Barton Hollow by The Civil Wars

Barton Hollow, the first full-length album from the Civil Wars, arrived on February 1, 2011, and it's a record built almost entirely on two voices. Joy Williams and John Paul White had only been working as a duo since 2008, and Charlie Peacock's production mostly stays out of their way: sparse arrangements and harmonies so close you can't always tell where one singer stops and the other begins. Folk, country and Americana get stitched together with a hushed, haunted air.

"Poison & Wine" had already surfaced on a 2009 EP, and its tender push-and-pull between the two singers is the emotional center here. The title track is the outlier, all swampy menace and stomp, and the pair took it to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno a few weeks before release. It paid off: Barton Hollow won Grammys for Best Folk Album and for Best Country Duo/Group Performance with the title song, and by August 2013 it had sold 623,000 copies in the US.

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