While the Sixties saw a great civil war in the folk music community – with traditionalists clinging on to acoustic instruments on one side and innovators experimenting with electric guitars on the other (to howls of ‘Judas!’) – in the Seventies, the scene splintered every which way, with an explosion of sub genres in which folk was fused with rock, country, pop, funk and Celtic music.
At its heart, however, folk has always been the broadest of churches, populated by an eclectic ensemble of singer-songwriters decanting the human experience into narrative-rich lyrics and guitar-led tunes.
Here is a selection of the best folk songs that helped document and define the Seventies, an era of extraordinary upheaval and change.
Best 1970s folk songs
Tangled Up in Blue – Bob Dylan
The opening track of Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks polarised opinion when it was released but has since been heralded as one of his greatest. This restless song traces the storied journey of a fragmented love affair, hopping between tenses, time periods and perspectives as the peripatetic poet narrator stumbles and tumbles from one place, job and bar to another, encountering his anonymous muse in a range of dramatic scenarios.
The non-linear arrangement was influenced by the painter Norman Raeben, who was Dylan’s art tutor in the mid 1970s. It’s a song that has evolved over time, with Dylan adopting different lyrics during live performances at various stages of his life. Many fans think the words are autobiographical, but Dylan claimed each track on the album was based on a short story by Anton Chekhov.
Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose) – Joan Baez
Although always referred to as the queen of the folk scene, Baez is too often seen in the shadow of Bob Dylan (with whom she had a short romance and a long and complicated relationship that inspired several songs by both artists), instead of being properly recognised for her more hard-hitting, era-defining protest compositions, such as this clever track (which rages just as hard as 'Hurricane').
Written in the aftermath of her husband David Harris receiving a one-year prison sentence for dodging the Vietnam draft, this deftly delivered storytelling masterclass tells a trio of tales about three marginalised men as they suffer the brutality of arrest and imprisonment for minor misdemeanours amid a raging culture war, and ends with the plea: "Help us raze, raze the prisons to the ground." Depressingly, the song sounds every bit as relevant today as it was when released on Baez's incandescently furious 1972 album Come From the Shadows.
Powderfinger – Neil Young and Crazy Horse
The first track on the all-electric B-side of the 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps explodes like a gunshot after the mellower vibe of the acoustic A-side. This song tells a short, tragic story about a young man confronted by an approaching gunboat when he's all alone, with the more senior men missing for a range of semi-explained reasons, which spiral off into intriguing subplots: “Daddy’s gone and my brother’s out hunting in the mountains / Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou…"
Poignantly and posthumously narrated in the first person by the main protagonist, after he is violently killed during the encounter, Young's storytelling and raw guitar playing, backed by Crazy Horse at their thumping best, makes Powderfinger a powerful anthem, but it's also an enigma. Many people have presumed it's set in the American Civil War, but this isn't explained.
Originally written by Young in the mid 70s, he offered it to Ronnie Van Zant for a forthcoming Lynard Skynard album, which was never recorded due to the plane crash that killed Van Zant. The song has been covered by a plethora of artists, including Band of Horses and Cowboy Junkies, and inspired the name of a great Australian band.
Father and Son – Cat Stephens
From the English artist's sensational 1970 album Tea for the Tillerman, which also includes the stone-cold classic ‘Wild World’, this extraordinary song adopts the first person voice of both protagonists as it narrates a debate between a protective parent and a defiantly independent child on the cusp of adulthood.
Stephens, who later changed his name to Yusuf Islam after becoming a Muslim, wrote the song as part of a proposed film and music project, Revolussia, set in 1917 in Russia, featuring a boy who intends to join the revolution, against the wishes of his conservative farmer father, but this was abandoned after the singer suffered a severe bout of tuberculosis (one of the deadliest diseases). Instead it became a much-covered single that captures an eternal conflict endlessly replayed by every generation.
American Pie – Don McLean
In some ways a victim of its own enormous success – many middle-aged folk would likely be happy to never hear this song again, having suffered through (and joined in with) innumerable ragged renditions by fireside guitarists – 'American Pie' is inarguably an epic masterpiece, which spent weeks at the top of the charts in English-speaking countries across the globe in 1972–71, despite being over eight and a half minutes long.
The often-opaque lyrics are like an impressionist-inspired landscape painting populated by the people, events and music that rocked tumultuous preceding decade, starting with the 3 February 1959 plane crash that killed early rock 'n' roll stars Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens ("the day the music died") and ending with the killing of Meredith Hunter by Hell's Angels at the Altamont Free Concert headlined by the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.
