NICK DRAKE Fruit Tree Universal Music Enterprises The facts of Nick Drake’s short life are well known to many: The English singer-songwriter died in 1974 at the age of 26 from an overdose of anti-depressants. He left behind only three albums of delicate, introspective, artfully written songs. He was the object of a small but fervent cult until the year 2000, when the use of his song “Pink Moon” in a widely-viewed Volkswagen commercial vaulted him to posthumous popularity.

Fruit Tree, the original collection of Drake’s wonderful works, has been out of print for some years. The newly configured edition from Universal’s catalog division includes Drake’s three classic records – Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Later (1970), and Pink Moon (1972). It also contains a DVD of the documentary A Skin Too Few (an intense, rhapsodic 48-minute featurette) and a 108-page book with lyrics and track-by-track observations from Drake’s producer Joe Boyd, engineer John Wood, arranger Robert Kirby, and musician Robin Frederick.

Anyone who has ever heard Nick Drake’s music knows that the air vibrates a little differently in its wake. His caressing vocals, deeply introspective lyrics and dense, unusually chorded guitar work play directly on the listener’s nerve endings. Each of his three albums has a different feel: Five Leaves Left is warm and richly orchestrated; Bryter Later continues on the same path, but with more soulful inflections; and Pink Moon, essentially a solo performance, is stark and harrowing, the soft cry of a man who sees nothing but dark at the end of the tunnel. Drake had many talented contemporaries on the English folk-rock scene – John Martyn and Richard and Linda Thompson, to name a few – but no one produced work as singular.

A Skin Too Few offers an intimate and impressionistic look at Drake’s life and career. It’s notable for its splendid photography, which captures the verdant, somewhat ominous landscape of the musician’s hometown Tanworth-in-Arden, and for its vibrant interviews with Gabrielle Drake. The book’s interviews give a fresh inside look at the recording of the Drake canon.

Fruit Tree is the cornerstone of any collection of great folk music – though its scope and effect defeat a label as simplistic as “folk music.” A perfect complement to this essential package is the new 2007 single-disc collection Family Tree, which brings together revelatory home recordings by Drake and his family members that afford a look at the roots of his utterly original style. BACK TO TOP

EMMYLOU HARRIS Songbird Rhino This four-CD/one-DVD compilation is not designed to supersede Portrait, Harris’ three-disc 1996 career overview. That package focuses on the commercial highlights of the singer’s career, including her chart hits and her best-known concert staples. Songbird is a more rigorous dig into the recesses of Harris’ three-and-a-half-decade career, and it’s a very satisfying look at her work as both a front woman and a collaborator.

Harris arrived in the early ‘70s as Gram Parsons’ vocal partner, and she acknowledges her debt to the late Grievous Angel by giving a couple of duets with him pride of place on the box’s first disc. While Emmylou has since proven her mettle as one of country music’s great soloists, she has never forgotten her roots as a harmony singer, and many of the most stirring moments on Songbird are collaborative efforts, some of them drawn from other artists’ albums or group projects (like her Trio work with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt). Among the great company she keeps here: Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Gillian Welch, Sheryl Crow, Beck, Chrissie Hynde, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Waylon Jennings, and the McGarrigle Sisters.

The compilation also dramatically demonstrates that Harris has applied her peerless, bell-like voice to one of the broadest repertoires ever essayed by a “country” vocalist. To be sure, there are many classic country songs essayed, but Emmylou is also effortlessly at home with Bruce Springsteen’s songbook, the Les Paul-Mary Ford classic “How High the Moon,” Lucinda Williams’ most powerful material, or the Beatles’ “For No One.” Emmylou Harris has never received quite enough credit for her resourcefulness, her daring, and her willingness to step outside the sometimes rigidly unforgiving and confining boundaries of her chosen genre.

