The Best Folk Albums of the '60s

Columbia nearly dropped him after the debut stiffed; John Hammond's answer was this, cut before Dylan turned 22. Blowin' in the Wind opens it on three chords and a melody borrowed from the spiritual No More Auction Block, and within weeks Peter, Paul and Mary had made it the movement's anthem. The Suze Rotolo cover photo, arm in arm on Jones Street, is half the myth.

Cut in the weeks around the Newport plug-in, this is the electric border the list claims on purpose — folk's language at rock's voltage. Like a Rolling Stone runs six minutes because nobody could cut it down, and Al Kooper's organ part exists because he bluffed his way from the control room onto the session. Tom Wilson produced that track; Bob Johnston handled the rest.

Regrouping in a Hampshire farmhouse after the M1 crash that killed drummer Martin Lamble, Fairport rebuilt English folk-rock from the ballad tradition up. Matty Groves takes an old murder ballad and accelerates it until Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick are chasing each other through the outro. December 1969, so it lands here, not on the '70s list. No un-remastered copy exists on Spotify; the official 2002 remaster adds two bonus takes.

Joe Boyd produced the 1969 debut for Island, with Pentangle's Danny Thompson on double bass and Harry Robinson conducting the strings on River Man — five beats to the bar, cellos swelling against a guitar figure that never quite resolves. Almost nobody bought it at the time. The year rule puts it on this list rather than the '70s one, and it may be the best record here.

A 33-year-old Montreal poet with two novels behind him walked into Columbia's Studio E and argued with producer John Simon over every overdub. Suzanne had already been recorded by Judy Collins, but Cohen's own take — near-spoken baritone over nylon-string arpeggios, ornament kept at arm's length — is the version that built the cult. Claimable here on the year rule; his '70s records are not.

Bob Johnston produced the duo's third Columbia album in 1966, the one where folk singers turned studio perfectionists. Scarborough Fair/Canticle sets the ballad Paul Simon learned from Martin Carthy in London against a counter-melody lifted from his own anti-war song The Side of a Hill — two songs braided into one arrangement. Carthy went uncredited and stayed angry about it for decades.

Light Flight got picked up as the theme to the BBC drama Take Three Girls and dragged this 1969 Transatlantic LP into the UK top five — Danny Thompson and Terry Cox swinging through 5/8 and 7/8 under Jacqui McShee's voice like it's nothing. The Spotify copy tacks four bonus cuts, two of them 2001 re-recordings of Sally Go Round the Roses, onto the original nine tracks.

Engineer Bill Leader taped it on a borrowed reel-to-reel in his own flat and sold the tapes to Transatlantic for one hundred pounds. Needle of Death, a plainspoken heroin elegy, is the song Neil Young later admitted he leaned on for Ambulance Blues, and the guitar playing everywhere else rewired what a British acoustic player could attempt. Spotify carries Sanctuary's 2001 transfer with live extras appended.

Two Scottish multi-instrumentalists armed with sitar, gimbri and pennywhistle reached the UK top five in 1968 with this Elektra set, Joe Boyd producing. A Very Cellular Song sprawls thirteen minutes from music-hall piano to the Bahamian hymn Bid You Goodnight and holds together on pure nerve. Border case: this is where folk shades into psychedelia without a single electric instrument.

Elektra's house team — Paul Rothchild directing the sessions, Jac Holzman supervising — put Ochs's second album out in 1965 with nothing on it but voice and guitar. The title track, I Ain't Marching Anymore, walks through a century of American wars in a handful of verses and became a draft-resistance anthem within the year. Dylan wrote riddles; Ochs wrote the newspaper, and this is his sharpest edition.

Vanguard released it in 1965 with four Dylan covers, including a title song Dylan himself never put on a studio album — Farewell, Angelina survives mainly because Baez rescued it. Her vibrato had calmed by then, and she lets the surreal verses fall plainly: one guitar, no ornament. The interpreter's wing of the revival starts here, and the 2006 Vanguard edition, with three session outtakes appended, is the one linked.

Paul Simon produced the only album Frank ever made, in a London studio in 1965, with the singer hidden behind baffles because he couldn't play while anyone watched. Blues Run the Game rolls its bass figure under a melody so complete that Simon & Garfunkel, Bert Jansch and Nick Drake all covered it. Only the 2001 remaster exists on Spotify, and the title says so.

Capitol let Nick Venet record the Village's most reluctant star in 1966, and Neil barely promoted it before drifting back to Florida and his dolphin-research obsession. The Dolphins floats that cavernous baritone over tremolo guitar in open tuning, halfway between raga and lullaby. Everybody's Talkin' sat here quietly for three years until Nilsson's cover became the Midnight Cowboy hit.

Reprise issued it in May 1969 with the production credit split between Mitchell and Paul Rothchild, and it took the Grammy for Best Folk Performance. Chelsea Morning bounces on her open-tuned guitar like the light through the window it describes. By the year rule her '60s work is claimable here; the confessional '70s run belongs to a future singer-songwriter list.

Vanguard's 1964 debut carried two songs the decade never stopped covering: Cod'ine and Universal Soldier, the latter turned into a hit single by Donovan a year on. Universal Soldier indicts every link in the war-making chain over a circling guitar figure with no chorus and no relief. Spotify's listing drops the title's exclamation mark — same record underneath.

Joshua Rifkin's chamber arrangements wrap this 1967 Elektra set, where Collins introduced three Leonard Cohen songs and cut the version of Both Sides Now that reached number eight on the Hot 100 — Joni Mitchell's own recording was still two years off. The harpsichord setting sweetens it, but the phrasing is the interpreter's art the whole revival ran on. Her first self-written songs appear here too.