Michelle Shocked — The Texas Campfire Tapes

In 1986 Pete Lawrence, an English music enthusiast on his first trip to the United States and the founder of a label that barely existed yet, walked the campgrounds of the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas and heard someone playing at a fire. He asked her to run through some songs. He had a Sony Walkman cassette recorder with him. That tape became an album.

The songs are Michelle Shocked's, sung without amplification, without a second take and without any expectation that anyone beyond the circle would hear them. The crickets sit as high in the mix as the guitar. A freight train passes and lays down an accidental drone under one of the performances. Nothing is corrected because nothing could be.

Cooking Vinyl released it in 1986; it went to number one on the British independent chart and launched a career that Shocked had not yet agreed to have. It was remastered and expanded in 2003 as the two-disc Texas Campfire Takes.