Last week I was invited to give a guest lecture for a music class at Carleton College on the American folk revival.

Personally, I’m much more interested in English and European folk music, and much less so in singer/songwriters. As a teenager, hearing this music from “over the water” changed my life. So I built my lecture around Shirley Collins and Davey Graham. These two worked together on only one project, the groundbreaking 1964 concert and album Folk Roots New Routes.

This excerpt from the BBC Folk Brittania documentary is a great introduction to these two musicians, and both are interviewed about their music and each other:

Other threads that I wove into my story included the singing traditions of the Copper Family (hereditary) and The Watersons (revival), 1970s bands such as Pentangle and Fairport Convention, and current groups Bellowhead, The Unthanks, and Spiro. Barely scratching the surface…