20 YEARS OF WIT, SINCERITY AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Popular music has spawned its own history and a corresponding collection of tall tales and legends.

Arlo Guthrie says there's truth in at least one of those famous fables, one involving him and Bob Dylan. The story goes like this: Shortly after arriving in New York in 1961, the teenage Dylan made a pilgrimage to the Guthrie home in Queens looking for Arlo's famed father, Woody.

He was greeted at the door by a baby sitter who, not knowing what to make of the scruffy kid, called Arlo's mom at work.

"Don't let him in," Mrs. Guthrie said. "Tell him to come back when I'll be home."

The baby sitter hung up the phone only to find Dylan showing Arlo a new way to play harmonica.

"That happened," Guthrie said in an interview from Taos, N.M. "Bob's not like a really good friend, (though) he's obviously somebody whose work I greatly admire. I talk to him every couple of years.

"Dylan, he had really succeeded in doing something that had never been done: making our music serious. Before he was a generation's hero, he was a folksingers' hero."

Guthrie himself could lay claim to those two titles. As a singer and songwriter, he's spent more than 20 years combining sincerity, acerbic wit and social consciousness reminiscent of, but independent from, Woody Guthrie.

Both father and son have been back in the spotlight lately thanks to "Folkways: A Vision Shared." The album, a Dylan-instigated tribute to Woody and Leadbelly, features performances of their work by U2, Bruce Springsteen, John Mel-lencamp and, of course, Arlo. Some royalties will benefit the Guthrie estate.

"I'm walking that tightrope from being just another person involved in the project and a recipient of it," he said. "I don't want to be pumping something too much that I will eventually benefit from."

Another cause Guthrie doesn't want to pump - for different reasons _ is the fight against Huntington's disease, the hereditary ailment that killed his father and could claim him, too. He has refused pleas from Huntington's groups to use his face, name and music to raise money.

"I don't want to focus on a particular disease or disease in general," he said. "I want to put my focus on what it means to be alive, not what it means to be sick.

"I have a fundamental disagreement with using pictures and words that describe a tormented death to solicit funds from people who are healthy. I think it's degrading to people. In other words, I don't want to be the Jerry Lewis of Huntington's disease."