***, Various artists, “Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” Sub Pop.

Springsteen didn’t portray the dusky despair of Middle America’s underbelly simply with lyrics of murderers, drifters and beaten souls on 1982’s “Nebraska,” but also with the music--spare, charcoal-gray sketches that expanded the notion of what a “folk” song could sound like.

Chrissie Hynde (on the title song of this tribute, which is due in stores Tuesday), Dar Williams (“Highway Patrolman”), Ani DiFranco (“Used Cars”) and Springsteen archetype Johnny Cash (“I’m On Fire,” one of three “bonus” tracks of “Nebraska”-era songs not on the original album) effectively honor that aesthetic blueprint in highly intimate performances.

Deana Carter (“State Trooper”), Son Volt (“Open All Night”) and Aimee Mann and Michael Penn (the redemptive “Reason to Believe”) are only slightly more elaborate but no less affecting, and even Hank Williams III’s mordant hoedown evoking his granddaddy on “Atlantic City” and Los Lobos’ rockabilly-tinged “Johnny 99” still plumb dark depths.

This hardly supplants Springsteen’s version, but it both reveres and renews its haunting achievements.

*

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