Two days in Dublin, three in London and two names on everybody's lips: Monica Lewinsky and Harry Smith. The former is ... well, you know who she is; the latter is the visionary record collector responsible for assembling the recently re-released 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music." The former's face is on the cover of every news magazine; the latter's name comes up in every music magazine. You might say that the only thing Monica Lewinsky and the late Harry Smith have in common is that they both have soft spots for a particular American icon: the ambitious Southerner. Which may not sound like much, but those of us with similar soft spots know how many evenings can be passed, how many books can be read, how many letters can be written talking up the virtues and vices of these twang-talking American dreamers who are so charismatic they cast even the most cold-hearted Yankee under their spell. This figure is always changing faces. Sometimes he looks like President Clinton. Listening to the voices recorded in the 1920s and '30s on Smith's "Anthology," you might recognize him as Dock Boggs. Of course, the girls screamed the loudest when his name was Elvis Presley.

I'm not blaming Lewinsky for all the ribbing my American accent got me from Irish cab drivers last week. Because, like her, I once fell for the president. A president who is often compared to Elvis, a president Secret Service agents call Elvis, a president whose Little Elvis is the part of him I dread the most. Once the country gave up on Clinton (which was about six days into his presidency), he required much defense. Years and years as an Elvis fan was training enough. Anyone who knows all the words to "Jailhouse Rock" learned long before the '93 inaugural how to stand up to bad jokes about greasy food and racist slurs against non-Northern accents. And while all the smartass comics were looking at pictures of Lewinsky and bemoaning that the leader of the free world couldn't score a better class of tail, anyone who's seen the wedding photos of the day the King married his Queen could see a little Priscilla in Lewinsky's big black hair.

Still, I can't help rewriting a Beck lyric to evoke the dullest State of the Union Address of Clinton's presidency: "I'm a bureaucrat baby, so why don't you blow me?" What was that speech? Its concerns were so businesslike it may as well have been the Kansas-flat ramble Bob Dole would have delivered if he'd won the election last year. Where was our biblical charmer? Our Arkansas poet? Where the hell was Elvis? I'm as thrilled as the next girl the deficit's gone down. I realize that fact might mean real things to real people. But a Clinton speech isn't supposed to be a tax seminar. It's supposed to be a concert. I still have one of the songs from last year's address stuck in my head. He spoke of racial healing as if it were possible. He invoked Isaiah, asking us all to become something as weird and wonderful as "repairers of the breech." All I am this year is less worried about the fate of Social Security, which is comforting, not inspiring. This new no-nonsense was all musically reenforced during one of the president's Illinois stops the next day, where the soundtrack to an appearance was the unfortunate Presley motto "Taking Care of Business."

Like I said, I'm not angry at Lewinsky. I'm not even angry at Clinton -- I had his number sex-wise ages ago. And I'm certainly not self-hating enough to loathe the press. I'm angry at America, or whoever those Americans are who are answering opinion polls. You know, the polls that now tell us that the president's approval ratings have never been higher. Where were you approvers a few weeks ago when Clinton presided over the longest and most intelligent press conference of his term, the one in which he spoke eloquently of hopes and dreams while at the same time responding deftly to terrifically precise questions about the diplomatic relations between Turkey and Greece? Where were you when he addressed the nation with Old Testament outrage and New Testament sorrow after the Oklahoma City bombing? And where were you last fall, my fellow music fans, when he appeared on VH1 speaking with so much feeling for real American achievement, showing us his old Ray Charles albums and teenage home movies in which he jitterbugs to something new called rock 'n' roll? You like him now? You like him with his tail between his legs? You like him taking care of business?

