“The best folk music released in 2013 was, almost without exception, of the intensely personal variety.” That’s NPR introducing its list of “The Top 10 Folk and Americana Albums of 2013.” The formulation, however breezy, handily captures our expectations of current Americana heroes (Sarah Jarosz, Jason Isbell), folk and anti-folk troubadours (Iron and Wine, Kimya Dawson), and practiced singer-songwriters (Bill Callahan, Mark Kozelek): a focus on the individual performer and on quasi-autobiographical content. The same bias has been reinforced by reissues (Richard and Linda Thompson) and fictionalizations (Crazy Heart, Inside Llewyn Davis). Even the “indie-folk” acts who have tried to elude the predominance of the personal have done so almost exclusively through recourse to bucolic soundscapes, lush harmonies, and woodsy imagery (Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Phosphorescent).

In this context, it’s refreshing to encounter a folk band interested less in getting intensely personal than in getting intensely political. Jesse and the Revelator, a male-female duo based in Philadelphia, tackles labor struggles and small-town social life with a combination of wit, artifice, and aggression. The setting of the pair’s self-produced and self-released debut album, Live from the Black Mountain Theatre, in Harlan, KY, conjures a place where song and organized protest have been entwined since at least 1931, when Florence Reece’s classic “Which Side Are You On?” articulated the stakes of the bloody wars between coal operators and unionized miners. Thick with historical allusions but grounded in the present day, Live from the Black Mountain Theatre draws its relevance from recent union battles in Wisconsin, Chicago, and elsewhere, while offering a reminder of the overtly left-wing commitments of the American folk revival’s first wave, in the 1940s.

The suite, though, is neither a set of rally songs nor genuinely “live.” It’s a concept album that uses dramatic monologues and abrupt juxtapositions to bring to life characters, stories, and headlines from the political
“theatre” that was and is Harlan County, Kentucky. Simple vocal melodies and acoustic instrumentation are complicated, or ironically framed, by audio clips from news broadcasts and films, blasts of electric guitar, and quick turns to collective sing-alongs. On “I Wish My Mother’d Call Me Rose,” for instance, a coda of electric fretting punctuated by screams overturns the gentle minor blues that precedes it. The coda comes on the heels of a lyric about a soothsaying “they”—“They say it’s the union made men greedy;” they insist...