If you had walked into Doc Watson’s house in June of 1963, you might have found him tearing open a package of Folkways LPs and laying the needle down on one of these songs.

In the early 1960s, Folkways Records sent Doc a sampling of albums from their catalog at the request of his promoter, Ralph Rinzler, then an emerging folklorist, who had conducted some freelance work for the label. A list of these records was preserved in correspondence between Doc and Ralph and recently unearthed by the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections staff. We compiled our favorite tracks for this playlist.

Read more about the correspondence and its discovery here.