Anthology of American Folk Music

It's impossible to overstate the importance of this six-LP, 84-song collection: without it, there may not have been a 1950s collegiate folk revival, which means no Bob Dylan, which means a very different evolution of pop music. (The closest rock and roll equivalent would be Lenny Kaye's original two-LP version of the garage-rock primer Nuggets, another compilation that helped shape music history.) Compiled by experimental filmmaker Harry Smith out of his personal collection of 78s from the golden age of Depression-era folk and blues, it doesn't pretend to be anything more than one man's personal best-of playlist: generations of folkies usually just call it "The Harry Smith Anthology." Smith's oddball fingerprints are everywhere, from the occasionally off-the-wall song choices (no Robert Johnson, but a track by hokey vaudevillians Nelstone's Hawaiians) to his fascinatingly odd cut-up liner notes and obscure alchemy-related cover art. What keeps the set from utter incomprehensibility is Smith's canny sequencing, which divides the six discs into three categories: Ballads (story songs based on the British folk tradition), Social Music (dance tunes and songs of religious devotion) and Songs (original, often autobiographical songs capturing the flavor of their time and place). The 1997 CD version adds a comprehensive book that sheds much historical light; for further exploration, Greil Marcus' book-length essay The Old, Weird America takes the Anthology of American Folk Music's influence on Bob Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes as its starting point. But really, all you need is the music itself, which is timeless.