The bonus DVD also makes a strong case for Emmylou as a do-anything performer. You get ‘70s versions of the country standards “Together Again” and “Making Believe” with her great Hot Band, featuring James Burton, Albert Lee, Glen D. Hardin, and Rodney Crowell; a corny but entertaining 1981 video for “Mr. Sandman”; a blazing 1998 take of Crowell’s “Ain’t Living Long Like This” with Buddy Miller and Spyboy; and recent live versions of “Love Hurts” (at the Grand Ole Opry, with Elvis Costello) and John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Add to this a baker’s dozen unreleased tracks and an intelligently annotated hardbound book, and you have a smartly assembled, rewarding look at a boundlessly gifted country star who still seems somehow underestimated. BACK TO TOP

BILLIE HOLIDAY Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles Columbia/Legacy Anyone seeking a solid yet affordable collection of Billie Holiday’s first and finest work has probably been waiting for a while. The Legacy, the first boxed set of her esteemed Brunswick, Vocalion, and Okeh sides, was released in 1991; Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday On Columbia 1933-44, a 10-CD treasure chest of all those Columbia-owned sides, was issued a decade later, but the price may have been too steep for most consumers. The new Lady Day is a digest of the 2001 set, and it’s a perfect compromise for those who want more than a best-of but can’d afford the whole enchilada. There is no chaff on these four discs. The sides that Holiday cut at the beginning of her career are, simply, among the best jazz recordings ever made. She’s at the apex of her vocal powers, and even the earliest performances, like “I Wished On the Moon” and “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” show her style almost fully formed. They’re sparkling recordings; no one ever quite equaled the way Holiday could pry emotion from a lyric by elongating a vocal line. There is great variety here: She could bounce as well as wail, as a listen to numbers like “Pennies From Heaven” or “Me, Myself and I” will attest. Yet many find darker tracks like “I’ll Never Be the Same,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” and “Gloomy Sunday” to be the zenith of her work.

Lady Day operated as a working member of a band on these records – she often took no more than one vocal chorus. And what bands they were! Many of the groups were led by the estimable pianist Teddy Wilson; the most brilliant numbers pair her with tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who nicknamed her and was her partner in a great musical love affair. Also on board were such unmatchable Swing Era players as Benny Goodman, Roy Eldridge, Chu Berry, Buck Clayton, Walter Page, Jo Jones, and Cozy Cole.

The current set preserves some of the best elements of the 10-disc version, including a thoughtful essay by jazz critic Gary Giddins and track-by-track notes by co-producer Michael Brooks, for whom the Holiday project was a labor of love. There are few greater achievements in American singing than these recordings. The four-disc Lady Day could be alternately titled The Essential Billie Holiday, and no one would be misled. BACK TO TOP

PINK FLOYD The Piper at the Gates of Dawn Capitol/EMI It’s tempting to write about the forthcoming and as yet unseen and unheard Pink Floyd set Oh By the Way, which Capitol/EMI will issue on Dec. 4. That limited edition package will contain all 14 of the English band’s studio albums, which will be packaged in miniature album sleeves in a box designed by the group’s longtime design accomplice Storm Thorgerson. That collection will be ideal for the high-end super-fan, but a splendid alternative is already on the market for those just getting out the door with this esteemed band: the pretty fabulous 40th anniversary version of Pink Floyd’s debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Offered as both a commemorative edition of that Summer of Love classic and a posthumous salute to Floyd’s original creative maestro Syd Barrett, who died last year, this lovely book-styled package offers not one but two versions of the masterful album, one in stereo and one in mono. (The monophonic edition was previously available, standing alone, as a Thorgerson-designed import in 1997.)

It’s a stylish edition of an historic album. Issued within months of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and recorded in the same studio, EMI’s Abbey Road, Piper was psychedelia’s truest first salvo. It was the quartet’s attempt to translate the freewheeling improvisations of their UFO Club appearances onto vinyl; if EMI’s conservatism and producer Norman Smith’s tight reins only allowed the band to go so far, they still broke new ground on such lysergic tracks as “Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive.” The album also included some of Barrett’s trippiest writing in “Lucifer Sam” and “Bike.” All psychedelic rock and such alternate-universe musics as krautrock spring from this album.

Purists may prefer the forceful mono mix, while those seeking wider sonic bandwidth may opt for the stereo version. No matter – the album still sounds amazing either way, and its longer experimental tracks have aged exceedingly well. The set’s great treat is a third bonus disc, which includes wonderful contemporaneous singles like the irreplaceable “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” and rarities like a fantastic short alternate take of “Interstellar Overdrive.” This was Syd Barrett’s only album as Pink Floyd’s vocalist-guitarist; after two gnomic solo records, he receded into a life of mental illness and reclusiveness. The new Piper is a fitting testament to his legend. BACK TO TOP

FRANK SINATRA A Voice in Time 1939-1952 RCA Victor/Legacy There’s a wonderful photo spread across two pages of the handsome hardbound book that accompanies this four-CD, 80-track overview of Frank Sinatra’s early career. It was taken at the Wedgewood Room of New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel in the early ‘40s. The shot was taken from the stage, and Sinatra is viewed from the rear; the camera focuses on the faces of his young, mostly female audience. The majority of them look like they have just been struck by lightning; many of their faces glow with desire.

