10 Folk Acts That Deserve More Respect

Bob Dylan this, Bob Dylan that. There’s been a lot of talk about Bob Dylan lately.

With the 2024 release — and phenomenal box office success — of A Complete Unknown starring Timothee Chalamet, the undeniably talented singer-songwriter has been at the front of a lot of people’s minds. Dylan is the subject of the film, but other characters, each integral to the American folk music scene of the early ’60s, surround him, including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Woody Gurthrie.

But those names are well-known. The fact of the matter is that “folk” (the genre is not always easy to define) artists like Dylan, Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Judy Collins, Donovan and other musical stars of their day were heavily influenced by a whole host of less famous people.

In the below list, we’re running down 10 Folk Acts That Deserved More Respect. Without these people – and frankly this is just the tip of the iceberg — its possible there may not have been a Dylan or a folk music movement at all.

1. The New Lost City Ramblers

Entire books have been written about the folk revival of the late ’50s and early ’60s, but to briefly summarize: in America in particular, a swath of young musicians began performing and recording songs that were written years before their own birth, often with a political bent to the lyrics, taking elements of country, blues and gospel and turning it into what would ultimately become the foundation of protest music. Put another way, as one of the movement’s chief influencers Woody Guthrie once said: “It’s a folk singer’s job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people.”

The New Lost City Ramblers strived for as authentic a sound as possible, recording old-time style music of the ’20s and ’30s with what was then quite new technology — they had one album literally titled Songs From the Depression. This might sound a bit boring to you now, but at the time it was a refreshing change of pace from “classic pop” type music — Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, etc.

 

2. Carolyn Hester

Anybody who was anybody in the folk revival world was in Greenwich Village in the first half of the ’60s. Apart from Cambridge, Massachusetts, it was arguably the epicenter of folk music. That’s how you wound up with recordings like the one below, with Carolyn Hester inviting a very young, barely heard of Bob Dylan to play harmonica on her album. (This session would eventually lead to Dylan getting signed himself to Columbia Records.) In those days, Hester, who hailed from Waco, Texas, was dubbed “The Texas Songbird,” and was a regular performer at venues like the Gaslight Cafe, Gerde’s Folk City and more.

 

3. Richard Farina and Mimi Baez

We’re grouping Richard Farina and Mimi Baez together here on account of, well, the fact that they were married to one another from 1963 until Farina’s death in a motorcycle accident in 1966. In that time they became an important duo in the folk scene, recording both traditional songs and ones penned by Farina himself. His original works were often political in nature — “Birmingham Sunday,” one of his best known songs, which was later recorded by his wife’s older sister Joan Baez, was about the murder of four children in a bombing orchestrated by white supremacists. But he was also what we might consider now a sort of connecting figure between the beats of the early ’60s and the hippies of the later half. “He was a serial fabulist,” David Hajdu, author of Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, explained to The Guardian in 2016. “He made up wild stories about his life. He created a persona, and in him you can see the mercurial identity we know so well in artists from David Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga.”

 

4. Phil Ochs

It’s interesting how sometimes the most influential people in a given musical movement are often the ones with such little commercial success. Phil Ochs was that type, a sharp-witted songwriter who wrote some 200 songs in the span of roughly a decade, many of them in opposition to war and in support of civil rights. Among the artists who covered his songs: Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Cher, John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot and more. Ochs was a perfect example of what the folk revival wound up creating: a herd of singer-songwriters who found inspiration in the vein of historical folk music and used it to write material relevant to the present day.

 

5. The Roches

One thing that is important to understand about folk music is that it has experienced multiple shifts over the course of decades. The Roches, a trio of sisters, arrived during the sort of second wave of folk artists, the ones that followed people like Dylan and Baez by making music more along the lines of folk pop. In fact, the Roches got their break when Paul Simon hired them to sing backing vocals on his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Their self-titled debut album was produced by Robert Fripp — yes, the one from King Crimson. Here was proof that acoustic guitar-based arrangements and rich harmonies had a place in the musical tapestry of the ’70s, even if disco was all the rage.

 

6. Judee Sill

Judee Sill appeared to have everything going for her. She was the first person signed to David Geffen’s own Asylum record label, which would also release albums by Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and more. Plus, Sill’s first two albums were acclaimed by critics and it was clear she possessed serious songwriting talent. “You could tell that she was taking everything in,” Graham Nash said of Sill in 2021. Sill toured with Crosby, Stills & Nash for a time as their opening act, and Nash himself produced Sill’s first single, “Jesus Was a Cross Maker.” “If she saw an old man on a street corner flashing by, you knew that it might end up as a line in one of her songs. Because she didn’t say much, you didn’t really know how bright she was.” For all intents and purposes, she was primed to be one of Los Angeles’ biggest musical stars, right up alongside fellow SoCal dwellers like Neil Young, Cass Elliot and others. And yet, major commercial success evaded the delicate-voiced Sill, who unfortunately never finished her third album, dying of a drug overdose in 1979.

 

7. Lead Belly

“If there was no Lead Belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan,” George Harrison purportedly once said. “No Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore no Lead Belly, no Beatles.” But one could also argue that no Lead Belly, no Bob Dylan either. Dylan was one of many who quite literally discovered various folk song standards through the singer/guitarist. “Transported me into a world I’d never known,” Dylan wrote in his 2016 Nobel Prize speech. “It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me.” Lead Belly’s music, like other Black musicians of his era, received the most commercial success via the white artists who covered it, and it wasn’t until after his death that he earned more recognition for his work. But the fact of the matter remains: without Lead Belly, a whole generation of folk singers, rock ‘n’ rollers and blues lovers may not have existed the same way — and a certain someone may not have won a Nobel Prize.

 

8. Happy Traum

We could come up with a whole separate list titled something along the lines of “Integral Greenwich Village Folk Musicians.” Happy Traum would most definitely be on it, a member of the New World Singers, the group that recorded the first version of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Traum was a consistent presence in both the studios of New York City and the local coffee houses, playing guitar with multiple different acts, including a duo with his brother Artie that Rolling Stone once said “defined the Northeast folk music style.” Traum embodied the kind of easy going, blues-adjacent style of finger picking that was then viewed as hip and informed, and could now be considered a building block for all acoustic guitar playing.

 

9. Jackson C. Frank

To be transparent: this writer has a special affinity for the late Jackson C. Frank since he also hails from Buffalo, New York. But he’s a bit different from the others on this list in that his eponymous debut album, which came out in 1965, was made in the U.K., where a similar folk revival was happening with artists like Donovan, Nick Drake and others. The album was produced by Paul Simon and was received well in England. Unfortunately, Frank’s mental health took a turn for the worse not long after and the remainder of his life was a difficult journey. His music, however, would ultimately be covered by the likes of John Mayer, Counting Crows, Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees and more.

 

10. David Blue

If you know the name David Blue you’ve probably seen clips from Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, or perhaps you’re a really dedicated Eagles fan. Blue is the writer behind “Outlaw Man,” which appeared on the Eagles’ 1973 album Desperado. Before that though, he was a stalwart of the Greenwich Village folk scene, rubbing shoulders with all the people who would wind up world famous while Blue remained a cult artist of sorts. He’s also the man responsible for introducing Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne early on in their careers. “He knew everybody and he was there at the beginning,” singer/actress Ronee Blakley told Rolling Stone in 2020, “but he didn’t make it to the fullness of his talent and didn’t achieve the degree of success he deserved. It’s a difficult thing to predict. I don’t understand it. I really don’t.”