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Six of the eight volumes of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd singing the Child ballads a cappella. (The entire eight-record set contains 72 of the 305 ballads, my six contain 54 of those 72.) Anybody who’s listened to ANY of Ye Olde Rocke & Rolles bandes (Fairport, Steeleye, Pentangle, et al.) will recognize Child as the source for a lot of their material, and here you get it without any instrumental intervention, but with a couple of FIERCE accents—MacColl’s Erse and Lloyd’s Welsh. The entire collection was curated by Kenneth Goldstein, who produced informative lyric booklets to go with the albums (thankfully present in my copies; there’s dialect words in there that even I’m not accustomed to!).
Paul Clayton was one of the early casualties of the folk movement (it was commonly said he couldn’t cope with being queer in the early Sixties, and killed himself over it in ’67), but he was very highly thought of by other important folk figures; Dylan himself admired Clayton greatly. This collection finds Clayton working up traditional sea shanties for Folkways’ Moe Asch with a bunch of other Washington Square folkies, including Dave Van Ronk and Bob Brill.
Ry Cooder’s debut album. He wasn’t yet as good as he was gonna get (see 1973’s Paradise and Lunch), but pretty formidable already.
I bought this one for L, who has a taste for 1970s prog, and Tarkus is nothing if not prog.
This one is a real oddity, but very satisfying. Slim Richey, then of Fort Worth but now of Austin, gathered up a bunch of hard-core young bluegrass pickers and told them “make some jazz,” so they did. Their sound is a weird Newgrassy combination of Jethro Burns, Earl Scruggs, and Stéphane Grappelli—but it works. The recording is notable for containing some of the earliest recordings of Alan Munde and Ricky Skaggs.
