THE FOLK PROCESS

From Antifogmatic (2010). Despite the old-time title, it's a Punch Brothers original. Mandolin, banjo, fiddle, guitar and bass, all going flat out: the string-band line-up the folk process handed down, played by a band whose mandolinist has also recorded Bach.

Recorded on 3 December 1927. There are no words: Johnson hums and moans over a slide guitar, played, by most accounts, with a knife rather than a bottleneck. The title comes from a 1792 hymn, and in 1977 NASA sent the recording into space on the Voyager Golden Record.

Cooder called "Dark Was the Night" "the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music" and built the title theme for Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984) on it. Same slide, same open space, nearly sixty years later.

From Talking Timbuktu (1994), Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder's album together, which won a Grammy. Touré sings in Bambara. His Malian guitar lines and Cooder's slide sit together so easily that it's hard to say where one tradition stops.

John Lomax, who recorded Vera Hall for the Library of Congress, said she had the loveliest voice he had ever recorded. Unaccompanied and under two minutes. Hold on to the melody: it comes straight back in the next track.

Moby built it from loops of Hall's 1937 recording, which he found on a box set of folk music compiled by Alan Lomax; Hall and Lomax share the writing credit. Listen to how little he changes. The voice is hers, the beat and the chords around it are his.

From All Is Well, recorded in Iceland with Valgeir Sigurðsson producing. Amidon takes old songs and reharmonises them, and Nico Muhly wrote the chamber arrangements around his voice. The tune is old; the arrangement is new.

From Folk Roots, New Routes (1964). Shirley Collins sings an old riddling song in an arrangement credited to Cecil Sharp, and Davy Graham plays guitar under it with an ear for modal jazz and North African scales. Critics hear a template for the folk-rock that followed.

Recorded on 24 April 1963 for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The tune is "Nottamun Town" as Jean Ritchie arranged it; the song had been in her family for generations, and Dylan's lawyers settled with her for $5,000.

Jansch recorded his arrangement of the traditional Irish song for Jack Orion (1966). Listen to the guitar more than the voice: the droning bass strings with the melody threaded through them are what travelled next.

Recorded at Olympic Studios in October 1968 for Led Zeppelin's first album, and credited to Jimmy Page alone. Page learned Jansch's arrangement through Al Stewart, played it in DADGAD tuning on a borrowed guitar, and added Viram Jasani on tabla.

Bartók wrote the dances for piano in 1915 from seven Romanian tunes collected in Transylvania, first played on fiddle or shepherd's flute, and scored them for small orchestra in 1917. Six dances in about six minutes, each one gone before you've settled in.

Ewan MacColl wrote it in 1949 about Salford, where he grew up, for a play called Landscape with Chimneys. The Pogues recorded it for Rum Sodomy & the Lash (1985), produced by Elvis Costello. Thirty-six years old, and it already sounds like it was always there.

Gillian Welch wrote it, but Emmylou Harris recorded it first, on Wrecking Ball (1995). Welch's own version opens Revival (1996), produced by T Bone Burnett. A new song, written in the oldest idiom on the record.

Dvořák wrote the New World Symphony in America, and the New York Philharmonic gave the first performance in December 1893. The cor anglais tune in this Largo was fitted with words in 1922 by his former pupil William Arms Fisher, as the spiritual-style song "Goin' Home".

Vaughan Williams used the old tune in his opera Sir John in Love (1928). Ralph Greaves arranged this version for strings, harp and flute in 1934. The middle section is a different folk song, "Lovely Joan", which Vaughan Williams suggested himself.

Canteloube arranged folk songs of the Auvergne for soprano and orchestra between 1923 and 1930, keeping their Occitan words. In "Baïlèro" a shepherdess calls to a shepherd across the water, and the long refrain floats between them. Patricia Rozario sings it here.