Folk Best Sellers

This recording, first released by Folkways founder Moses Asch in 1976 to coincide with the celebration of America’s Bicentennial, was originally recorded by Asch in the 1940s. The collection captures Woody Guthrie at his artistic best with gritty songs about the struggles of the American worker (“Waiting at the Gate,” “The Dying Miner”), unions (“Ludlow Massacre,” “1913 Massacre”), and an ode to a bad man (“Pretty Boy Floyd”). Blues harmonicist Sonny Terry sits in with Guthrie on “Lost John,” and fellow traveling companion and folksinger Cisco Houston contributes his voice, guitar, and a song (“Get Along Little Doggie”).

The Milk Carton Kids’ fifth album , All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do arrives from ANTI- Records on June 29. The new project marks the first time that acoustic duo Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale have brought a band into studio with them. “We wanted to do something new,” Pattengale says. “We had been going around the country yet another time to do the duo show, going to the places we’d been before. There arose some sort of need for change.” “Musically we knew we were going to make the record with a big- ger sonic palette,” says Ryan. “It was liberating to know we didn’t have to be able to carry every song with just our two guitars.” “Sometimes in singing, we’ll switch parts for a beat or a bar or a note,” Ryan says. “And things start to obscure what is the melody and what is the supporting part.” A third presence rises out of their combined voices. “There are only so many things you can do alone that al- low you to transcend your sense of self for even a short period,” Pattengale says. “I’m the lucky recipient of a life in which for hundreds of times, day after day, I get to spend an hour that is like speaking a language only two people know and doing it in a space with others who want to hear it.”

Magic Ship-a reflection on the joys, follies, and oddities of existence-is the band's second album. The songs on Magic Ship distill eight years of experience since their 2010 debut album, Made the Harbor, of sights seen, pleasures had, feelings hurt, forgiveness extended. "Mountain Man share that rare, innate gift of almost supernatural harmonizing," says NPR. "Hauntingly beautiful."

Recorded in 1958 and released on the Folkways label in 1959, this album introduced American listeners to Joseph Spence’s unique guitar and vocal styles. These field recordings by musicologist Sam Charters capture Spence in a relaxed, expansive mood—only one of the six selections in the set is under five minutes in length. Spence’s guitar style was due in part to the D tuning of his bass string, which produced a lower bass sound. Whereas many critics have called Spence’s vocal style unorthodox, they have found his guitar playing spontaneous and iconic. Some music critics have gone so far as to refer to him as the “Thelonious Monk of folk guitar.”

Mardi Gras Music at it's best. Features Professor Longhair, Earl King, and the Wild Magnolias.

This is a Vinyl 2-LP Set and feautures the Ultimate New Orleans experience. All the classics from New Orleans best Brass bands.

Happy Woman Blues - Lucinda Williams, whose musical style defies easy categorization, recorded her first album of original songs in 1980, supported by a six-member band. Her songs are a mix of traditional and alternative country, folk, and blues that reflect her Louisiana roots. The Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau gave Happy Woman Blues an "A-" and described Williams as a "guileless throwback to the days of the acoustic blues mamas" who "means what she says and says what she means." The vinyl reissue of Happy Woman Blues, which includes a liner notes booklet with the song lyrics, is part of the Smithsonian Folkways Vinyl Reissue Series, revisiting some of the most iconic and influential albums in our collection.

Limited 150 gram vinyl LP pressing. Good Old Boys is the fifth album by Randy Newman, released in September 1974 on Reprise Records. It was Newman's first album to obtain major commercial success. Initially envisioned as a concept album about a character named Johnny Cutler, an everyman of the Deep South. The kernel of this concept survived into the released album, although as Newman's take on viewpoints from the inhabitants of the Deep South in general, rather than from a single individual character. As on his previous release, Newman addressed generally taboo topics such as slavery and racism, most stringently on the opening song "Rednecks," a simultaneous satire on institutional racism in the Deep South and the hypocrisy of the northern states in response. Newman also incorporates actual historical events into the album, remarking upon the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on "Louisiana 1927" and a plea to Richard Nixon to alleviate poverty as a result of the recession of the mid-1970s on "Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)".

With their powerful harmonies and imaginative songwriting in full force, Girlpool are making new creative leaps with their new album, What Chaos Is Imaginary. Combining elements of shoegaze, folk, and 80’s postpunk with their own melodic gifts, these two great songwriters come up with a modern classic full of great tunes and sonic surprises. Impressive growth for this already celebrated band.

"Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you. Let it show you how the future can look, for nothing in this world has not come around before. These songs are based on slave narratives from the 1800s, African American experiences of the last century, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and headlines from streets of Ferguson and Baltimore today. Voices demanding to be heard, to impart the hard-earned wisdom of a tangled, difficult, complicated history; we just try to open the door and let them through." —Rhiannon Giddens

Freedom Highway, Grammy Award–winner and 2017 Grammy nominee Rhiannon Giddens' follow-up to her highly praised debut album Tomorrow Is My Turn, will be released by Nonesuch Records on February 24, 2017. The record includes nine original songs Giddens wrote or co-wrote while she and her band toured after Tomorrow Is My Turn's 2015 release, along with a traditional song and two civil rights-era songs, "Birmingham Sunday" and Staple Singers' well-known "Freedom Highway," from which the album takes its name. Giddens and the band will tour the U.S. in the spring; details will be announced shortly.

Vinyl LP pressing. Elizabeth Cotten's 1958 debut album on Folkways is best known for containing the earliest recording of her classic "Freight Train." The breadth of her repertoire and her endearing style have captivated generations of guitarists and fans of traditional American music. Cotten's self-taught, upside-down, left-handed playing style on the guitar and banjo made her a true original. Many of her deeply personal compositions, such as the immortal "Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie," are also included here. "[A] classic that belongs in every collection..." (Blues Review Quarterly), this reissue is part of Smithsonian Folkways Vinyl Reissue Series and features Mike Seeger's updated notes with comments on Cotten's life, musical style, and song lyrics.

Dave Van Ronk was a mentor to Bob Dylan and immortalized in the Coen Bros film "Inside Llewyn Davis". This 1967 live recording was released as a CD in 1997 and comes to record stores for the first time on vinyl for Record Store Day 2018, with a bonus remix of "Statesboro Blues".

Limited 150gm vinyl LP pressing. Pieces of the Sky is the second studio album by American country music artist Emmylou Harris, released in February 1975 through Reprise. Although she had released the obscure folk-styled Gliding Bird five years earlier, Pieces of the Sky became the album that launched Harris' career and is widely considered to be her début. In those intervening years she had forged a musical relationship with Gram Parsons that would alter the musical direction that her career would take. The album includes Harris' first high-charting Billboard country hit, the #4 "If I Could Only Win Your Love", and the relatively low-charting #73 "Too Far Gone" (originally a 1967 hit for Tammy Wynette). The overall song selection was varied and showed early on how eclectic Harris' musical tastes were. In addition to her own "Boulder to Birmingham" (written for former singing partner Parsons, who had died the previous year), she included the Merle Haggard classic "The Bottle Let Me Down", the Beatles' "For No One", and Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors". (Parton, in turn, covered "Boulder to Birmingham" on her 1976 album All I Can Do.) On Shel Silverstein's "Queen Of The Silver Dollar", her friend and occasional collaborator Linda Ronstadt sings harmony. The album rose as far as the #7 spot in the Billboard country albums chart.

Vinyl LP pressing. In 2011, an eponymous, self-recorded EP led to touring, and before long The Lumineers started attracting devout fans. They're drawn by songs like "Ho Hey" and "Stubborn Love," Americana-inflected barn burners in the vein of the Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons. The roots revival of the last few yeas has primed listeners for a new generation of rustic, heart-on-the-sleeve music. The Lumineers walk that line with an unerring gift for timeless melodies and soul-stirring lyrics.

Vinyl LP pressing including digital download. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the second studio album by legendary singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. Whereas his self-titled debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, Freewheelin' represented the beginning of Dylan's writing contemporary words to traditional melodies. Eleven of the thirteen songs on the album are Dylan's original compositions. The album opens with "Blowin' in the Wind", which became an anthem of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary soon after the release of Freewheelin'. The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as among Dylan's best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".

The highly-anticipated album, The Tree of Forgiveness, is Prine's first collection of new material since 2005's Grammy-winning Fair and Square. Rather than going out on a limb, Prine cultivated the themes that have brought international acclaim since the 1970s. For example, he can take a topic like loneliness and make it funny or heartbreaking.

Prine teamed with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb to record in Nashville's historic Studio A, enlisting friends like Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, and Amanda Shires to sing along. The songs are new, although some had waited to be finished for decades, like a co-write with Phil Spectro called 'God Only Knows'; Another incomplete song, 'I Have Met My Love Today' now celebrates the unexpected spark that leads to lifelong romance -- with a dash of youthful innocence. The musical arrangements may be simpler than on past efforts, yet his unique ability to distill complex emotions into everyday language remains fully intact.

