Bluegrass and Traditional Music Resource Guide: Audio-Visual Resources

This impressive--and frankly, fun--musical document is still sending out shock waves almost 50 years after its original 1952 vinyl release. The Smithsonian's six-CD reissue is painstakingly researched, annotated, and packaged (even boasting an enhanced disc for the techno-capable). Unlike field recorders, eccentric filmmaker/collector/musicologist Harry Smith assembled the Anthology from commercially released (though obscure) 78 rpm discs issued between 1927 and 1935. Its broad scope--from country blues to Cajun social music to Appalachian murder ballads--was monumentally influential, setting musicians like Bob Dylan down the path to folk fandom. The White House started its own national music library with the Anthology; anyone with more than a passing interest in American roots music should do the same. --Michael Ruby

A 1961 collection of traditional ballads and more recent story-songs such as a pair of Woody Guthrie classics, Story Songs is a fine traditional folk-style album. Although story-songs are often thought of as children's music - and there are some safe-for-the-kiddies songs here, most notably "The Foolish Frog," a story his musicologist father Charles Seeger had told his own children - this selection of tunes also includes a fair amount of material for more grownup tastes, most notably Guthrie's gangster ballad "Pretty Boy Floyd" and the snarky "Aimee McPherson," about the disgraced evangelist. Overall, Story Songs is a typically fine and well-chosen selection of songs given Pete Seeger's usual treatment

1983 pressing LP Lily May is accompanied on some tracks by Mike Seeger and Vivian Williams on Guitar along with Phil Williams on Bass.

Tradition label founder and ethnomusicologist Diane Hamilton made a field recording trip to Virginia and North Carolina in the summer of 1956, and her findings are gathered here. Featured musicians include Etta Baker (one of Taj Mahal’s earliest musical mentors), Richard Chase, Hobart Smith, and Boone Reid. An album of truly great music, it inspired the Library of Congress to make subsequent recordings of many of these artists.

Jean Ritchie celebrated her 50th year as a performer of her beloved Appalachian songs in 1995, and Mountain Born, which features Ritchie with her two sons, Peter and Jonathan Pickow, was sort of a commemorative release to mark the occasion. A charming and low-key affair, Mountain Born has the usual traditional pieces drawn from the Ritchie family songbook, but it also has a higher than normal number of original compositions, including Ritchie's moving tribute to her mother, "Abigail," and the title track, "Mountain Born," a sort of autobiographical summing up of Ritchie's life which was written for the stage play Hillbilly Women.

Music of Coal delves deeply into Virginia history, addressing various aspects of mining and culture. This two disc set features Merle Travis, Hazel Dickens, Doc Boggs, The Carter Family, Ralph Stanley & Dwight Yoakam, Darrell Scott, Natalie Merchant and a few dozen others. Packaged in a richly detailed 69 page book w/ liner notes and striking historical photographs.