What is the best-selling album in folk music history?
The roots of folk music run deep through the ages. So many of the songs that we now know and hold in the folk canon can be traced back hundreds of years, to British or Irish ballads like ‘The Wild Rover’, ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Frog Went a-Courting’ or ‘Lord Randall’. Many of the songs were passed down through the ages, through the generations and through the ears of so many listeners that the original songwriters, if the songs even had them, have long since been forgotten.
Folk music has always, at its heart, been about telling stories, so maybe in that sense, the genre goes back even further than ‘Barbara Allen’, to Homer and the ancient Greeks who would have sung verses of the Odyssey and Iliad, recasting and recrafting the story as the telling demanded.
As time went by, the most popular songs would be the ones most likely to be requested again and again by audiences; the ones most likely to be taught to new players and singers, and so, the most likely to survive and endure. Into the early 20th century, the best way to chart the popularity of any song was through sales of sheet music. But even for so many folk songs passed down through the generations, more directly than that, this statistic was less reliable than for other popular forms, like ragtime and jazz.
With the invention and proliferation of recorded music, phonographs and gramophones early in the century, it had never been easier for a folk singer to reach an audience with their songs. And with the new medium, in the new world, and in the new times, a new canon of folk songs was being written. Woody Guthrie led the charge, and with songs like ‘This Land is Your Land’, ‘Old-Man Trump’ and ‘Tear the Fascists Down’, he wove a radical and compassionate political edge into his material.
Folk music had always been about the stories, but now, thanks to singers like Woody and Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston and Lead Belly, too, and then later on Pete Seeger and the Weavers, it became about the message, as well. It had never been about popularity, but as the messages started connecting with larger audiences, some singers spotted an opportunity in the ever-growing folk scene. By the early 1960s, folk music was just as much about popularity and selling records as it was about stories. Just like in every other genre, artists wanted to sell a million copies of their latest release. If they could impart a positive message at the same time, then so much the better. Groups like The Kingston Trio, The Seekers or Peter, Paul and Mary saw plenty of chart success with their folk sounds and styles.
It was exactly this push and pull between perceived authenticity and commerciality that tore the folk scene apart when the genre’s darling Bob Dylan famously ‘went electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Though Dylan and all of his disciples have continued to sing folk songs, to work in the folk tradition and to utilise the folk process, the popularity of the genre never really recovered since he, as his stage announcement used to go, “forced folk into bed with rock”. Folk music these days just seems to mean anything with an acoustic guitar on it. For a while back there in the 2010s, it looked like there might be a folk revival of sorts, but bands like Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers were even more commercially minded, and much less authentically folk, than The Kingston Trio ever were. Despite the title, Taylor Swift’s folklore album is folk in name only (although that’s not to say that it’s a bad album; it is full of good songs, just not necessarily folk songs).
But what was the biggest-selling album in folk music?
As the face of folk music, you’d expect Dylan to not only top the list of ‘Best Selling Folk Albums of All Time’, but to have multiple entries in the top ten. In fact, as much as he is a prolific writer and performer, he has never been a huge seller. In the 62 years since it first came out, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan has sold an estimated 4.2m copies, and, from a year later, The Times They Are a-Changin’ has sold just under three million. Even combined, that doesn’t equal the amount of units that Mumford & Sons shifted worldwide for their 2009 album, Sigh No More. If this were a discussion about the historical importance of folk albums, though, only one of these artists would be in the loop.
Nevertheless, plenty of other important folk records have sold far fewer copies than anything Dylan ever did. Ian & Sylvia had their biggest hit with Cowboyography, which sold about 100,000, while sales for Phil Ochs’ albums were regularly in the tens of thousands. Joan Baez was more successful than almost anyone else in the scene, with her eponymous debut selling into the multi-millions. But the biggest-selling folk album of all time came along right at the end of the last golden era for the genre and, thankfully, has even managed to keep Mumford & Sons from taking the top spot ever since.
Released in 1970, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water went on to sell over 12.5m copies, and it’s hard to see anyone from the folk realm outselling that any time soon.
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