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¶ The New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of college men, sing a brand of hillbilly known as "Blue Grass." Born in Kentucky, the style calls for a complex string accompaniment—in this case on five-string banjo, fiddle and guitar—and a frenetically fast vocal line unreeled to a foot-slapping accompaniment. The Ramblers learned their best songs—Beware, O Take Care and Hopalong Peter—from such fabled Blue Grass groups as the Buckle-Busters and Dr. Smith's Champion Horse-Hair Pullers.
¶ Pete Seeger, 41, quit Harvard to study folk music, has since cut some 50 albums that have made him the hero of the col lege folk revival. Seeger's voice is twangy and his pitch uncertain, but he sings with unequaled verve and a kind of rough-hewn sense of conviction. An ardent leftwinger, he once sang many industrial songs, now is better known for Appalachian mountain songs (Pretty Polly) and Negro classics like I'm on My Way and Takes a Worried Man.
¶ The Brothers Four rose to sudden popularity with their recording of Greenfields. Inspired by the Kingston Trio, they often appear in gold shirts and Oxford grey shorts, offer hoked-up versions of such numbers as Eddystone Light and Let the Rest of the World Go By. Perhaps their most unforgivable sin, in the eyes of folk purists, is backing up their arrangements with cymbals and bongo drums.
¶ The Weavers—three men and a girl—were organized by Pete Seeger more than a decade ago, and their success has made them the most widely imitated group in the business. Although they compose some of their own materials, they stick closely to folk tradition, avoid the pop styling that some other groups favor. Their most famous numbers: Good Night, Irene and On Top of Old Smoky.
¶ Joan Baez (pronounced buy-ezz) is a 19-year-old Boston-born beauty of Mexican-Irish descent who made her first big splash at last year's Newport Festival and has since been tagged as one of folk music's most promising talents. In her soft, clear voice, she sings both ballads such as Barbara Allen and rhythm numbers such as We Are Crossing the River Jordan, bringing to each a fine rhythmic sense and quantities of fresh charm. So far, she is best known in the coffeehouses of Harvard Square, where she sings, she says, to troubled intellectuals with "the Bomb on their minds."