George Jones
A novelty rockabilly tale about a moonshiner and his lethal homemade whiskey, told by his admiring kin in a comic, exaggerated…
Appalachian folklore outlaw defiance of authority masculine bravado
Vashti Bunyan
A brief, hushed instrumental-scale miniature that treats a single autumn day as a small ceremony, pairing seasonal images with a…
seasonal change rural pastoral life folklore and superstition
Bert Jansch
A late-period Bert Jansch song that treats courtship as sorcery, built from a wandering, almost dreamlike set of images rather…
enchantment and desire the limits of language to capture love folkloric imagery
Fleetwood Mac
A drifting, unhurried meditation on the pleasure of unexplained phenomena, built from a series of loosely connected anecdotes…
the appeal of the unexplained imagination versus proof folklore and hearsay
Run the Jewels
A boastful, mythmaking duo track in which El-P and Killer Mike cast themselves as outlaw legends -- part supervillain, part folk…
self-mythologizing violence as performance drug use and excess
Bessie Smith
This is Bessie Smith's rendition of W.C. Handy's classic, a comic-tragic tale of a woman named Susie Johnson pining after a…
romantic abandonment itinerant lovers and railroad culture communication and waiting
Little Feat
A boozy, tall-tale narrative about a drifter drawn in by a radio siren's voice and then by a woman (or maybe a car, or a storm,…
seduction and danger the open road as myth radio as folklore/siren call
Soundgarden
A tribute to a real Seattle street performer becomes a compressed meditation on rhythm as communal salvation, with the song's…
music as ritual/salvation street performance and urban folklore community through rhythm
This is a good-humored tall tale that dresses up dancing and music as medical treatment, casting a mysterious small-town figure…
music as healing Southern folklore/tall tale communal ritual
Loretta Lynn
A nostalgic, plainspoken carol that recreates a rural Appalachian childhood Christmas through small domestic details rather than…
nostalgia family and home rural tradition
PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey builds a self-mythologizing torch song out of biblical and folkloric imagery, casting devotion as a form of damnation.…
obsessive devotion blasphemy and sacrifice mythic self-invention
XTC
A hymn-like invitation to submit to an ancient nature spirit, framed as both courtship and worship. XTC build the song out of…
paganism vs. Christianity nature as deity surrender and devotion
Gillian Welch
A traveler recounts a journey to a mythic, menacing place called Scarlet Town, where hospitality curdles into betrayal and…
betrayal mortality folk/ballad inheritance
Lead Belly
An old Appalachian murder ballad, filtered through Lead Belly's version, that interrogates a woman about a night spent away and…
accusation and evasion death and dismemberment isolation/exile
This is a traditional Appalachian folk lament, here rendered by Bert Jansch in his hushed, weathered late-career voice, about a…
exile and rejection itinerancy social reversal of fortune
Guy Clark
Guy Clark builds an entire meditation on time, memory, and mortality around a single river metaphor, letting a childhood image…
mortality and release memory and impermanence folk religion and redemption
Genesis
Genesis take the folkloric Squonk—a creature of Pennsylvania legend so ashamed of its own ugliness that it weeps constantly and…
shame and self-loathing the cruelty of pursuit despair and self-destruction
The Band
A rambling, half-comic narrator addresses a woman named Molly amid some domestic crisis involving a gun, while spinning loose,…
restlessness and departure domestic tension masculine bravado and evasion
Todd Rundgren
Rundgren takes an old proverb about a chain of small failures leading to catastrophe and grafts it onto a personal confession…
loneliness cause and effect personal responsibility
Loretta Lynn's late-career reading of the old Appalachian folk standard strips the song down to its bare, haunted essentials: a…
abandonment displacement and loss of home mortality and endurance
Traffic
A short, incantatory piece built almost entirely from pastoral and folkloric imagery, this bonus track functions less as a…
freedom and journey unity with nature unanswered questions