I'm not saying I'm giving up on the man. Just like I'll hang in with Elvis even when the E-haters bring up "Spinout" and druggy toilet death, I'll let the dick-and-chick cracks roll off me. See, the fan of the ambitious Southerner and other grand thinkers knows about the flip side of large-scale dreaming: failure. And we don't just expect minor oopsie-daisies along the lines of "Old MacDonald" or "I didn't inhale." No. We know that eventually our hero will fuck up on a global scale and cause calamities that will be photographed and recorded and remembered. We're talking before-and-after pictures, Young Hot Elvis turning into Old Fat Elvis, Repairer of the Breech becoming Blow Job of the Month. The more they get, the more they lose. Those are America's rules.

Back to Britain: Because everyone was talking about Lewinsky, I talked about her, too. Because everyone I talked with was a musician, the conversations turned to Harry Smith. One of the chats was with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who was working on a record in Ireland. I had read in the great English music magazine Mojo where he said that Smith's "Anthology" -- a six-CD set featuring the above-named Boggs as well as dozens of even more obscure performers with names like the F. Ming Pep-Steppers doing "Indian War Whoop" or Chubby Parker offering "King Kong Kitchie" -- "creates an American world that I always hoped existed."

When I asked Tweedy to map out that world, he said, "America sounds like an experiment on those records. It sounds like some weird petri dish. There are no preconceived notions of what music is supposed to sound like. That's why early rock 'n' roll is folk music, or is so invigorating on a folk music level. It doesn't have anybody involved in it that had any idea what it was supposed to sound like. Howlin' Wolf didn't go into a recording studio and say, 'We need this amount of compression on my voice for me to sound like me.' They cut an acetate and they listened back to it and it wasn't them. It didn't sound like them. It sounded like something better."

Something better. Isn't that what public work or public office is supposed to be? A version of ourselves that's bigger, more daring, more impressive? You get that out of reading the story of Dock Boggs while listening to his records. The story of Boggs, as adapted into liner notes by Greil Marcus from his book "Invisible Republic" on the gorgeously produced new Boggs collection "Country Blues" (Revenant), is a parable of one man's America, lost and found. The records of Boggs -- 12 songs are heard here plus five alternate takes and four others by Boggs' Kentucky contemporaries -- can be heard as an encyclopedia of transgression.

"The American fantasy of public mastery," Marcus writes, "contains a fantasy of public suicide." It is very difficult this week to hear an intelligent, aspiring, poor white man from the American South singing that "Pretty women is a-troubling my mind" without feeling like you've bugged the White House. Boggs accompanies himself on the banjo, an instrument of African origin that can sound bright and bluegrass, though you'll forget that the second our hero rakes his boney hands across its strings. The song he's playing is "Country Blues," which is a title and a genre, not to mention a fact of life for an ex-coal miner like Boggs. And coal black is his voice. And coal black are the hearts of the men whose stories he doesn't tell so much as channel -- the murderer in "Pretty Polly," the inmate in "New Prisoner's Song," the drunk in "Sammie, Where Have You Been So Long?" These are the fables of fuck-ups, though the darkest line on this darkest of records is the one in "Old Rub Alcohol Blues" in which he says, "Have never worked for pleasure."

During the '20s, Boggs got to be a musician instead of a miner, making records and entertaining crowds. This freedom did not last. The Depression came. His wife thought his musicianing ungodly. Rediscovered in the '60s, he gave interviews to folkie Mike Seeger that Marcus cites at length. One telling anecdote recounts a book Boggs took to heart as a teenager, "The Standard Book of Etiquette." When asked why a coal miner would be practicing his manners, he replied, "I think a coal miner ought to have a little sense, and know how to meet the public, and speak very good English if he's to meet the king, or the president of the United States, he ought to know how to conduct himself, and how to act, if he's figuring on going into the White House."

Would that it were true. If Boggs were alive today, it's a seductive thought to imagine him hauling that old banjo into the White House to play for the man who lives there. But I wonder, would we see the prez as the singer or as the song? Would Boggs recognize the president as kin, as a man like himself who came from no place to become somebody? Or would he forsake his manners book and stare the politician in the eye, moaning all those tales of fools held captive to their evil choices? Luckily, Bill Clinton is a man with two faces: We don't even have to choose.