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Pete Seeger released 28 songs and stories about animals on two short LP records in 1955 to an enthusiastic audience. Ever since, they have been sung by generations of parents, grandparents, and children. The two original releases have been combined on this single CD creating an irresistible collecti...

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 reco...

The original Will the Circle Be Unbroken is undoubtedly a landmark country-music recording. A peace offering between rock-reared longhairs and rock-ribbed Nashville patriarchs (and one matriarch, Mother Maybelle Carter), it exposed generations of upstart pickers and singers to old-time country music...

Few musicians are as adept as Doc Watson is at making the remarkable seem routine. Song after song on this 23-track label retrospective demonstrates effortless flat-picking virtuosity. Listen to the fleet, precise picking on "Beaumont Rag," and you'll immediately recognize why the North Carolinian's...

Hallowed Ground...

Classic Bluegrass, Vol. 2...

Their setup was primitive enough--guitar, Autoharp, and vocals--but in the late '20s the trio of A.P. Delaney Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle would change (chart?) the course of country music forever. They did it with haunting harmonies, incredible guitar playing (thanks to May...

Bob Dylan stated, "Roscoe Holcomb has a certain untamed sense of control, which makes him one of the best." Eric Clapton called Holcomb "my favorite [country] musician." Holcomb's white-knuckle performances reflect a time before radio told musicians how to play, and these recordings make other music...

Originally issued as a single LP in 1960, Mountain Music of Kentucky was praised as "the greatest Kentucky record ever issed and one of the greatest records in the entire literature of American folk song" (San Francisco Chronicle 1960). This much expanded compilation features some of the outstanding...

While the Carter Family is certainly worthy of deeper exploration, this 25-song compilation provides a very useful overview of the work of one of country music's cornerstone artists. Beginning in the late 1920s, Sara, Maybelle, and A.P. Carter delivered to the rest of the world British and Irish...