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Taj Mahal playing bass and adding his vocal hoodoo. Written in support of the global movement to stop plastic pollution, and advocating against single-use plastic.

Alasdair Roberts, Emily Portman, Lucy Farrell and Rachel Newton are British folk group the Furrow Collective, dedicated to interpreting the traditional folk canon. All members also have parallel careers as solo artists.

Surette is one of New England’s premiere instrumentalists. A bourrée is ‘a very lively Old traditional French dance.’

Suzanne Thomas on vocal and clawhammer banjo. Recorded live at the Iron Horse Music Hall, Northampton, 1995.

Alice Stuart’s first album, produced by Chris Scrachwitz.

Monroe wrote this song about his fiddle-playing uncle, James Pendleton Vandiver, who was born in KY shortly after the Civil War. Monroe says he was "the fellow that I learned how to play from."

Says Jewell of this track, “I’ve been working on this song for several years”, Jewell explains. "It’s inspired by a feeling like I want to turn everything upside down, and I want everything to be completely different than it is.” Eilen’s been called ‘The Queen of the Minor Key.’

On Texas, ‘Crowell turns his emotional focus to the colorful Lone Star culture and the romance of regional music that formed his musical sensibility during his teen years in Houston, particularly the year 1965 (“My ears were brand new, and I was just transported by sound”), when the 15-year-old left home to join a band.’ Crowell says of Texas, ‘people consume music with real awareness there.’

Sonny Scott and, Walter Roland recorded this in NYC in 1933.

Béla Fleck on banjo.

Gaither Carlton – fiddle; Arnold Watson – banjo. Recorded live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1964.

Chris Carroll on vocals and mandolin, Adam Carroll on guitar and harmony vocals, with Dennis Ludiker on fiddle. Slaid Cleaves calls Carroll "the quintessential small-town songwriter," adding, "Travel outside the cities of this country and you'll recognize the barbecue-joint waitresses, the rice farmers, the karaoke singers, the black-flag pirates and the hi-fi lovers of this land--you'll meet them all in Adam's true-to-life songs."

That’s Jerry Douglas on dobro.

Self-produced and self-engineered this powerful and honest album at her home studio. NPR called it a “sublime distilling of Southern grit”.

Billed on the record as "The Guitar Wizard", Tampa Red cut "Black Hearted Blues" in late March 1930 in Chicago, Bill O'Bryant's piano supporting Tampa Red's guitar and vocal.

Bill Payne on piano and synthesizer, Jim Horn on recorders, and Brian Ahern on basses.

An American roots music, Americana group of folk musicians, based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Recorded in Nashville with producer Colin Linden, "Jigsaw Heart" is Americana soul shot through with Mississippi roots.

The album and its accompanying DVD were filmed, taped, and recorded live in December 1988 in the Hamilton, Ontario studios of CHCH-TV as part of the Canadian concert series In Session. Campbell on guitar and singing, and Webb accompanying him on piano.

5-string banjo player, singer-songwriter, poet, storyteller and painter. Adams went to Europe with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in 1957, and never came back. He became a folk hero in Britain and Europe in the 1960s, appearing in the Bob Dylan film ‘Don’t Look Back’. He had a big influence on Donovan, as you can probably hear. Mr. Rabbit is Br'er Rabbit, the hero of many African American folktales.

Album released 2 years after her death in 1987. The guitar tuning is open D, low to high its D-A-D-F#-A-D, often called the Vastopol tuning. That's a geographical reference to the Crimean War that was fought in the mid-19th century. The war was raging right around the time that the Victorian parlor style of guitar music was first becoming popular in America. the tuning called Vastopol comes from Sevastopol ... as in the Crimean port city of Sebastopol. The Crimean War was the first war to be reported by photograph and telegraph. One of the guys following the conflict, says Zaitchik, was an Ohio music teacher named Henry Worrall. He taught guitar at a woman’s college. And in 1884 toward the end of the conflict he wrote a song that he called "Sebastopol: Descriptive Fantasie".

Said Alan Lomax in 1960, ‘People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile… I resolved to prove them wrong." So, in 1959 and 1960, at the height of the Folk Revival, Lomax undertook the first-ever stereo field recording trip through the American South to document its still thriving vernacular musical culture. Bessie Jones teamed up with a group of other singers in 1963 to form The Georgia Sea Island Singers.

Ó Riada was an Irish composer and arranger of Irish traditional music. Through his incorporation of modern and traditional techniques he became the single most influential figure in the revival of Irish traditional music during the 1960s. Le Celtóirí Chualana was an Irish traditional group formed in 1960 by Ó Riada, and included many founding members of The Chieftains.

In creating music for a number of Woody Guthrie’s orphaned lyrics, Billy Bragg, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett stayed faithful to Guthrie's rowdy spirit.

Second cousins Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum live in rural Saskatchewan. Album produced by Jeff Tweedy.