The New Lost City Ramblers

As this triple-disc anthology clearly demonstrates, the New Lost City Ramblers have always sounded so natural, so at home playing archaic Appalachian folk that it's easy to overlook just how innovative they really were. In the early 1960s, the Ramblers were the first folk-revival group to actually try to sound like old-time icons such as Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb. Because of this strident nostalgia, the trio was also totally avant-garde. Absolutely nobody played like them, plain and simple.