At first, it seems ludicrous to bemoan the plight of the singer-songwriter.

Virtually every recording artist is a songwriter these days, especially if his or her aim is the lucrative and pop-culturally superrelevant rock market. To sing someone else's songs is to be a phony. It suggests you don't mean what you sing.

Yet, the term singer-songwriter has a very specific meaning in rock history. It refers to those musicians,often rooted in folk traditions, who felt liberated enough by Bob Dylan's daring, revealing wordplay and his impact on youth to follow suit after he went electric.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they strove to give us some of the more meaningful, thoughtful and lyrically important - often confessional - music to come out of the rock revolution. And, while they often played music that was rock, they made sure their arrangements and volume didn't overpower their words.

Included among these artists are Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Carole King, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Phil Ochs, Loudon Wainwright III, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Fred Neil, Eric Andersen, Don McLean and Tom Paxton.

There's a lot of talent there. And a lot of rock's more memorable songs - "Both Sides Now," "River," "Fire and Rain," "Everybody's Talkin,"' "It's Too Late," "Eli's Comin,"' "Is It Really Love at All," "American Pie," "Bird on the Wire" and plenty others.

Further, many of those artists still are making good music. And they still serve as role models for younger singer-songwriters, such as Shawn Colvin.

But as television documentaries, new books and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rush to document the music's development, singer-songwriters aren't faring well. Among those whose job it is to evaluate the importance of the movements that constitute rock history, singer-songwriters are battling bubble-gum rock and disco for the bottom. Worse, they are considered folkies, irrelevant to rock's evolution.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame didn't select Mitchell this year, even though she was eligible and has had at least as much impact on the music as Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, both of whom are in the Hall of Fame.

And a classic-rock station like Denver's KRFX-FM, devoted to the music of the very era when singer-songwriters prospered, avoids James Taylor, Carly Simon and others. "People who listen to classic-rock want to rock. They don't want too much folk," says Jack Evans, the station's operations manager.

PBS' influential "Rock & Roll" series, which aired last fall, neglected the whole singer-songwriter movement, concentrating on such other trends of the same period as punk, funk and the glam-rock of David Bowie. Carole King was interviewed for the series but not for her "Tapestry," one of rock's absolutely inescapable albums. Rather, she talked about her time crafting early 1960s teen-pop for acts like the Shirelles.

Truth is getting distorted here. Proper attention is not being paid the singer-songwriters. They are being written out of rock history, castigated as gentle, touchy-feely wimps who slowed the process by which alternative music conquered the world. Theirs was not the road to Nirvana.

"Maybe it's not loud enough," ponders Wainwright, who has been recording and performing since 1971. Much of his music has been acoustic, although he did have one of rock's more eccentric hits in 1973 with "Dead Skunk."

"Young folks like loud music," he continues. "If you look at MTV, it's loud and brash with quick cuts. Obviously that has a certain appeal for young people who are buying the records. Young people like it young and fast and hard." And, he believes, those who evaluate rock's past are influenced by today's MTV-influenced trends.

Dylan reputation unhurt

Curiously, the reputation of the guy who started it all, Dylan, hasn't suffered. But a funny thing has happened to it: He's no longer championed as the guy who brought folk's lyrical honesty and lack of artifice into rock. Instead, he's heralded as the the guy whose "I'll-do-it-my-way" attitude and loud but stripped-down rock inspired punk and grunge.

Dylan is acclaimed for plugging in at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, angering those old folk fans who hated rock. Yet, the truth is that he inspired folk performers to go electric and influence youth culture.

Ironically enough, most of Dylan's exciting new work has been acoustic - "MTV Unplugged" especially. He seems most comfortable with his heritage as a troubadour. But then Dylan is larger than life. His contribution to pop culture has been so pervasive that he can survive any interpretation.

But what about Taylor? How many other songs stand out from their time - the early 1970s - as "Fire and Rain" does? And the lyrics are spare and poignant, about loss without being sentimental or trite. That it was a Top-5 rock hit is especially impressive. Taylor wrote enough other fine songs - "Knocking 'Round the Zoo," "Something in the Way She Moves," "Country Road" - to merit more attention than he's getting today.

And if songs were paintings, Mitchell has written enough good ones to have a major museum retrospective.

The singer-songwriters of this crucial era did have their problems, for sure. The Three Dog Night factor didn't help. That vocal group, whose good ear for material was obscured by its annoyingly cute image, covered material by Newman ("Mama Told Me Not to Come"), John Hiatt ("Sure as I'm Sittin' Here"), Nillson ("One"), Nyro ("Eli's Coming") and Hoyt Axton ("Joy to the World"). In the long run, that has left a bad taste.

Too, there were some bad singer-songwriters. Songs like John Denver's "Sunshine on My Shoulder" and Dan Hill's "Sometimes When We Touch" are sugary enough to eat as a dessert. Some of the promising writers were done in by their pretensions - Cat Stevens' "Foreigner" and "Buddha & the Chocolate Box" are confusing to listen to today.

And even the best ran out of inspiration eventually. They went through long periods where they struggled with flawed material. Some eventually surmounted it; some never have. But so what? Doesn't that happen to all artists? How important was their best material and what was its cultural impact?

