Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention

Liege & Lief, Fairport Convention's fourth album, came out on Island late in 1969 with Joe Boyd producing, and it's the record where the band stopped borrowing from America and dug into its own soil. They had reason to start over: earlier that year a crash on the M1 had killed drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson's girlfriend, and the group shelved most of its old repertoire.

What they built instead was ancient ballads plugged into electric amps. Sandy Denny sings like a messenger from a haunted century, Thompson and Simon Nicol's guitars snake around Dave Swarbrick's fiddle, and new drummer Dave Mattacks drives "Tam Lin" and "Matty Groves" like a rock band; originals such as "Crazy Man Michael" wear the same old clothes. Denny and Ashley Hutchings quit before it came out, yet it climbed to 17 in the UK, is often hailed as the first big British folk rock album, and listeners voting at the 2006 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards crowned it the most influential folk record ever made.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.