by: Colman McCarthy (section: Editorial, page A15)

A Maniacs maniac who has their four hit albums, a head full of their songs and a son's sunny talent for remembering my fatherly advice--judge but don't prejudge--persuaded me to heed, for once, my own counsel and come along.

I did the other evening, when the five-member band from Jamestown, N.Y., had 4,000 youthful loyalists--and almost me--dancing, leaping and dislocating their pelvises in the narrow aisles of Constitution Hall.

My judgment? In Natalie Merchant, the folk-rock band's singer and chief songwriter, every parent can rest easy, especially those parental fretters who lie awake past midnight wondering which rock musician is leading their kids into the wrong ABCs: abusing, boozing and cruising.

Merchant herself is usually asleep by midnight, from exhaustion. She and the band, plus a crew of 22, are currently traveling in a two-bus caravan in an eight-month tour that carries into December. Merchant has been on the road for eight years. Lately, sold-out concerts have been routine, as well as favorable reviews from music critics happy to report that here is one group able to mix strong melodies with stronger political convictions.

The Maniacs' popularity is surging this summer. Their Blind Man's Zoo, released two weeks ago, is seventh on Rolling Stone magazine's top 50 albums chart.

Merchant, 25, raised in rural upstate New York in a Catholic family and who studied at the local Jamestown community college, writes lyrics memorably linked with the ardor of conscience found in the songs of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Merchant's songs are cassettes for this morning's news.

Well before Exxon befouled Alaska, she wrote and sang the environmental song, Poison in the Well:

O, they tell us
there's poison in the well,
that someone's been a bit untidy,
and there's been a small spill.
Not a lot, no, just a drop....
All that it amounts to is a tear in a salted sea.

In Please Forgive Us, she addresses the victims of U.S. surrogate wars in Central America: "Please forgive us, we don't know what was done in our name. There'll be more trials like this in mercenary heydays. When they're so apt to wrap themselves up in the stripes and stars and find that they are able to call themselves heroes and to justify murder by their fighters for freedom. Please forgive us, we don't know what was done."

Cherry Tree is about a victim of illiteracy: "I live in silence, afraid to speak of my life in darkness because I cannot read." In Gun Shy, a younger brother returns from Army boot camp: "So now does your heart pitter-pat with a patriotic sound when you see the stripes of Old Glory waving.... I don't mean to spoil your homecoming, my baby brother Jude, and I don't mean to hurt you by saying this again, they're so good at making soldiers, but they're not as good at making men."

The morning after the Washington concert, I went with Merchant to the children's learning center at the Calvary Methodist Church. It was there, sitting in a circle with 47 mostly Hispanic and black 4- and 5-year-olds, that her singing--in a melodic alto--truly took off. She led the group in such children's songs as The Wonder Ball and The Great Ship Titanic.

If Merchant's evening work in concert halls is the dispensing of message songs, her daytime visits to social-service programs are ways of carrying the messages personally. Merchant differs from most touring musicians: rather than holing up in hotels in days of nullity, she sends out advance word that she is available to visit day care centers, schools, homes for the elderly, campus service organizations or vegetarian and animal-rights groups. In Jamestown, she volunteers with handicapped children and spends time at the Boys Club and Girls Club.

"Artists," she argues, "ought to have a responsibility to their audiences," and that means, in a fusing of professional and personal energy, leaving the hotels and halls to find them.

Because of that, no falsity or vacuity can be found in Merchant's songs. Her records are records of what she has learned by talking with the voiceless -- from people driven out of Central America or pushed out of school before picking up reading.

For myself, I learned much from Natalie Merchant -- about the craft of songwriting, about the need to look beyond the stereotype of rock stars as dope-crazed wastoids. Merchant, firm in ideals, has an endearing tone of honesty and modesty in her conversation.

I should probably let it go at that, that she is a good person. But the other night at Constitution Hall she stood before 4,000 kids as something more -- a good example.