Folksongs & Ballads

Here's a fine little folk album, and a curious one, too, since the project was formed in France but they're clearly doing American folk music. Tia is an American girl who flew to Paris with nothing in her pockets but 60 bucks and the name of a record shop scribbled on a slip of paper. After checking into a five-bucks-a-night hotel nearby, the next day she went to the shop and fit right in with the countercultural crowd. Once they found out she could sing in her trademark, unaffected manner, they cut a record. Oh, and one of the regulars at that record shop? None other than the Colette Magny! I love Tia's understated vocals (the opposite of Magny's, by the way). This one album is the only document we have of the band. The renditions of "Polly Vaughn" and "Hangman" are respectively heartrending and poignant, but both wholly beautiful. Of course I heard "A Man of Constant Sorrow" in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and "Plastic Jesus" in Cool Hand Luke before I'd ever heard this album, so I wasn't sure what to think of these renditions, but they have grown on me and now I love them.