Various Artists: The Folk Years – Blowin' in the Wind

THERE WAS A TIME when the notion of the "folk singer-songwriter" was all but a contradiction in terms. "Folk" music was the ür-sound of the people – die volk, to use the German word. The coffeehouse beatniks and campus radicals of the Fifties folk revival venerated the elders of Delta blues and Appalachian ballads – weathered, "traditional" musics that defied the bland homogeneity of Eisenhower's nuclear USA.