Give a Damn - The Folk-Rock Years

Although the Johnstons are most known for their recordings of traditional folk material, this 1968 album saw them going in a folk-rock-pop direction with fair artistic success. Fans of Fairport Convention's early work could do much worse than to check this (and the Johnstons' 1969 album, Bitter Green) out, though it's not as good as Fairport Convention, and more tilted toward folk-pop than Fairport was. Nevertheless, there are solid treatments of largely then-contemporary folk-rock material by writers like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Dave Cousins (of the Strawbs). Though the arrangements use only mild rock instrumentation (and a good amount of mild pop orchestration), they work well with the group's gentle, pleasing harmonies. In addition to interpreting songs by the well-known folk-rock composers mentioned above, they also take on a couple of Jacques Brel numbers, Ewan MacColl's "Sweet Thames Flow Softly," and works by lesser-known authors that have a melodic late-'60s folk-pop bent.