This very welcome compilation brings together the crucial recordings from Sinatra’s first rush of stardom, when Harry James and Jimmy Dorsey’s boy band singer graduated to stardom as “The Voice” – America’s scream-inducing teen idol. There has never been a satisfying overview of this period, for Sinatra’s material was split between the Victor and Columbia labels. The merger of Sony and BMG has led to this lean, beautifully focused anthology.

The singer one meets here is in his apprenticeship. As a swing era band boy and then as a solo performer, Sinatra sported a light, intimate style that took off from Bing Crosby’s pathfinding approach. The harder, swinging Sinatra of the ‘50s Capitol sessions was still some time off. But, as compilers Didier Deutsch and Charles L. Granata and writer Will Friedwald make plain in their notes, the elements of Sinatra’s style were in place almost from the instant he stepped behind a microphone.

The set cannily sifts the two monumental multi-disc sets of Sinatra’s work with Dorsey (for RCA) and his first solo records (for Columbia). The early hits are here: “All Or Nothing At All,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” his signature “Nancy.” But the collection deepens as it offers Sinatra’s first forays into what has become known as the Great American Songbook.

The songs of Porter, the Gershwins, and others weren’t called “standards” yet – in fact, many of them were forgotten when he took them up again. What set Sinatra apart was his impeccable taste, and his understated way with a lyric. Listen to his first versions of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” or “One For My Baby (And One More For the Road).” Even then, he knew what made those tunes tick.

A Voice in Time is highlighted by some delicious previously unreleased airchecks from Sinatra’s ‘40s radio shows. A better summation of a brilliant career’s first blossoming is hard to envision. BACK TO TOP

MILES DAVIS The Complete On the Corner Sessions Columbia/Legacy The title of this six-CD collection doesn’t indicate the scope of its contents. This spectacular package – the latest and last in Legacy’s multi-box overview of trumpeter Miles Davis’ studio recordings for Columbia Records – comprises 1972-75 recordings that ended up spread over several early-‘70s albums, including On the Corner, Big Fun, and the sublime Get Up With It. It represents the fullest flowering of the electric style Miles had developed on In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Jack Johnson. It’s some of the most mind-shattering stuff ever recorded, and it transcends labels like “jazz.”

This was extreme and controversial music in its day, and it set off howls of protest among Davis’ more conservative critics; for a sample, see Stanley Crouch’s outraged piece about On the Corner, subtitled “The Sellout of Miles Davis,” in the anthology Reading Jazz. Some old-school listeners who would have been quite happy to hear him play “My Funny Valentine” forever were already uncomfortable with Miles’ embrace of electricity.

His move into a heavier, even more discordant and funky sound -- inspired by the contemporaneous work of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone -- with bands that included Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John McLauglin, and key new players like ex-Motown bassist Michael Henderson and guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas was viewed as mere commercialism, and a betrayal of jazz itself. But Miles Davis was never one to stand still, and these later “directions in music,” as he called them, were his most adventurous work.

As they have throughout the course of their reissue project, Legacy has done right by Miles. In addition to the previously released material – ranging from the stunning hard funk-rock of “On the Corner” to the hypnotic Duke Ellington elegy “He Loved Him Madly” – the box includes a full two hours of previously unreleased material. As usual, there’s a fat booklet, with smart essays by Tom Terrell and arranger Paul Buckmaster. The kooky original On the Corner cartoon cover art by Corky McCoy (who has also supplied new illustrations) is rendered in 3D on the package’s metal sleeve.

Time has shown that this fearless music, by turns fierce and impressionistic, was the hottest thing going – richly rhythmic, forceful, and visionary. Miles Davis was always ahead of the game, and The Complete On the Corner Sessions supplies another compelling view of his exploratory spirit. BACK TO TOP

SLY & THE FAMILY STONE The Collection Epic/Legacy Sadly, Sly Stone is better known today as one of the ‘60s’ more famous flameouts, recalled more for his drug busts, elusiveness, and strings of broken dates than for his innovative music. But Epic/Legacy has taken a giant step toward restoring his reputation with Sly & the Family Stone: The Collection, a limited-edition seven-CD box collecting the albums that permanently changed the face of music in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Budget-priced, it’s one of the best music values of the year.

