Shirley Collins: Sweet England (Topic Records)

As a live-in assistant to the folk musicologist Alan Lomax, this influential, long-silenced folk singer from near Hastings in East Sussex recorded her debut album over two days in 1958 at the age of 23. Accompanying herself on blunt but soulful banjo, the pure, unembellished voice is open and unmannered, delivering a peculiarly fragile power. There is interesting realism in The Cherry Tree Carol (a row between the Virgin Mary and Joseph), the children's ditties (with Lomax oinking in the background), sad love songs like Barbara Allen, or ballads of Dick Turpin, murder and black war. The remastering is a bit headachey on the treble - and hark the shameless echo on The Cuckoo - but this is a thing of strange, spooky beauty.

Ben Lennon & Friends: The Natural Bridge (Clo IarChonnachta)

With the bouncey pianos, this has a relaxed, untidy, ceili feel, but swing with the lived-in fiddle of this infectious Leitrim septuagenian, playing with his famous brother, Charlie, son Brian, Maurice (his viola making a lovely job of Rattigan's/The Collfer's), banjo expert John Carty, Gabriel McArdle on vocals/ concertina, Garry O Briain and others. Out on his own (Johnny Hen- ry's, or McDermott's hornpipe), Lennon well catches the groove of old gramophone 78s, and apart from drawled unison on reels, mazurkas, hornpipes, jigs, barndances and the grinning wheeze of the Primrose Polka, he doesn't miss a trick on the uptempo Boys of Ballisodare. Solid and swoony with casual expressiveness, he's recorded in Meehan's Bar in Kiltyclogher under the homey, unforced archiving philosophy of Clo-Iar-Chonnachta.