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10 Folk Albums Rolling Stone Loved in the 1970s You Never Heard

We praised them 40 years ago — and you should listen to them today!

Tom Jans and Judee Sills

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty; GAB/Getty

The folk scene of the Sixties evolved into the singer-songwriter movement of the Seventies, but it didn’t go away. Between 1970 and 1979, Rolling Stone reviewed lots of folk albums: music steeped in old-fashioned, acoustic traditions, more than a few of them by Greenwich Village habitués with personal connections to Bob Dylan, but also spanning local scenes from Kentucky to Maine. These 10 albums earned quality time on our turntables, even if they’ve been largely forgotten in the years since.

[This list was originally published in July 2015]

Gordon Bok, ‘Peter and the Wind’

While the folk music epicenter in the Seventies was Greenwich Village, there were still plenty of regional musicians steeped in their local traditions. Gordon Bok, for example, was a deep-voiced fisherman from Maine who principally did songs about life on the New England shore. We hailed his third album as a rough-hewn masterpiece; in the four decades since then, Bok has kept sailing, carving wood, and releasing a nautically themed album every year or two.

What We Said Then: “There are some fine new songs here, two of them brilliant instrumentals (Bok is one of the most versatile acoustic guitarists imaginable), one in imitation of seagulls’ flight… ‘Peter Kagan and the Wind’ is his own adaptation of one of the better known myths about New England’s seal folk… It may never land him in the pop charts with a bullet, but I think he’d rather stay in Maine and mind his own business anyway.” — Janet Maslin, RS 112 (July 6th, 1972)