Sly was already a well-known San Francisco DJ and producer when he put together the Family Stone in 1967. It was truly a family band, with his brother Freddie on guitar and sister Rose on keyboards. The interracial, co-ed unit’s sound borrowed from contemporary soul and psychedelic rock; it sounded unlike anything then on the map.

The debut A Whole New Thing sketched the outline of its sound, but Dance to the Music (1968) set the winning formula down. Its hit title single bristled with fresh energy and ideas; its tight mix of soulful horns, call-and-response vocals, dance grooves, and hard-rock force made good on the debut collection’s title. The follow-up Life stuck to the template, but 1969’s powerful Stand! upped the ante; the sound was harder, the tunes politicized and completely in step with the psychedelic times.
The Family Stone’s high-voltage fusion stole the Woodstock festival in the summer of ’69. They reaped huge hits with the non-LP singles “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (regrettably not included on the current reissues, but heard on the newly re-released Greatest Hits).

The increasingly crazed Sly ensconced himself in a Bel Air mansion and spent two arduous years on the album that would emerge in late 1971 as There’s a Riot Going On. Previously one of the worst-sounding CDs on the market, Riot gets a welcome reissue here in vibrantly remastered form. It remains one of the most disquieting albums ever made, a thing of druggy grooves, desperate lyrics, and overwhelmingly forbidding atmosphere. Though it spawned a surprising hit single, “Family Affair,” it was jarring listening in its day, and it still perfectly captures a death-of-the-‘60s vibe. The Collection also includes Fresh (1973) and Small Talk (1974). Taken together, these seven albums are among the crucial foundations of funk-rock. You should not live without it. BACK TO TOP

THE STANLEY BROTHERS The Definitive Collection (1947-1966) Time-Life It’s impossible to say if bluegrass – that striking form of virtuosic string-band music single-handedly formulated by Bill Monroe – would have continued its spread without the arrival of Ralph and Carter Stanley. But in hindsight it’s easy to say that the Stanley Brothers were the most important practitioners of the style after Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, and Time-Life’s three-CD compilation is a wide-ranging, compact summation of their spectacular brand of bluegrass. The Stanleys hailed from the Clinch Mountain region of Virginia; Carter (who died in 1966) was guitarist and lead tenor, while Ralph played banjo and sang harmony. They formed their first bands in the postwar years, and their music quickly matured from the old-style picking favored by such groups as J.D. Mainer’s Mountaineers to the driving, forceful sound favored by Monroe’s group. The brothers adopted songs from Monroe’s repertoire, and Ralph took up the fiery three-finger style advanced by the Blue Grass Boys’ banjo player Earl Scruggs.

As the 60 tracks on The Definitive Collection show, the Stanleys were soon making records that were the equal of Monroe’s early classics in the genre. The set stretches from their very first Rich-R-Tone sides through their celebrated achievements for Columbia, Mercury, Starday, and King. Included are many of the tentpoles of bluegrass music, from murder ballads to stirring gospel numbers: “Little Glass of Wine,” “The Fields Have Turned Brown,” “Angel Band,” “Rank Stranger,” and a pair of songs familiar to millions via the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its Grammy-winning soundtrack album – “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “O Death” (the latter of which received a surprisingly sprightly treatment in its original incarnation).

As usual, Time-Life moves beyond the expected repertoire to unearth rarities and live tracks that are otherwise hard to find. Especially welcome here are a couple of collaborations between the Stanleys and Monroe: the Blue Grass Boys’ magnificent 1951 “Get Down On Your Knees and Pray,” featuring Carter on lead vocals, and a 1961 concert version of “Sugar Coated Love” with both brothers.

