John Cohen, a photographer who took a series of pre-fame pictures of Bob Dylan, says he knew from the first that there would be more to Bob Dylan than the legacy sounds of folk and old blues.

Pete Seeger bluntly refutes the oft-told notion that he tried to pull the plug on Bob Dylan’s first electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In fact, Seeger says he was upset over the primitive sound system.

Vimeo Matthew Heller’s music has the balls-out attitude of rock, and the confrontational intelligence of folk. The atom-smashing combination of both on his new album Invitation creates a dangerous fission

Steve Earle, as is his way, gets beneath the bromides and the easy assumptions about the homeless, in a harrowing new song that digs out the hard-won scraps of remaining pride.

BeauSoleil’s first studio recording since 2009′s Alligator Purse finds Michael Doucet’s frisky amalgam retracing Louisiana music’s journey from West Africa to the swamps of south Louisiana

This isn’t a jazz album, anymore than Joan Armatrading’s 2007 UK charttopper Into The Blues was about something so simple as the blues. She’s always had a roving eye, a restless muse. So Starlight is, but it also isn’t, jazz.

The contemporary folk group Erwilian uses this project to transform traditional spirituals and praise music into something more universal, taking away the specifics that comes with attaching lyrics. The results are stunning, as refined as they are inspirational

Although the mystical name suggests a psychedelic consciousness, this Southern California act actually specialized in jugband-styled folk rock.

A song about hard-won acceptance, Stone Blind Valentine’s “Think What You Will” begins with a raw acoustic riff from Colby Maddox before Emily Hurd enters — all steely resolve, but barely obscuring a sweeping moment of heartbreak.

Lisa Germano’s spare fragility, her whispery confidentiality, would come off as too precious if she didn’t pay such great attention to the craftsmanship of her writing. Instead, her new album has enough trenchant, note-perfect images to fill a good-sized lit mag