relay.