I'm sure you know about Simon and Garfunkel but if you only have a peripheral familiarity with them, definitely check out their live albums. I'll just give you amazing folk albums and see where it goes from there.

1. Gary Higgins - Red Hash
2. Richard Dawson - Nothing Important
3. Joni Mitchell - Count and Spark
4. Kath Bloom and Loren Connors - Restless Faithful Desparate
5. The Microphones - The Glow Part 2
6. Comus - First Utterance
7. Current 93 - All the Pretty Little Horses
8. Tim Buckley - Goodbye and Hello
9. John Fahey - The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death
10. Sun City Girls - 330,003 Cross Dressers From Beyond the Rig Veda

I'll toss in Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and Elliott Smith's Either/Or.

Two good lists so far, with some familiar/ some new mentions.

If it's all English-language folk, my list goes like this:-

1. Ewan McColl and A.L. Lloyd - Blow Boys Blow
2. Andy Irvine and Paul Brady - Self-titled album
3. Woody Guthrie - Dust Bowl Ballads
4. Dando Shaft - An Evening With...
5. Neil Young - Live at Massey Hall
6. Various, led by Ashley Hutchins - Morris On
7. Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)
8. Simon and Garfunkle - Bookends
9. Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding
10. Steve Earl and the Del McCoury Band - The Mountain
11. Ry Cooder - Chicken Skin Music

Notes:
+ I dropped some favourites if the artist has already appeared on Neapolitan's or Frownland's list
+ Italics means the music is from the British Isles, if not, it's from North America
+ They are listed in order of folk purity, from #1 (very pure traditional folk) to #11 (counts as folk doesn't it?)

Oh hell, yes!

^ Yes, that is such a great album, and if it weren't for the presumed language restriction, "The Balfa Brothers Play Traditional Cajun Music" would be in my top ten too:-

Oh, and I second all of the above folk album recommendations, particularly Erik Darling, Gillian Welch (I think you'd like her a lot, bat), Ry Cooder, John Fahey, and Kath Bloom, Mississippi John Hurt and Leo Kottke.

Very nice addition of a cimbalom solo @ ca. 3 minutes

Great take on czech folk music.

^ Yep, that's a fabulous piece of folk music grindy, thanks!
I also liked Chiomara's Jammin' in the Redwoods. :thumb:

^ I used to have an album by Joseph Spence, but I never got into it, tbh. Thanks to Ry Cooder, I expected every Joseph Spence song to sound like this,



... so my JS solo album was a pretty disappointing purchase for me.
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I think Dance Hall Girls is a really nice song; kind of sad but with a decent pace all the same. I love The Duhks studio version, which really brings out it's melancholy best. That's not available YouTube, though. These guys do a pretty good version of the same song, but who they are I can't tell you:-