In 2015, after decades of speculation about characters mentioned in the song, McLean finally revealed his thoughts by auctioning off his original annotated lyrics (which sold for $1.2 million), although that hasn't ended the debate.
River – Joni Mitchell
Although never actually released as a single, ‘River’, which features on Mitchell’s 1971 long-play magnum opus Blue, is certainly the Canadian artist’s most-covered song, and likely her most commonly played track, and not just because it’s always included in the Christmas record rotation by radio stations, despite a distinct lack of merriness.
Set to a hauntingly melancholic melody, the lyrics are a chilly lament (either about a broken romantic relationship or the memory of a child given up for adoption – theories differ) and a cry of pain caused by displacement, all juxtaposed against the backdrop of Christmas celebrations. A carol for the lonely and lost, it’s a brutally brilliant riposte to the relentlessly cheery façade of the festive season (something not repeated until the Pogues released ‘Fairytale of New York’ in 1987).
The Well Below the Valley – Planxty
Long before Nick Cave made murder ballads morbidly popular, folk singers were spinning sinister tales about all sorts of bloody and horrifying shenanigans to wide-eyed audiences (in 1971 Fairport Convention released an entire concept album, Babbacombe Lee, about the repeated failed hanging of a man convicted of murder), but few songs are quite as dark as this traditional number, which tells a centuries' old horror story of infanticide and supernaturality, with awful implications of incest.
Despite the deeply disturbing narrative, sung in the Guinness-black velvety brogue of Christie Moore it becomes a thing of magical, if macabre and monstrous beauty – made all the more poignant by recent revelations in places like Tuam in Ireland. The song appears on an album of the same name, released in 1973 by Planxty, a band that reinvigorated Irish folk in the seventies and paved the way for The Pogues to completely revolutionise the genre a decade later.
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald – Gordon Lightfoot
Released a year after the disaster that it describes, this emotional track by a Canadian folk singer and songwriter who was deeply admired by Dylan, tells the terrible tale of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a bulk carrier that sank during a storm on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, with the loss of all 29 souls on board. The sorrowful lyrics are set to a simple but unforgettable melody that Lightfoot later said was drawn from a traditional Irish dirge, and which was later borrowed back by the Irish Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands when he wrote ‘Back Home in Derry’ whilst in prison.
Rocky Mountain High – John Denver
Written by the undisputed king of country folk, with contributions by guitarist Mike Taylor, this love song to the Colorado mountains was the title track of Denver's sixth album, released in 1972. The finely crafted tune and lyrics, which took 9 months to finesse, became so popular and firmly associated with the landscape it describes that the track is now an official state song of Colorado.
Bizarrely, however, it was banned from being played on multiple radio stations for a period because of the words "everybody's high" in the final verse, which was taken to be a reference to drug use. Denver later explained to Congress that it was an articulation of the "elation, celebration of life or the joy in living that one feels when he observes something as wondrous as the Perseid meteor shower on a moonless, cloudless night, when there are so many stars that you have a shadow from the starlight, and you are out camping with your friends".
What About Me – Richie Havens
Born in Brooklyn, to a West Indian mother and a father who hailed from the Native American Blackfoot Nation of Montana/South Dakota, Havens found worldwide fame after being filmed performing as the opening act at the era-defining 1969 Woodstock festival. The folk artist apparently said of this track, released in 1971 and featuring on his Great Blind Degree album, that it was the only song he never wanted to have to sing again.
A protest poem put to Haven’s distinctive guitar playing, it starts by decrying the destruction of the environment and goes on to rally against the racial and social injustices faced by millions of people, like himself, in the United States, describing how he is made to feel like a stranger in the land where he was born.
Rising for the Moon – Fairport Convention
Written and sung by the inimitable Sandy Denny, this track is the opening salvo of a 1975 album of the same name, which also features the beautiful song ‘White Dress’. Rising for the Moon was the 10th studio album by British band Fairport Convention, pioneers of folk rock in the late 1960s who, along with Steeleye Span, dominated the sound throughout the Seventies, releasing multiple albums stacked with popular reinterpretations of traditional songs and the occasional original.
There's nothing particularly profound or original about the words to this song – which dances through classic folky themes of travel, nature and landscape – but you can't deny the delicious quality of Sandy Denny's voice in her final outing with the Convention.
Top image: Joan Baez performs at the War is Over Rally in Central Park, New York, May 1975 (Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images)
