The Loveliest Rose, by Bukkene Bruse. This group is wonderful, and this is one of my favorite albums. They are led by the fantastic and cute as a bug’s ear fiddler Annbjorg Lien, who has several albums of her own (check out her website). I quite like...

Hah—trick category, since there isn't one, and a Rolling Stones Christmas album is about as likely as a string section on a Gov't. Mule album. I throw it in as an excuse to mention that we saw the Stones a couple of years ago. In fact, the same week...

This would be Anonymous 4, not only the best, but perhaps the only American Medieval Babe group. I used to go hear them at the lunchtime concert series at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan in the 1980s, before they got famous and sold something like a...

Ah, a bit of a problem here. There's a whole bunch of them, but they're all only ok if you’ve actually ever attended a Revels. None of them quite captures the real spirit of a real Revels show, which itself is a joyful, chaotic affair of boundless...

There are lots of versions of this, but my favorite remains the one I bought in 1964 (which I still have, amazingly enough) by the Robert Shaw Chorale--in this case, just the women's chorale. One of the first classical recordings I ever bought, in...