Susan Reed was originally a 78 rpm artist for RCA Victor in the late 1940s. A bewitchingly popular cafe artist around New York, following a South Carolina childhood. Her Elektra career followed with a 10" LP in the later 1950s.

A ravishing voice—I cannot get her songs of the Auvergne, originally sung at Town Hall in NYC (LP on Columbia) out of my head. My devotion is to traditional style, yet Susan Reed's work is some of the first I heard, and I still love it.

The folksong performers of the 1940s and 1950s are all too easily overlooked by those whose first knowledge of folksong singing starts with the 1960s. The '50s (and to some extent the '40s, when Guthrie, Seeger, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, Josh White and many others first came on the scene, and were recorded by Moe Asch and others) were the breakout era so far as mass culture was concerned.

They deserve to be better known.

Bob