It’s all sublime stuff, with dazzling playing and positively hair-raising singing. Bluegrass fans are often hard-pressed to say that Monroe’s recordings of the period were better than these superb Stanley sides. Altogether, the work of these two bands set the course that everyone else followed. If you’ve never heard the Stanley Brothers, start here; you’ll want to hear it all. BACK TO TOP

VARIOUS ARTISTS Art of Field Recording: Volume 1 Dust-to-Digital The Atlanta-based independent label Dust-to-Digital – a mom-and-pop operation run by musicologist Lance Ledbetter -- has been enriching our knowledge of American music since 2003, when it released Goodbye, Babylon, its astonishing six-CD compendium of sacred music and sermons. Now the label has summoned forth another revelation: this exceptional four-disc box of American field recordings, recorded between 1958 and 2006 by Art Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum fell under the spell of American folk music when he was a student at Columbia University in the ‘50s. During that decade, he began compiling open-reel recordings of blues, country, and gospel musicians around the country; some of his work was released on commercial LPs from the Prestige label. His tapes now reside in such institutions as the Library of Congress and the University of Georgia. Ledbetter’s research for Goodbye, Babylon put him on Rosenbaum’s trail, and the current set – as its title suggests, the first of two due from the label – digs deep into the documentarian’s library.

Organized thematically, roughly along the lines of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the CDs –- devoted to an overview survey and religious, blues, and dance/instrumental music – is simply flabbergasting. Only a few of the names here, like bluesmen Neal Patman, Shirley Griffith, and Yank Rachel, will be even vaguely familiar to most listeners, but that means little. In his wanderings, Rosenbaum uncovered rich veins of American sound, and the glorious, raw eruptions one hears offer our country’s music at its most primal, harking back to a time before mass communications eradicated strong regional voices.

From norteño polkas to jew’s-harp solos, from sacred harp choirs to fiddle reels, from funky blues to the most devout spirituals, Art of Field Recording takes the listener into some obscure yet revealing corners of our country’s native styles. It’s hard to imagine a fan or student of American folk, no matter what his or her preference, who won’t be surprised, amazed, or delighted by this collection.

As ever, Dust-to-Digital has dressed the music handsomely. The box comes with a 98-page book that includes a lengthy introduction and track-by-track annotation by Rosenbaum, who also supplied a number of wonderful paintings, much in the manner of Ivan Albright, that illustrate the work. Dozens of black-and-white photos also enrich the text. Art of Field Recording Volume 1 is an unprecedented package, and it will leave you hungry for Volume 2. BACK TO TOP

VARIOUS ARTISTS Love is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970 Rhino If they’re done properly, musical retrospectives can make the listener look at a performer, a style, or a scene in an entirely different way. So it is with Love is the Song We Sing, a stellar reconsideration of the San Francisco Bay Area explosion of the late ‘60s. Everyone thinks of Frisco in terms of the Summer of Love and the explosion of psychedelic music, and, to be sure, this comprehensive four-CD, 77-track collection takes in that end of the musical spectrum. All the big-name bands are represented, sometimes by surprising selections: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Steve Miller Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe & the Fish, Santana. But the dead giveaway that the compilation is onto something unusual is its subtitle: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970.

Alec Palao, the producer of the set, has a larger agenda; he’s a sometime member of the latter-day Chocolate Watchband, and, as his subtitle suggests, he’s interested in the more hard-edged, garage-oriented aspect of the San Francisco sound. He favors the raunchier, bluesier bands that came out of the city – Moby Grape, Big Brother & the Holding Company (whose live version of “Down On Me” here gives an indication of their on-stage power), the Great Society (Grace Slick’s pre-Airplane group), the Charlatans, and the early proto-punk Flamin’ Groovies. And let’s not forget Blue Cheer, America’s original power trio.

And, as might be expected, there is garage-rock galore here. The collection’s second disc, dedicated to “Suburbia,” includes 19 smokin’ slabs of fearsome punkorama by housewreckers like the Count Five, the Syndicate of Sound, Public Nuisance, and other, far more obscure teen practitioners. The Bay Area produced a lot of fearsome noise in the day, and this stuff will be a revelation to many.

If all this fine, unexpected music is not enough, Love… is also one of the most gorgeously produced collections to be seen this year. The CDs are housed in a full-size hardbound book bursting with beautiful vintage photographs by such artisans of the scene as Jim Marshall and Herb Greene. SF vets Ben Fong-Torres and Gene Sculatti supply introductions, and Palao walks you through the music with some splendid track-by-track annotation.

