In this season’s finale, we cover the sixth and final album in your Vanguard box set, Skip James’ Today! James’ signing to Vanguard represented the logical endpoint for a movement started in the mid ’50s, by a wave of artists and record collectors who obsessed over the 78s of old, forgotten bluesmen. At some point in the early ’60s, some of these players and collectors started actively hunting down the old bluesmen whose records they obsessed over. In this episode, we talk with Elijah Wald about Skip’s rediscovery, and how he wasn’t content to play to type when touring in the ’60s. We also talk about how Today! presented Skip James to a new generation.  

In this episode, we cover the fifth album in your box, Doc Watson’s self-titled debut album. Doc was somewhere in between Joan Baez and Skip James, in terms of his age and novelty in the folk revival. Losing his eyesight at age 2, and spending his days and nights absorbing generations of Appalachian folk tunes, Doc was “discovered” in his late 30s by Ralph Rinzler, who recognized Doc’s unique talents, and realized he’d do well on the coffeehouse and folk circuit.  Through a rare quirk in the bands he was in, in order to be heard properly in the outdoor venues he often played, he transposed the main instrument of Appalachian folk — the fiddle — to an acoustic guitar, developing a flat picking style, where he both plucked and picked at his guitar strings, playing dexterous, complicated riffs that rang through the clamor of a get down.  In this episode, we talk with Elijah Wald, who, in addition to being a blues and folk writer and historian, admires Watson as a guitar player, as Wald has played in traditional blues and folk bands inspired by him. Here we talk about Watson’s unlikely rise to folk fame, why his guitar playing stood out and the mechanics of flat picking.

In this episode, we cover the fourth album in your box, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s debut LP, It’s My Way! It’s hard to find a folk debut as daring, jarring and impactful as Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Vanguard debut in 1964. That year, folk was at its highest peak of popularity, the same year Beatlemania made landfall on American shores, but there was no performer in music as direct as Sainte-Marie. And few were as prolific. As she told writer Andrea Warner for her authorized biography, she had written somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 songs by the time she recorded her debut.  In this episode, we talk with folk and blues scholar and writer Elijah Wald about how after the explosion following Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie — who, just 4 years earlier, might have been a risk for Vanguard — was part of a continuum of folk singers exploding at the time. We talk about how Buffy was both outside the mainstream, but also part of the wave of performers who benefitted from emerging college radio. We also talk about how underrated Sainte-Marie is, and how she’s one of the best folk songwriters of the era. 

This fourth episode of this season of the VMP Anthology Podcast is devoted to Joan Baez, whose self-titled Vanguard debut is the third album in your VMP Anthology box set devoted to Vanguard and the folk explosion. It’s hard to put into context now, but when Baez hit the folk scene in 1959, she was like a one-woman atom bomb, the biggest star the scene had ever seen, by a considerable margin. Where the Weavers could put a single on the charts on random larks, Baez’s self-titled debut was a chart behemoth, to date still the best selling record in Vanguard history.   To help put Baez in proper context, we talk with Elizabeth Thomson, who in 2020 published The Last Leaf, an extensive biography of Baez that culminates in her final shows before Baez retired. Here, Thomson checks in from her home in London and discusses how Joan became famous, her debut album, her relationship with Bob Dylan and why Thomson wrote her book on Baez.   Listeners can order Joan Baez: The Last Leaf from IPG and get $10 off by either by phone or email using offer code JoanBaez21 by contacting one of the below:   Phone: (800) 888-4741   E-mail: orders@ipgbook.com

In the third episode of our series on the folk label Vanguard, we cover the story of Odetta’s My Eyes Have Seen. The 1959 record solidified Odetta’s place, both as a notable artist and as a voice and central figure in the Civil Rights Movement.  To explore Odetta, this album and her music — and why they both deserve to be more widely recognized and discussed for their contributions — we talk to historian and professor in Yale’s American Studies program, Matthew Frye Jacobson, who also penned the 33 ⅓ book about Odetta’s One Grain of Sand.

In this episode, we’ll start to dive into the albums in your box set, starting with The Weavers’ second album, At Carnegie Hall.  Recorded live at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Christmas Eve, 1955, and released in 1957, the record  paved the way for Vanguard’s entry into the folk world, saved the Weavers’ from the entertainment industry blacklist and was a catalyst for the folk boom. To explore this album, VMP sat down with Jesse Jarnow, the author of the book Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America, to talk about the story of the album’s creation, the true radical nature of The Weavers, McCarthyism and more.

The first episode of our podcast on The Story of Vanguard,  the 10th edition of VMP’s Anthology box set series, will set the scene for the rest of your box and give you an overview of Vanguard, its importance, as well as the state of folk music at large in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when the albums contained in this box were first released.  Before we dive into the music of The Weavers, Odetta, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Doc Watson and Skip James, learn from Ronald Cohen — professor emeritus of history at Indiana University Northwest and a leading scholar on folk music — about the backstory of the label, New York as an epicenter of folk and how to define folk music.

In this final episode of season 9, we cover the final two albums in your Metal Blade Anthology, Amon Amarth's Twilight of the Thunder God and Armored Saint's La Raza. In this episode, our host J. Bennett talks to Amon Amarth's Johan Soderberg about one of their biggest albums, and Armored Saint's John Bush about the band's comeback album. 

In this fourth episode of the new season of the VMP Anthology podcast, we discuss the third set of albums in your VMP Anthology: The Story of Metal Blade box set: King Diamond's Voodoo and The Black Dahlia Murder's Miasma. In this episode, our host J. Bennett talks to King Diamond about his underrated classic and to Trevor Strnad of the Black Dahlia Murder about their breakthrough LP. 

In the third episode of this season of the VMP Anthology podcast, we cover the second set of albums in your box set: Gwar's America Must Be Destroyed and Cannibal Corpse's Butchered at Birth. In this episode, J. Bennett talks to Mike Bishop from Gwar, and Alex Webster from Cannibal Corpse, about the controversy that surrounded both bands