The Best Folk Albums of the '70s

Two nights at Sound Techniques with engineer John Wood and nobody else in the building: twenty-eight minutes, voice and guitar, one piano overdub on the whole record. Pink Moon, the title song, carries that overdub — a bright treble figure dropped onto a take that was already finished. Drake reportedly left the tapes at Island's front desk without a word, and the label pressed them as delivered.

Island booked John Martyn roughly a week at Sound Techniques in late 1972, and he spent it slurring his guitar through an Echoplex while Danny Thompson's double bass shadowed every phrase. Solid Air, the title track, was written for Nick Drake — vibraphone, electric piano and that smeared voice hanging over a two-chord sway. Folk walks right up to jazz here and strolls across the line.

Recorded over a few weeks in spring 1973, then held back by the oil-crisis vinyl shortage until Island could press it in April 1974. The Great Valerio closes the record: Linda level and cold above Richard's circling guitar figure, a tightrope parable with no net in sight. Nobody has made desolation sound this companionable before or since, which is the Thompson trick in full.

Joe Boyd produced the middle Drake album with strings, brass and a rhythm section from Fairport, betting arrangements would sell what solo guitar had not. John Cale came in to play on two songs, and Northern Sky is the one that matters — celeste, piano and organ under the plainest love song Drake ever wrote. The decade cut starts here: Five Leaves Left is 1969, the '60s list's property.

Arif Mardin produced the 1971 debut for Atlantic, flying a Chicago mailman to Memphis to cut his club set with the American Sound players. Sam Stone hangs its junkie-veteran chorus — the hole in daddy's arm — on the gentlest melody on the record, and the calm is what makes it land. Kris Kristofferson wrote the sleeve notes that talked the industry into paying attention.

Poppy Records released it in 1972, and it holds the first recording of Poncho & Lefty — as Spotify spells the track — eleven years before Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard rode the song to a country number one. Townes sings it close and dry, the strings kept politely behind him, and If I Needed You sits two tracks away. Storyteller folk out of Texas, whatever the pedal steel implies.

Sandy Denny's departure left Fairport a five-piece — Thompson, Swarbrick, Nicol, Pegg, Mattacks — and the all-male lineup cut the hardest-driving record of their run in 1970. Sloth stretches past nine minutes, guitar and fiddle trading lead lines like a slow argument. Edition note: the only official Spotify copy is Island's 2001 reissue with bonus tracks appended; the plain-titled upload is a 2021 grey-label pressing, so the reissue is linked.

Her first solo album after Fotheringay folded, co-produced with Richard Thompson and engineer John Wood for Island in 1971. Late November is the way in — shipwreck imagery over descending chords, Denny holding long notes flat until they bend. Spotify's Remastered and Deluxe versions are typed as compilations; the plain 1971 edition is linked here, and for once the plain one is also the right one.

Michael Lang of Woodstock fame signed Karen Dalton to his Just Sunshine label, and bassist Harvey Brooks produced this at Bearsville in 1971. Katie Cruel is the terrifying centre — banjo and fiddle circling while that cracked voice sings the traditional lines like accusations. Edition note: the in-print copy is Light in the Attic's reissue, which appends alternate mixes after the original ten songs.

Philips pressed her only album of the era in 1970: Joe Boyd producing songs written on a horse-drawn wagon journey toward the Hebrides, with Robin Williamson and Dave Swarbrick sitting in. Diamond Day runs barely two minutes — whispered voice, one guitar, a recorder line. It sold almost nothing, she disappeared for three decades, and the 2000s freak-folk crowd built a genre on the reissue — the copy linked, four bonus cuts appended, two of them 1966 demos.

RCA finally let Guy Clark cut his own versions in 1975, after Jerry Jeff Walker had already recorded L.A. Freeway. Desperados Waiting for a Train is the keeper — a boy and a dying wildcatter, sung level, Emmylou Harris among the harmony singers. Border case, flagged: Texas writing this plainspoken shades into country, and this is exactly where that line runs.

Chrysalis money bought Steeleye Span proper studio time in 1972, and the band answered with medieval repertoire on electric instruments and no drummer anywhere. Gaudete is the strange one: a sixteenth-century Latin carol sung a cappella in five parts, a UK top-twenty single when reissued in the winter of 1973-74. Maddy Prior's voice comes off the top of the choir like a struck bell.

An all-traditional set from 1970 on Transatlantic, with Jack Orion stretched across the whole second side — eighteen-plus minutes of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn trading the murder ballad over Danny Thompson's bass while Jacqui McShee keeps the telling plain. Buyers stayed away and the band's confidence never fully returned. Five songs, one of them side-long, all of them older than the record business.

Topic issued her first full LP in 1971 — ten songs, mostly unaccompanied, from a singer who had spent a decade refusing to record. Blackwater Side is the source text: the arrangement Bert Jansch learned directly from her and carried to the guitar world. She disliked her recorded voice and quit within two years. Only remastered editions exist on Spotify, so the 2019 remaster is linked.

Border case, flagged openly: by 1974 Gordon Lightfoot was a mainstream hitmaker, but the writing stayed folk to the bone. Sundown the single and Sundown the album both reached number one in the States — his only Billboard 200 topper — the title track threatening an unnamed rival over the most relaxed menace Reprise ever pressed. Carefree Highway sits on the same side.