If we get back to the original question which is what was the most influential folk album in the folk revival of North America, what I say is that the cited albums by The Weavers and Pete Seeger never crossed my path -- it wasn't until "Wasn't That a Time" came out that I ever heard The Weavers, although I had heard of them -- one of their songbooks made its way into our house sometime during my childhood, but no one used it much. So, while Seeger's and The Weavers' albums may have been highly influential they did not penetrate here on the West Coast, in California, in the Bay Area, in a household where we bought albums but did not listen to the radio. Joan Baez albums made it in, and Odetta, and the Peter, Paul and Mary concert album, and, way before that, as I have said, recordings by Burl Ives, Bob Atcher and Susan Reed. I first went to see Joan Baez locally when I was a teenager here just north of Berkeley.

When I went to camp at the age of ten in 1968 all of the counselors with guitars were singing Peter, Paul and Mary arrangements -- I didn't know that at the time, I learned later that that is where all of that stuff had come from: "The Cruel War" and "You Take a Stick of Bamboo" and "Five Hundred Miles."