The standard line among historians and critics is that rock's importance is connected to its reputation for rebelliousness. The music is all about fighting the status quo, and, at first, wild men like Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard shocked parents. But at a certain point in the late 1960s, rock had won. Older America envied the youth revolution and daydreamed about watching the Yardbirds in swinging London or dancing in mind-expanded ecstasy with the hippies of San Francisco.

Rebellion against itself

It is at this point that those eager to keep alive the "rebellion" theory have become revisionists. Beginning with the late 1960s, they have chosen to deign as most important the rock that was in rebellion against rock itself. The rock that was avant-garde by the standards of its time.

That includes music little heard in its time. In particular, it includes those artists who tried to mix noisy, buzzy aural experiments with often-arty lyrics - the early Velvet Underground, MC5, Captain Beefheart, the Stooges, the New York Dolls.

Their argument is that compared with MC5's cry to "Kick Out the Jams, Motherf... ," the well-written and carefully delivered lyrics of Taylor's "Fire and Rain" were timid. Taylor played for the high school English class, while the rebels played for the wild streets of the late 1960s. Taylor was polite. And for the revisionists, that's a far dirtier word in the rock lexicon than motherf....

As the late Lester Bangs, considered the most influential of all rock critics, once put it, "James Taylor Marked For Death."

As these critics and historians elect Hall of Fame members and work on television documentaries, their opinions affect the contemporary marketplace. The Velvet Underground, a band unfairly dismissed in its time because radio stations were suspicious of Andy Warhol's involvement, was the subject of a five-CD boxed set last year. And the group was inducted into the Hall of Fame this year.

Meanwhile, Detroit's 1960s-era rock scene, which hardly mattered commercially at the time, has become the subject of books, magazine articles and extensive treatment on PBS' "Rock & Roll." Its music is

hailed as a precursor to punk and alternative. The Stooges' lead singer, Iggy Pop, is far more influential among today's youth than he was then.

That's not to quarrel with the raw, ecstatic energy of the Detroit scene. Its proponents believed rock should be as musically daring as the free jazz of Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and late-period John Coltrane. If that meant flirting with chaos, so be it.

Yet, while jazz historians certainly consider the free-jazz movement of critical importance, they don't treat it as jazz's only meaningful recent development. They also treat bop, or Miles Davis' collaborations with arranger/conductor Gil Evans, as valuable.

Why should their rock counterparts be so myopic? Further, is everyone so sure that today's big alternative acts, such as Better Than Ezra, Stone Temple Pilots, Red Hot Chili Peppers or even Pearl Jam, are making music worth remembering in 10 or 20 years?

Maybe today's best popular music is coming from those who sound something like the acoustic-based singer-songwriters of yore. Like Dar Williams, perhaps, who believes she is carrying on a tradition that once was as commercially and creatively potent as rock got. And yet by today's standards, she's marginalized as a folk singer.

"I was asked to write a song that would be like a bubble-gum rock song of 1964," she says. (She's touring with Joan Baez.) "I listened to an oldies station and realized all the songs were about two minutes long, very repetitive, and dipped into a pool of very standardized cliches. That's when I realized just how much the singer-songwriters changed rock.

"I can see why it's hard for some to call something "rock' if it doesn't have a wailing guitar," she says. "But all lyrics were changed by the singer-songwriters. They poured their souls into it in a little more quiet way. What a key part of rock 'n' roll it was."

In the current issue of Mojo, the British music magazine, Chris Hillman, a founding member of the Byrds, recounts visiting David Crosby in the hospital as the latter was awaiting his liver transplant.

"He was out of it, looked close to death, and he leaned over and whispered, "If you're a middle-aged white singer-songwriter, it's over."' (Actually, the few black ones, Tracy Chapman and Joan Armatrading, especially, face the same problems.)

Still, things aren't hopeless. Just last week, Reprise Records, Mitchell's label, sent out a press release that she had won the prestigious 1996 Polar Music Prize for "significant achievement in music."

Prestigious in Sweden, that is. It's given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. But then, the Swedes always have been progressive.

SOME ALBUMS: LOOKING BACK

What were some of the most representative singer-songwriter albums of the late 1960s and early 1970s? Here's a selection:

*Randy Newman: "12 Songs," "Sail Away" and "Good Old Boys."
*Joni Mitchell: "Clouds," "Ladies of the Canyon," "Blue" and "Court and Spark."
*James Taylor: "James Taylor" and "Sweet Baby James."
*Carole King: "Tapestry."
*Laura Nyro: "The First Songs," "Eli And the Thirteenth Confession," "New York Tendaberry."
*Tom Waits: "Closing Time," "Small Change," "The Heart of Saturday Night."
*Jackson Browne: "Late for the Sky."
*John Prine: "John Prine."

And here are a few new discs that carry on the tradition:
*Loudon Wainwright III: "Grown Man."
*Dar Williams: "Mortal City."
*Jackie Leven: "Forbidden Songs of the Dying West."
*John Hiatt: "Walk On."
*Joni Mitchell: "Turbulent Indigo."
*Jewel: "Pieces of You."