Philadelphia Folk Festival - 40th Anniversary

4-CD box set is an amazing collection of over four hours of music never before released on CD. The fourth CD in this set is a special enhanced CD with nine audio tracks & six different videos from the grounds of the festival. The artist list is a who's who of folk music, past, present & future: Fairport Convention, Bonnie Raitt, Pete Seeger, John Prine, Taj Mahal, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Steve Goodman, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Mississippi John Hurt, Christine Lavin, Janis Ian, Nanci Griffith, Loudon Wainright III, Ricky Skaggs & many others. Naturally, this remarkable four-disc set celebrates 40 years of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, but it also serves as a compelling and diverse history of modern folk music itself. The performances included here run the whole gamut of the genre: from early-1960s recordings by authentic purveyors of traditional blues and country such as Rev. Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, and Doc Watson, to urban revivalists like Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Pete Seeger, to protest folkies such as Phil Ochs, to confessional singer-songwriters, folk-rockers, pristine-voiced divas, bluegrass pickers, Celtic, Eastern European, and Latino preservationists, and everything in between. Among the many highlights of this 58-track set are a solo blues by young Bonnie Raitt from 1970, Odetta's passionate 1977 reading of her self-penned "Hit or Miss," the Ricky Skaggs band tearing through a fiery instrumental in 1996, Richard Thompson's emotional 1996 solo performance of "Bee's Wing," Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsen harmonizing exquisitely in 1996, and a stunning 1962 banjo display from Bill Keith. Younger artists like bluegrassers Nickel Creek, biting songwriter Mary Gauthier, and rousing Eastern European dance band Harmonia seem ready to carry the torch. --Marc Greilsamer

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