The after-work gang gathered at a local watering hole, hoisted a pint and sang a spritely spoof in which Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon and Henry Clay Frick get publicly, comically, falling-down drunk.

		The NewLanders Where: Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Shadyside When: 6:30 p.m. today Tickets: $5, 724-837-1500

Well-lubricated sing-alongs were a nightly ritual 100 years ago, but this one occurred in February at The Map Room in Regent Square, where Pittsburgh folk group The NewLanders were recording part of an unusual new CD.

"Born of Fire: Songs of Steel and History" is one part of an ambitious, multidisciplinary exhibition now showing at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Its organizers hope to tell the human story of 150 years of Western Pennsylvania's industrialization through the impressions of artists represented in the museum's resident collection of period paintings, sketches and photos; a catalog documenting the collection; a documentary film; and a commissioned work of songs about the region performed by The NewLanders.

The full exhibit opened in June. The Westmoreland is sponsoring the band's CD release party, with a screening of the documentary film, tonight at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

NewLander guitarist Doug Wilkin arrived early at The Map Room to set up microphones. While singer Paula Purnell strummed an acoustic six-string and sang the century-old drinking anthem "Soho on Saturday Night," invited guests and surprised regulars were encouraged to join in on the chorus. The song, by an unknown writer, refers to the bars that once lined the north Monongahela shore and was intended as a satirical poke at Pennsylvania Blue Laws, which attempted to close the taverns at midnight on Saturdays.

During successive takes, the Map Room crowd got progressively rowdier as they sang along to the printed lyrics, but Purnell wasn't leading them from sheet music. And that's sort of the point of The NewLanders.

Purnell, Wilkin, guitarist Gerard Rohlf and fiddler Art Gazdik see themselves as contemporary folk artists, not as musical preservationists. Like their previous CD, 2003's "Where the Allegheny Flows," "Born of Fire" is a collection of mostly old songs written about Western Pennsylvania and performed in contemporary folk arrangements. After researching old scores and early recordings, The NewLanders interpret the stories through the musical prism of their own experiences. The result is the resurrection of colorful old songs about Pittsburgh's cultural history, songs that might have otherwise remained dormant.

"I think Western Pennsylvania has a really bad track record of honoring or valuing its indigenous music," says Purnell, a teacher at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, artist in residence at the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and rostered scholar with the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. "When we tell people we're doing the music of Western Pennsylvania, they say, 'Is there some?' "

Wilkin says despite the historical nature of the project, their contemporary spin on the songs has gotten a cold shoulder from some historians.

"They didn't like the idea of us taking the songs in a fresher direction," he says. "They wanted us to stay within some boundaries that we didn't recognize. I could see their point -- it meant a lot to them to look at [the songs] with a somewhat arbitrary definition of authenticity. [But] the purists, I think, are off the mark. Many of these songs were passed down verbally long before they were ever written down. Who knows how they sang them originally? And they were virtually lost for a long time, but we're still telling these stories today in our way."

One song, "I Lie in the American Land," was written by Andrew Kovaly, a Slovakian who immigrated to McKeesport in 1899. It tells the true story of a mill worker who sent for his wife and family in Eastern Europe but was killed in a mill accident before they arrived. Charged with the sad task of meeting the man's family at the railroad station to break the bad news, Kovaly was literally moved to song. A century later, The NewLanders keep the timeless story alive, giving it a bleak, haunting, contemporary vibe.

"Twenty-Inch Mill" was a proud work anthem passed for decades among rolling-mill workers before the lyrics were published in an 1894 union newsletter. Produced by Wilkin at his Wilkin Audio Productions in Regent Square, the song opens with industrial percussion and segues to wailing electric guitar.

"If you listened to the song and look at the exhibit of ["Born of Fire"] paintings, you could learn more in five minutes about life in a steel mill than you might from reading a text," says Wilkin. "Some of the images of those steel mills, I think, are better than perfect snapshots. They're more evocative. They really take you inside that smokin', stinkin' cauldron."

"It's the original artists' emotional response to what they were feeling," says Purnell. "Art is how you get that. We keep the artist's emotional experiences there while interpreting the songs to make them accessible to modern audiences. My whole entree into this has been education. I think these stories and the songs teach us about our history in a way that a book doesn't. Not in a dry, academic way, but getting those stories across to people in a way that's meaningful now."

Next week, The NewLanders meet with Jeffrey Zeiders, a social studies adviser for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, to talk about ways to share "Born of Fire" with teachers and students. The group was recently accepted by Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, a public-private partnership that's offering matching funds for presenters interested in taking The NewLanders on tour or booking their shows.