The most recommended folk music books

This illustrated collection of weird, chilling, quirky stories of ghosts, witches, and occult creatures includes very famous writers such as M.R. James, Edith Nesbit, and Thomas Hardy, as well as less well-known ones like Bernard Capes and John Collier.

I saved up their tales, rationing myself to one per day because they were such a pleasure, each one a neat little parcel of beautifully shivery words.

Being worried about pagan sacrifice and lurking monsters was a lot better than worrying about real stuff, and this horrid, lovely book made me happy.

I literally guffawed as I read this—enough times that my kids begged me to read it to them (which I did). This retelling of Beowulf played with expectations, twisting and turning in unexpected ways. The characters were fully fleshed out, with plenty of faults and quirks. No one was who I thought they were. Intrigue, magic, and stubborn independence mixed to make this delightful tale. 

If you want to know about some of the earliest forms of magic that originated in America, this book is for you. This book focuses on folk magic, with an emphasis on Hoodoo, the magic of enslaved black people, with practices that include nature and the elements as sources of power. The text provides botanical information on magic plants, and spell recipes for healing and protection. As a plus, the book is lavishly and beautifully illustrated with extensive how-to guides on creating your own charms for good luck and fortune.

This book is packed with Taffy Thomas's best riddle tales.

Taffy has been storytelling for many years and is brilliant at it. He knows just how to keep a story short and exciting. Each tale has at least one and often more riddles to be solved by the reader or listener. The expertly drawn pictures are humorous and help you solve the riddles.

It's also great for storytellers, parents, and teachers who want to keep their audience actively engaged. I tell these riddle tales when I want my listeners to join in and be part of the fun. Taffy tells us where and who he learned the riddles from – an enjoyable insight into his extraordinary life as a teller of tales.

This wonderfully written memoir by one of the most successful singers in American rock and popular music offers a thoughtful look at the artist’s rise to fame in multiple musical genres—from folk clubs to sold-out stadium concerts, to Broadway, torch songs, and the Mexican Canciones music of the author’s Sonora heritage. The book is a keen glimpse at the pressures of the road (and expectations for women in the spotlight), but a triumphant story of talent and artistic innovation.

As the subtitle of the original German says, this is the story of the time-thieves and how a child called Momo brought stolen time back to the people. A group of men in gray, paranormal parasites that steal people’s time, arrives in her hometown and all the inhabitants are made to save time in special banks by increasing efficiency and cutting down on leisurely human contact, fun activities, and artistic endeavors, considered “time-wasting.” Life becomes sterile, but Momo comes to the rescue, bringing time back to where it belongs: in the hands and minds of the people.

Tracey Garvis Graves’s novel about second chances and starting over is filled with so much warmth, it’s impossible not to cheer for her characters and to feel true empathy for their situations. Newly-divorced Layla discovers she had to make peace with her past to find love in her present—and music is the key to it all. 

There is so much to love, perhaps in the first place, the bond between tragic hero Fitz and the irresistible Fool. But even more moving is that the series shows you how deeply human beings can be bonded to non-human beings. The world is so much alive that even wood harbours intelligence; and even if human beings arrogantly fail to acknowledge it, there are more magnificent intelligent creatures around than human beings. This series makes me all the more aware of the broken beauty of our own nature, and the need to take good care of it.

Not everyone who loves and admires this folk musician, the half-sister of Pete Seeger and a longtime collector of English folk ballads, knows her as the songwriter behind Roberta Flack’s hit “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face;” hence the title. The quirky style of this real page-turner provides fantastic stories of folk heritage, song collecting, love, child-rearing, radio performance activism, encounters with English Travelers, travels to China, and life growing up as a daughter of the ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger.

In 1961, American illustrator Peter Spier won a Caldecott Honor for his version of this ancient song, and in 2014 he revisited his book, turning the black and white illustrations into glorious colour. As a scholar of ballads, I’m thrilled by their persistent popularity. The first evidence of “The Fox” is in a manuscript in the British Library from the second half of the fifteenth century, with its chorus—“Pax vobis, quoth the fox, for I am going to the town.” It’s clearly the same song, just missing the ‘o’ after town. What’s the attraction? Besides Spier’s shimmering double spreads of Americana, there’s tight storytelling with great visual details, a tune, a chorus, and a hero’s journey with a happy ending—for Fox and his family, at least!