Essential

To celebrate the 70th birthday of England's foremost folk singer, the country's most original and innovative guitarist and a man with an almost scholarly yet entirely practical approach to its traditional songs (and dance tunes) Topic Records have done what is only right and proper, and released a double album of his finest work. It begins with ‘Scarborough Fair’, from his first album in 1965. It was this arrangement that Paul Simon, taking his cue from the rogues, vagabonds and highwaymen familiar from Mr Carthy's repertoire, famously made away with. It ends, two-and-a-half hours of magnificent music later, with his rendering of ‘The Harry Lime Theme’, which after playing it for years, continues to exercise Carthy, as if he feels he still hasn't quite got it. I think he has.

The great work of a long career is handsomely represented: there's the haunting ‘Lord Franklin’, written, some believe, by the missing arctic explorer's wife as a fund-raiser for a search expedition; ‘Prince Heathen’, vehement in its defiance of brutality; and the epic ‘Famous Flower of Serving Men, a cinematic 17th century ballad of medieval murder, disguise, magic, revelation and revenge. This is a song that Carthy has lived with for decades. BBC DJ John Peel told me that every time Carthy did a session for his show he played this, and that it grew longer every time. Here – from Waiting for Angels (2004) – it comes in at over ten minutes, every second gripping. Listening to Carthy change over the years is one of the many pleasures of the album. His young voice is ringing and strong (he first sang as a chorister at the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy) and it is interesting to hear, as it ages, how he negotiates the demands of ‘Famous Flower’ and ‘The Maid of Australia’. Another delight lies in his enduring musical collaborations, with fiddle player Dave Swarbrick on ‘Byker Hill’, with Brass Monkey on a terrific version of ‘Sovay’ and his wife Norma Waterson and daughter Eliza on ‘Rackabello’.

Some of Carthy's more adventurous work is missing; there's nothing from his stint in Steeleye Span nor with The Imagined Village. Fans will always wish for favourites omitted: in my case it's ‘Lord Randall’ and Carthy's setting of Brecht's ‘The Wife of the Soldier’. But this is a selected rather than a complete works. It is essential in both senses: the basic core of his art, and an album you have to have.