Dear Companion

A founding member of Philadelphia’s psych-folk group Espers, Meg Baird strips away the psych for her first solo album and records a pure, unadorned folk album that would fit comfortably alongside the Folkways catalog or the traditional releases of the 1960s Vanguard label. The rightful contemporaries for Dear Companion are not anything from 2007 — not even her peers in the freak-folk movement — but the early works of Joan Baez, Richard and Mimi Farina, Judy Collins and Sandy Denny. Baird tackles traditional material (“Dear Companion,” “The Cruelty of Barbary Allen,” “Sweet William and Fair Ellen,” “Willie O’Winsbury”), obscure, well-chosen covers (Chris Thompson’s “River Song,” Jimmy Webb’s “Do What You Gotta Do”) and two originals (“Riverhouse in Tinicum,” “Maiden in the Moor Lay”) that could have come from centuries past. Baird double-tracks and harmonizes with herself, supporting most of these songs with little more than beautifully finger-picked acoustic guitar, the occasional dulcimer and random percussion. It’s an unexpected, unpretentious delight.