For What It's Worth

Lost Treasures and Neglected Classics: RICHIE UNTERBERGER celebrates 25 American Folk-Rock albums of the 1960s

I t took a good decade after rock’n’roll’s birth as a commercial phenomenon for rock and folk music to mate, though there had been awkward experiments at blending the two forms dating back to the late 1950s. Once the Byrds combined the best of the Beatles and Bob Dylan on their mid-1965 transatlantic chart-topper Mr. Tambourine Man, however, there was no stopping the folk-rock explosion.

We all know about the brilliantly innovative work that American folk-rockers like the Byrds, Bob Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Simon & Garfunkel, the Mamas & the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young would generate over the last half of the 1960s. Less of a force on the hit parade, but of equal musical magnificence and nearly as influential in the long run, were the records by more cultish bands like Love, and pioneers of the singer-songwriter movement such as Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.

Yet as with any major upheaval in popular music, folk-rock also spun out a wealth of fine albums that barely made the charts or were barely even sighted in record stores. Folk-rock paved the way for singers with unconventional voices, as well as ambitious lyrical explorations into both social and inner consciousness …

by Richie Unterberger
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