There was a lot more to ‘60s San Francisco than peace signs, love beads, tie-dyes, and light shows. A better overview of this crucial American music scene is practically unimaginable. BACK TO TOP

VARIOUS ARTISTS Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection Shout! Factory When people talk about great independent labels, they inevitably mention Chicago’s Chess Records first. But during the same era, another Windy City label, Vee-Jay Records, was cutting its own groove – and racking up hits even bigger than those issued by its neighborhood rival. Vee-Jay, whose catalog has never been as widely distributed as Chess’s, is the subject of a grand four-CD, 86-track box that makes a nice case for the label’s place in history. Founded in Gary, Indiana, by disc jockey Vivian Carter (the “Vee” of the company) and her husband Jimmy Bracken (the “Jay”) in 1953, Vee-Jay was the most successful black-owned indie label until Motown opened six years later. The firm hit almost immediate pay dirt with two Gary-based acts, the Spaniels and Jimmy Reed, and soon moved to the nearby metropolis of Chicago. Reed scored 18 top-20 R&B hits with his slow-rocking blues style, and his success made Vee-Jay a magnet for top talent. John Lee Hooker, already a star, came on board in 1955; he often used Reed’s guitar player Eddie Taylor, who himself cut magnificent singles for the label. Vee-Jay excelled with pop-oriented R&B from Dee Clark, Jerry Butler & the Impressions, the Dells, and Gene Chandler (whose “Duke of Earl” was the label’s first million-seller in 1961). But the label was notable for its opportunism, and its willingness to release anything that might make money, and rang up gospel and jazz hits.

Vee-Jay’s biggest pop successes of the early ‘60s may have hastened the company’s demise. The label pacted with a falsetto-flashing New Jersey vocal group called the Four Seasons (whose “Sherry” is heard on the box). Around the same time, the company licensed some British singles by an untested foursome from Liverpool, and thus the Beatles saw their first American release on Vee-Jay. (Sadly, the Fabs aren’t represented here.) By 1966 Vee-Jay was embroiled in dozens of lawsuits, many of them tied to the Beatles’ and the Four Seasons’ immense sales. The company filed for bankruptcy that year and quickly shut its doors.

Vee-Jay’s breadth of styles – R&B to deep soul, every variety of blues, gospel, pop – is breathtaking, and even the relatively unknown material here is sparkling. This box is a flawless, fat-free collection that looks back on the glory days when enterprising American indie labels made their fortunes by being able to turn on a dime. BACK TO TOP

VARIOUS ARTISTS
People Take Warning!: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938
Tompkins Square

The three-CD set People Take Warning looks back at an era when horrific events of the day were played out in song. This exquisitely mastered, packaged, and programmed collection recalls an age before mass communications brought calamity into living rooms in real time, when a new variety of commercial folk song transmitted, in the words of Tom Waits’ introduction, “tragic chronicles of the perils of being human.”

Hank Sapoznik, who co-produced the set with audio restorer Christopher C. King, says in his notes that dispatch-like songs became popular with crooner Vernon Dalhart’s 1925 ballad “The Death of Floyd Collins,” about a Kentucky miner trapped in a cave-in, recorded only three months after the event. Dalhart went on to record dozens of other tunes about contemporary disasters, and many another musician would follow in his footsteps.

Not all of the great ballads here are topical, of course. “Man V Machine,” the set’s first volume, includes no less than seven songs about the 1912 sinking of the Titanic among its 24 tracks. Tremendous blues-based performances by Richard “Rabbit” Brown and Frank Hutchison are among the most notable narratives of the ill-fated ship’s end. There are also indelible tunes – by Furry Lewis, Riley Puckett, and Blind Alfred Reed, among others -- about plane crashes, zeppelin crashes, and that old-time staple, train wrecks.

Volume two, “Man V Nature,” focuses on natural disasters. Unsurprisingly, the devastating Mississippi flood of 1927 is a focal point; a quarter of the 24 tracks concern that tragedy, which was witnessed first-hand by some of the performers (including the masterful Charlie Patton, who also holds forth on drought and boll weevil infestation here). Otherwise, you get cyclones, storms, earthquakes, and fires.

Murder gets its due on the third volume, “Man V Man (and Woman, Too).” The mythic murder-ballad characters like Stack O’Lee and Omie Wise are here, but there are some surprises drawn from contemporary crimes. Three tracks look back at the Lindbergh kidnapping-murder; Bill Cox’s two-sided composition about the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, released in 1935, was penned and recorded on a deadline, like a daily paper’s front-page story.

If anything, People Take Warning! demonstrates that America’s appetite for the sensational has changed little in the 70-plus years since these songs were recorded. There’s enough death, destruction, and perversity here to satisfy the most ardent checkout-line reader. BACK TO TOP