Leonard Cohen - Greatest Hits album by Leonard Cohen, originally released in 1975. In some countries from Europe, it was released under the title Greatest Hits. This alternative title was used for the original vinyl release and for CD reissues from the 1980s onwards. The front cover photograph was taken in 1968 in a Milan hotel room, according to Cohen's liner notes. Alternative rock band Ween based the album cover for their 1991 album, The Pod, after this photograph.

Vinyl LP pressing including digital download. Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits is the first compilation album by Bob Dylan, released in March 1967 on Columbia Records. It contains every Top 40 single Dylan enjoyed through 1967. It peaked at #10 on the pop album chart in the United States, and went to #3 on the album chart in the United Kingdom. Greatest Hits serves as Dylan's de facto singles collection for the 1960s. With the exception of "The Times They Are a-Changin'," "It Ain't Me Babe," and "Mr. Tambourine Man," all tracks on this album were released as 45 RPM singles in the United States during that decade. It is worth noting that in 1963 "Blowin' in the Wind" became a #2 hit single for Peter, Paul and Mary, and that in 1965 "Times" made it to #9 as a single release in the United Kingdom. That same year of 1965 a truncated rock and roll version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" had been a number one hit for The Byrds in the summer, and the Turtles took a folk-rock version of "It Ain't Me Babe" to #8. The remaining six tracks all made the Billboard Top 40 in 1965 and 1966.

After two years of relentless touring, Colter Wall wanted to make an album about home. Drawing on the stories of Saskatchewan, Canada, the young songwriter's corner of the world takes shape throughout his second full-length album, Songs of the Plains. Produced by Dave Cobb in Nashville's Studio A, the project combines striking original folk songs, well-chosen outside cuts, and a couple of traditional songs that reflect his roots growing up in the small city of Swift Current.

Reissue of the second studio album by the Pogues using 2004 remastered audio.

Vinyl LP pressing. This intimate collection of Townes Van Zandt live recordings from 1993 is being pressed on double vinyl for the first time. "... The 17-song set finds Van Zandt in fine form - upbeat, gracious, apparently sober - and in good company, with fiddler Owen Cody and guitarist Danny Rowland adding a dimension of musical enhancement that never overwhelms the nuances of the material," wrote No Depression. "As anyone who ever saw Van Zandt fall off a stool recognizes, there was no such thing as a typical Townes performance, but when he was good, no one working in the Texas troubadour tradition has ever been better... Listeners only familiar with this album's higher-profile material in more popular renditions by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard ("Pancho & Lefty'), Don Williams and Emmylou Harris ("If I Needed You') or Nanci Griffith and Arlo Guthrie ("Tecumseh Valley") may have heard the tunes, heard the words, but they haven't really heard the songs until they've heard Townes."

Ty Segall goes all the way, flipping the Freedom coin to find passion, laughter and savagery on both sides. A head-spinning compendium of stompers, weepers, ballads, screamers, bangers and funker-uppers, all marking a different impasse, like a flag whirling into a knot, exploding and burning on contact, in the name of life and loathing and the pursuit of what you love.

HQ vinyl reissue of original 1969 compilation featuring several non-album singles, all the hits!

Various Positions is the seventh studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in December 1984 (and February 1985). It marked not only his turn to the modern sound and use of synthesizers (particularly on the opening track), but also, after the harmonies and backing vocals from Jennifer Warnes on the previous Recent Songs (1979), an even greater contribution from Warnes, who is credited equally to Cohen as vocalist on all of the tracks. - The album was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983 with Leanne Ungar engineering. A small core of musicians from a group called Slow Train backed Cohen on the album. The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and "Hallelujah".

Bob Dylan - Love And Theft - LP Vinyl Album

Import LP pressing of this iconic album. Universal. 2013.

The long awaited first pressing of Gillian Welchs The Harrow & The Harvest was mastered direct from the original tapes through custom Ortofon amplifiers to a Neumann VMS-80 cutting system and plated and pressed on standard-weight audiophile-quality vinyl at Quality Record Pressings. Grammy-nominated for Best Engineered Album (Non Classical) and Best Folk Album, this deluxe package includes new full color cover art by John Dyer Baizley and full lyric insert.

Reissue with original artwork designs. Produced by Elvis Costello with 2004 re-mastered audio