Once heard, 1969’s Spirit of the Golden Juice is not forgotten. F. J. McMahon’s sole album is imbued with the heavy air of desolation. Its nine country tinged songs are also melodic and as good as those by Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, with whom McMahon is most often compared. Unlike them, McMahon had not steered a path through the folk circuit to achieve recognition.

Close your eyes and be transported. Not just to Greenwich Village, New York and America’s west, but to Copenhagen, Belfast and Swansea, from whence Dylan Thomas – dedicatee of “The Sparrow of Swansea” – set out on his adventures. The album was recorded in Austin, Texas, and the spirit and the sound of such country music greats as Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins and Roy Orbison permeate the music.

Russell is an architect of “Americana” and his mighty fistful of albums includes a series of folk operas, including the much-lauded Rose of Roscrae. His songs have been recorded by Cash, Doug Sahm and Nanci Griffith, among others, and then there’s his prose and his art, some of which adorns Folk Hotel. Russell is a genuine polymath who can indeed stand tall “in boots that have walked 10,000 miles”.

His sleeve note is brief: “My mind is an old folk hotel in the Village, haunted by troubadour ghosts who sang songs that will never escape my soul.” Nor should they, for those ghosts made music which will forever endure. The cover painting suggests the streets around Washington Square, the beating heart of the folk scene long before Bob Dylan hit town. The Hotel to which he refers could easily be the old Earle, where Dylan and Joan Baez and many of their confrères (whose presence you sense in these songs) lived and where Dylan Thomas stayed when he wasn’t at the Chelsea. A Russell painting of the latter adorns the CD.

No matter the style (traditional folk here, a touch of mariachi there, a cowboy song, talking blues) or the subject, Russell inhabits every track, his sometimes world-weary voice masterfully accompanied by guitar, the verses occasionally punctuated by harmonica. He’s both storyteller and guide, leading us down the foggy ruins of time in the company of such figures as James Joyce, Joseph Mitchell, JFK, Hank Williams and Ian Tyson in songs replete with literary and historical allusion. His ballad for Dylan Thomas is poignant indeed and the imagery of “All on a Belfast Morning” raises a smile: “Spanish Frankie with his ironmonger’s nose”, the cat “licking at her whiskers in a puddle”. “

The CD includes two bonus tracks: a cover of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, gentler and more empathetic than the Bob Dylan original, on which Russell trades verses with Joe Ely, and “Scars on His Ankles”, a tribute to the great Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Buy Folk Hotel and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, dim the lights and settle into a comfy chair. It’s all the company you need.

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Overleaf: Eight minute film in which Tom Russell talks about his Folk Hotel album

After the gruelling five-hour coach journey to Powys, Wales, we strolled over a bridge into Glanusk Park, through two security guards, and into Green Man with only so much as a sing-song “Bore da”. Satisfied, we picked a spot and set up camp in the intense heat. Young Welsh scholars waved their A-level results in the air and cracked open that first bottle of cider, quaint middle-class families eagerly discussing the multitude of vegan opportunities.

Dylan aficionados will get the cover art reference immediately: one of Elliott Landy’s celebrated Woodstock photos, taken in 1968.

August is often a quiet month on the release front but theartsdesk on Vinyl came across a host of music deserving of attention. Now that even Sony, one of the biggest record companies in the world, are starting to press their own vinyl again, it’s safe to say records aren’t disappearing quite yet. On the contrary, the range of material is staggering in its breadth. So this month we review everything from spectral folk to boshing techno to the soundtrack of Guardians of The Galaxy 2.

According to Pete Frame’s book Rock Family Trees, Fairport Convention had 15 different line-ups between 1968 and 1978, the period covered by the new box set Come All Ye – The First 10 Years. Fairport Convention #7, extant from November 1971 to February 1972, featured no one from the first three iterations of the band, which had taken them up to June 1969. Evidently, the actuality of Fairport Convention is fluid.

Offa was an Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, and now his name is attached to this outstanding collaboration between English singer and multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney and Portland indie band The Decemberists. The record draws on Seventies English folk rock and the songs largely comprise gems from the British tradition.

For an act that hasn't visited the UK since 2009, the Indigo Girls might have been surprised at the audience's familiarity with their work. It’s now a given that artists have to tour to sell records, but judging by the vigour with which the audience in Islington joined in with the songs, sometimes in an informal call-and-response, the UK must provide a good flow of royalties. And no doubt absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Between them, Marylebone Beat Girls and Milk of the Tree cover the years 1964 to 1973. Each collects tracks recorded by female singers: whether credited as solo acts, fronting a band or singer-songwriters performing self-penned material. That the two compilations dovetail is coincidental – they were released by different labels on the same day – but they embrace the period when the singer-songwriter was codified and when, as the liner notes of Milk of the Tree put it, “female voices began to be widely heard in the [music] industry.”

The Time Has Come was issued in late 1971. Anne Briggs’ second album and her second to reach shops that year, it followed an eponymous set released that April. That was on the folk label Topic and produced by the pivotal A. L. Lloyd, who had been key to propagating Britain’s traditional music since the late 1930s.