It’s hard to imagine someone more fit to celebrate the work of Pete Seeger than Bruce Springsteen. His own music, especially acoustic albums like “Nebraska” and political ones like “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” makes him a clear part of the lineage that runs from Woody Guthrie through Seeger and Bob Dylan. Sadly, it is easy to imagine a more fitting Seeger tribute than Springsteen’s new album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” (Columbia).

The album’s 13 songs – all of them associated in one way or another with Seeger – were recorded in three one-day sessions, the first in 1997 and the other two in the last 16 months. Fellow folk musicians used to gripe that when Seeger recorded a song, his became the definitive version. Springsteen’s “covers” use Seeger’s melodies and phrasings exactly, but that’s where the similarities end.

The classic image of Seeger is that of a solitary figure onstage, his thin frame seeming to mimic the shape of his long-neck banjo, his chin stretched out like a runner leaning for the finish line as he sang. Seeger was embarrassed enough by his weak, reedy voice that he encouraged crowds to sing along with him whenever he could.

In contrast to those of the modest folkie, Springsteen’s renditions are lusty and elaborate. Backed by a 13-person band that includes his wife, Patti Scialfa, and E Street Band violinist Soozie Tyrell, he sounds like he’s leading a revival meeting or a New Orleans street parade. This isn’t to say they’re bad versions; many are quite good.

“Old Dan Tucker,” which opens the album, is a rollicking hootenanny with chugging banjo and horn ensemble. “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep” is zydeco-tinged, with a full gospel chorus, Gypsy fiddle, and clanging drums. Springsteen sings low and growling like a young Tom Waits on a bittersweet version of “Shenandoah,” and then yips and hollers all through the calypso-flavored “Pay Me My Money Down.”

The issue here is song selection. Springsteen includes only one song that Seeger actually wrote, “Pay Me My Money Down,” and it’s not among his better known.The rest are traditional folk songs that Seeger recorded,but those he did the most to popularize are not included. There’s no “Guantanamera” or “Wimoweh,” not even “Goodnight Irene,” the Leadbelly song Seeger and the Weavers made a no. 1 hit in 1950.

Seeger’s music was inseparable from his social mission. His father wrote protest music for worker strikes, bread lines, and unemployment rallies in the 1920s as a member of the communist-affiliated Composers Collective (Aaron Copland was a fellow member). Seeger grew up reading radical literature and marching in the May Day Parade, eventually joining the Communist Party himself.

He made his public debut in 1940 at the Forrest Theater in New York City during a “Grapes of Wrath Evening,” a concert to benefit the John Steinbeck Committee for Agricultural Workers. It was the same evening that Guthrie ambled onto the national stage – and he stole the show. Seeger, meanwhile, was so nervous that he could hardly pick his instrument. He forgot the words to “Old Dan Tucker,” a song he knew by heart, and left the stage embarrassed and bewildered. Still, the great folklorist Alan Lomax thought enough of seeing the two of them share a stage that he later remarked, “You can date the renaissance of the American folk song to that night.”

Seeger attached himself to Guthrie, and together they went hoboing out West, playing music for tips and meals along the way. When they came back East, they formed the Almanac Singers with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell. Their songs – especially union and anti-war numbers like “Which Side Are You On?” and “C for Conscription” – were so radical that their first record label refused to print its name on the records, releasing them simply as “Almanac Records.” Theodore Dreiser once said of the group, “If we had six more like these boys, we could save America.” The FBI feared there might actually be more, and warned agents to “watch out for any Almanac Singers in their midst.”

With anti-communist fervor on the rise in the late 1940s, Seeger dropped his political material in favor of traditional songs, forming the Weavers along with Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert. A weeklong residency at the Village Vanguard turned into six months and landed the quartet a deal with Decca Records. The Weavers became a national sensation and sold some 4 million records between 1950 and 1952, when they were blacklisted for former communist associations. Seeger would eventually be hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, charged with perjury, and threatened with a year’s jail time.

“The blacklist forced us to take a Sabbatical, which turned into Mondical, and a Tuesdical,” Hays liked to say. But it was during this time that Seeger did some of his most important work. Acting as a kind of Johnny Appleseed of folksong, Seeger played summer camps, school assemblies, state fairs – anywhere and everywhere he could find an audience.

The seeds he planted would mature into the 1960s folk movement. At one of his concerts, Seeger sold a self-published booklet titled “How To Play the 5-String Banjo” to a Stanford sophomore named Dave Guard.Three years lat er, Guard would form the Kingston Trio, whose 1958 hit recording of “Tom Dooley” kicked off the urban folk revival. Joan Baez first decided she wanted to become a folksinger after seeing one of Seeger’s concerts at a local school gymnasium, and Peter, Paul & Mary cite the Weavers as a major inspiration and influence.

According to a recent New Yorker profile of Seeger, Springsteen recorded a version of “If I Had a Hammer” for the album but decided not to include it because he felt it overwhelmed the other material. The same rationale must have been used to dismiss such Seeger-penned classics as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” and “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” the refrain of which was one of the most direct and poetic criticisms of America’s growing involvement in Vietnam: “We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy / and the big fool says to push on.”

A “Seeger Sessions” without Seeger himself, without his passionate politics, without the songs he wrote and popularized does nothing to distinguish Seeger from any other midcentury folk singer. Why even drag him into it?

Springsteen’s effort is obviously well-intentioned. He has only admiration for Seeger and his music, but by ignoring his activism, he misses what Seeger was largely about and does his legacy, and the national memory, a disservice.