Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Essential Bluegrass Album

Before the sound– track to O Brother, Where Art Thou? roared up the charts, it's fair to say that few people outside the US truly cared about the elemental music of banjos, mandolins and guitars referred to as bluegrass. O Brother's soundtrack not only won young female singers Gillian Welsh and Alison Krauss a wide audience, it brought veteran banjo picker Ralph Stanley (and the music he made with his late brother Carter) a much greater audience than he had ever previously enjoyed. This brilliantly priced and superbly packaged compilation gathers up eight original Stanley Brothers tracks – what a mournful sound those two men made – alongside 12 tracks by Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys (the genre's godfathers) and many others, both well known and obscure.

Film buffs will recall how Flatt & Scruggs’ fluid picking wittily lit up several 1960s-era soundtracks, and they are of course represented here, while the Louvin Brothers’ songs of murder and faith are both beautiful and eerie – one can sense in their keen harmonies and folk song lyrics the isolated hillbilly communities where this music took shape. For those interested in American roots music, this double CD is a perfect introduction to the sound that arose out of Virginia's mountains