On Top of Old Smokey - Gordon Jenkins Orch. w/ vocal by the Weavers. That song introduced me to folk music in 1951. Today I hate that particular record because of the orchestration, and if it hadn't have been for the HUAC hearings and the subsequent blacklisting of the Weavers, who knows to what direction folk music might have gone. (I guess even bad things create some good.)

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me - First heard that song just mere hours after breaking up from a very serious relationship. (I was the breakee, not the breaker.)

Sh-Boom by the Chords on Cat Records (S' of '54). This was a really outrageous record, the third popular rhythm and blues song that was tremendously popular in the LA area (after the Orioles-Crying in the Chapel, and Gee by the Crows). The versions of Sh-Boom done by the Crew Cuts, and on Your Hit Parade, are, in retrospect, funnier than parodies by Stan Freberg or the Three Haircuts (Caesar, Reiner, and Morris) of the nascent rock idiom.

Tom Dooley by the... well you know who. The break-out song popularizing folk music.