Bruce Springsteen has described himself as “a child of Woody [Guthrie] and Elvis.” The spirit of Elvis is easy enough to see. It’s all over the recent 30th anniversary edition of “Born To Run”: in his kinetic live performance, his reckless ambition for what rock ‘n’ roll can be and mean. The spirit of Woody is quieter, and emerged a few years later on the Springsteen classic “Nebraska.”

On Saturday night, the nearly monthlong New York Guitar Festival will kick off with a free concert celebrating the “Nebraska” album. Artists including Laura Cantrell, Dan Zanes,Vernon Reid, the National, Mark Eitzel, Martha Wainwright, Jesse Harris, Michelle Shocked, and Lenny Kaye will interpret songs from it, much as they did with Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” last year (with mixed results).

“Nebraska” is at least as tricky a challenge – one that even the E Street Band declined. Springsteen recorded the “Nebraska” demos in 1982 at home alone with an acoustic guitar, harmonica, and a four-track tape recorder. But when he brought them to the E Street Band to flesh out, according to their usual practice, the band urged him to release the album “as is,” fearing they would trample the haunting quality of the songs.

The sound owes a lot to Woody, whom Springsteen discovered while on tour the previous year when somebody gave him a copy of Joe Klein’s “Woody Guthrie: A Life.” He was struck by Guthrie’s empathy for the downtrodden and dispossessed – which matched his own – and impressed by Guthrie’s articulate anger.

Through Woody, Springsteen discovered the stark power of folk music, and it colors every part of “Nebraska.” Despite the sparse, acoustic instrumentation, however, Springsteen’s songs throb with a subdued energy and intensity, as though he can’t forsake the lessons of rock ‘n’ roll and R&B. When he barks a sharp “Yeeooww!” on the song “State Trooper,” when he howls and moans, it’s more in keeping with Howlin’ Wolf and James Brown than Guthrie and his ilk.

“Nebraska” was not only a revolution of sound, but also of symbolism, especially of the automobile. On his early albums, Springsteen wrote like Tom Wolfe channeling a grease monkey with B-movie chase scenes flashing before his eyes. Cars were metaphors for freedom and rebellion, often overwrought: His characters and their souped-up machines merged into one. They were “broken heros on a last chance power drive”; “chrome-wheel, fuel-injected, and steppin’ out over the line.” Sometimes the descriptions bordered on the pornographic: “I’ve got a ’69 Chevy with a 396, fuelie heads, and a Hurst on the floor,” he sings in the opening lines of “Racing in the Street,” “she’s waitin’ tonight down in the parking lot, outside the 7-Eleven store.”

The car is just as central to “Nebraska,” but its meaning is entirely different. The transformation begins on the album cover. Instead of another shot of the tousle-haired leadfoot with the leather jackets and T-shirts (Springsteen himself), there is a grainy blackand-white photo taken through the dashboard window. The view is unrelentingly bleak: snow on the wipers, dark clouds overhead, empty fields, and highway shrinking to a point in the distance. No amount of speed and masculine daring can outrace this desolate landscape.

Cars are no longer the key to freedom on “Nebraska,” but sheet-metal cages. “Johnny 99” gets laid off from the auto plant. The “Highway Patrolman” can only chase his criminal brother across the Canadian border, “pull over to the side of the road and watch his taillights disappear.” A car thief – or not, it’s unclear – prays the “State Trooper” won’t pull him over as he races through the night. Embarrassed by his poverty, the kid riding in the backseat of “Used Cars” can only vow that when “my number comes in, I ain’t never gonna ride in no used car again.”

In this way, “Nebraska” is an answer and bookend to “Born To Run.” That album was about the irresistible pull of the American dream, the irrepressible energy of American youth. The intervening albums,”Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The River,” introduce doubt: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” he asks on the final song of “The River,” “or is it something worse?”

“Nebraska” is an incontrovertible answer, a bottoming out. It wallows in something deeper and harder than doubt: resignation. Lyrics repeat throughout the album in different contexts, like lives intersecting the same points. But whatever their particulars, they all face the same long odds and narrow options.

The characters that populate “Nebraska” are honest folks facing “debts no honest man can pay.” The good life sparkles in the “Mansion on the Hill,” but they can’t have it, for it’s locked behind “gates of hardened steel” that “completely surround” it. “Tired of comin’ out on this losing end,” they turn to crime, more out of exasperation than malice or even hope. But if they’re no longer innocent, neither are they entirely guilty. Johnny 99 speaks for the entire cast of the album when he stands before the sentencing judge and says, “It was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand.”

Ironically, the song that best captures this idea didn’t even make the album: the original version of “Born in the U.S.A.” It’s the one song among the “Nebraska” demos the E Street Band said it could do something with. It went on, of course, to become the title track for his next and best-selling album, the song for which he’s best known and most misunderstood.

There’s another Guthrie parallel in this.As he was working up material for “Nebraska,” Springsteen became fascinated with Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” how it had been stripped of its original, radical meaning. He often performed it, but always with an explanation: “This song, it was originally written as an angry song,” he would say. “It was an answer to Irving Berlin who just wrote ‘God Bless America.’ This song was written as an answer to that song.”

“Born in the U.S.A.” has been similarly distorted in the public mind. The popular version, with its synth backdrop and 3-D drums, was greeted as a flag-waving, chest-thumping anthem, perfect for ballparks and halftime shows. It was so pro-America-sounding that first President Reagan then Walter Mondale used it in their 1984 campaigns (much to Springsteen’s chagrin). Stadiums of fans still react to it that way.

The original “Nebraska” version (eventually released on the obscurities box set “Tracks” in 1998) could never have been so misunderstood. Inspired by Ron Kovic’s autobiography “Born on the Fourth of July” (and first performed for disabled Vietnam Vet activist Bob Muller), it was a bitter song about “a Vietnam veteran who’s on fire because he’s colliding with the forces of history,” as Springsteen recently told Mojo.

He sings it with a gruff disgust, Bono-like falsetto howls, and slashing strokes at the guitar that reverberate in swells. “Born down in a dead man’s town / the first kick I took was when I hit the ground,” runs the first verse, “end up like a dog that’s been beat too much / till you spend half your life just to cover it up / Born in the U.S.A.” “God Bless America” it ain’t. But it is a perspective on America that is just as accurate, and in its brutal honesty, just as patriotic.

The Nebraska Project takes place January 14 at 8 p.m. (World Financial Center Winter Garden, 212-945-2600).