Welcome back to Crate Digging, our recurring feature that delves into music history and features various albums every music fan should know about. In this edition, John Oates offers us his list of the most essential folk albums of the sixties.
If John Oates understands anything, it's the basic fundamentals of songwriting. After linking up with his writing partner Daryl Hall, Oates achieved hit after hit after hit. He now he's back with Meeting, a collection of tracks that sees the aging artist return to his roots and embrace the classic folk music that captivated his creative mind as a pre-teen. To celebrate the new release, Oates has rounded up what he considers the 10 most essential folk records of the '60s, from icons like Bob Dylan to deep cuts like John Jacob Niles.
“I was excited about this music when I was a child, when I was 12 years old. “I had a good friend whose older brother went to college in North Carolina and came back with all these albums he'd never heard of by people he'd never heard of,” Oates recalls. “I started playing guitar when I was six years old, so I had been playing guitar for six years. It wasn't good, but it was good enough to learn things. I started listening to this music for the first time and started trying to learn it from records.”
A decade later, his love for Joan Baez and The Byrds had resulted in classic songs like “Rich Girl,” “You Make My Dreams (Come True)” and “Maneater.” she keeps going to Meeting, and the direct lineage between the Greenwich Village scene and Oates's output becomes even clearer. And as he himself says, these 10 albums are where it all began.
Listen to the title track from John Oates' new album Meeting below, then read on to see what made your list of the most essential folk albums of the 1960s.
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