I purchased my first Tom Rush album in 1968 and over time worked my way backward to everything short of his rare first album, issued in 1962. In the 1960s Rush was a star of Boston/Harvard Square's fabled folk scene, even then a distinctive presence with an irresistible singing voice and a memorable, resonant guitar style. With a couple of mid-1970s rocked-up exceptions, both misfires in the collective estimation of Rush fans, his recordings can be categorized as folk. At ease in his own skin, Rush is comfortable being labeled a folk singer. That doesn't mean his approach to being one hasn't evolved over time.

His early LPs covered traditional material, from old ballads to Woody Guthrie songs to downhome blues, at a time when the designation "folk music" meant precisely what it said: home-made musical expression by ordinary people. Then in his most famous album, The Circle Game (1968), he reinvented himself as an interpreter of songs that, as he put it, sounded something like folk but weren't, in other words the creations of artists whose repertoire comprised self-written compositions fashioned on acoustic guitars. Circle Game introduced the world to the early work of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Jackson Browne, in other words to what would turn out to be a new genre of popular sound, spawned by the folk revival but soon transcending it. In due course just about anyone playing an acoustic guitar was expected to sing his or her own songs, however mediocre.

Singer-songwriters have proved to be a mixed blessing. For one thing, they have decimated the art of interpretation in much of popular music. Signed to Columbia, Rush cut a couple of brilliant discs (both released in 1970) in which he highlighted mostly even-now un-famous, but nonetheless talented, writers and shaped their songs to his own sensibility, usually improving them in the process. The eponymous Tom Rush and Wrong End of the Rainbow remain moving and eminently listenable more than half a century later. Rush, who had sounded pretty good before them, never sounded better.

In the third stage of his career, Rush perhaps inevitably chose to become a presenter almost entirely of his own originals. In the latest release in this vein, Gardens Old, Flowers New, he communicates, via the title (or so I read it), that from his education in traditional folk he now makes his own folk-derived but personal music. Mostly, as with the bulk of singer-songwriters, the subjects are love, joyous or despairing, and -- as with older composers pondering the comforts of late-life experience -- family. Rush's vocals (amazingly undiminished for a man in his early 80s), his distinctive guitar approach and his good humor remain as robust as ever.

Circle Game features a single Rush song, "No Regrets," covered since then by Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, U2 and more. In Rush's reading (and nicely captured in Harris's reading) it's a break-up number so chilly that you'd be well advised to don a sweater before exposing yourself to it. It's also unforgettable, as compelling as any non-Dylan item in the folk-era catalogue. Later, for Wrong End, Rush composed the tradition-inflected "Merrimac County," which moves me yet. In short, when I think of Rush's own material, I think of those two songs -- neither of recent vintage, of course. He's assembled a lot of newer songs since, and I confess that I don't think of them much. In fact, I wish, decades later, that he were putting his mark on other material from other sources.

But to paraphrase the saying, we go with the Tom Rush we have, not the one we wish we had. An outstanding quality of his, unchanged by time, is his likability. If not the commanding figure he was, Rush is still a welcome presence, perhaps more for his vocals and musicianship than for the quality of his songwriting. If the last of that sentence strikes you as a damning with faint praise, it shouldn't.

To be clear, his songs are listenable enough, and particularly on Gardens they do grow on you, at least if your experience proves to be like mine. A few employ nautical metaphors to splendid effect, especially "The Harbor," whose meaning when it hits the listener hits hard. "Gimme Some of It" and "Nothin' but a Man" look back cheerfully to pre-war blues. Though a metaphorical account of Rush's life as a lifelong traveling musician, "Glory Road" has its roots in a strain of antique songs about wanderers seeking their fate in a younger America.

If I don't adore everything here, there is nothing I object to listening to. Most of all, while I have never met him personally -- once, however, he emailed me after I'd written a review much like this one; the self-effacing humor in the message was precisely what I would have anticipated -- he has been in my ear so long that he might as well be an old friend who's come around again to fill me in on the latest.