AMG Review of Folk Collection

Marisa Brown
All Music Guide

A two-disc set, Woody Guthrie's The Folk Collection contains a lot of the songs that are associated with the revered singer, like "Buffalo Skinners," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "House of the Rising Sun," and "John Henry" (which actually appears twice, once as a solo and once as a duet with Cisco Houston). There are many omissions as well (most noticeably "This Land Is Your Land," "Hard, Ain't It Hard," and "Do-Re-Mi"), but they are tempered by the addition of a few harder-to-find tracks ("Brown Eyes," "Ride Old Paint," both of which are performed again with Houston), which makes The Folk Collection a pretty decent combination of the well-known with lesser-known.