Which Pete Seeger album? Just pretend you forgot the title and just say,"I dunno, the LIVE one!" Close enough. Just for the art of working an audience.

The first Clancy Brothers album I heard through my oldest (pre-War sister) got me much deeper into the Celtic thing. Besides, they had four distinct voices and personalities, something too many of the folk "groups" lacked. (Why from all that stuff I pretty much outgrew, The Limelighters always had it over the Kingston Trio, whose individual personalities never seemed to matter-but that's a separate thread still out there for the world Folk Music Association folks and others that still rabidly care).

Also, through my oldest sister, some Josh White records pointed me towards the Blues, but when I first heard John Hurt's Ontario Place live recordings and Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman" on Vanguard, they really set the hook.

And growing up in Washington DC, local performances and the Folkways records by the Country Gentlemen got me interested in Bluegrass and good ol' King 615 simply called "The Stanley Brothers & The Clinch Mountain Boys (blue cover, "She's More to Be Pitied" & "Think Of What you've Done" inside), bought used for a buck fifty, got me addicted to the "Hard Stuff", and where in other things, you'd say "I never looked back.", we're dealing with folk music here! I LOOKED back and forward as well, as with all these other genres already mentioned.

(The image of a folkie's head back then discovering new things must've been the inspiration for the famous Linda Blair scene in "The Excorcist").

But again, we're not talking nescessarily about favorites here, but things that got us pointed to wherever our heads reside today. Stuff you still listen to today and thingd now left behind or regarded as "Guilry Pleasures".

Local and college radio shows that spun individual cuts, would be another good, but related thread, 'cause just one look was sometimes all it took!.