That movement, though essentially backward-looking, would help beget the protest folk era of the mid-1960s and, by extension, the seismic moment in pop culture when Bob Dylan strapped on an electric guitar at the Newport folk festival in 1965. In this elegantly-tooled volume, Adam Sweeting gets the lowdown on cover versions – the worst, the most popular, the most frequently recorded, the most successful, the stupidest, the most tasteless, the most influential, and the ones nobody got around to yet. Rob Young also includes pagan rites and rituals and how bands incorporated them into their image, with other references to films such as The Wicker Man and how that movie influenced a generation of magic seeking artists.

But reading Rob Young it’s hard not to feel as if you are being beaten softly with pillows each stuffed with ten thousand feathery folk facts which escape and float about until the air is thick with facts and factlets and facticles making you snort and sneeze as you plough, hack and heave yourself through these 600 pages PLUS notes PLUS timeline PLUS bibliography.

Like an elephant in a hot air balloon Rob Young’s gargantuan Observer’s Book of Folk comes wafting towards us on a breeze of critical hot air. An attempt to isolate the 'Britishness' of British music - a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity - Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain's folk music and Arcadian dreams. Electric Eden is that rare book which has something truly new to say about popular music, and like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces , it uses music to connect the dots in a thrilling story of art and society, of tradition and wild, idiosyncratic creativity.

This work chronicles her extraordinary life from the tragic accident that left her lame at the age of 14 to the writing of her novel from her death bed. The chapter closes with a squib on Raymond Williams, the Marxist literary critic who wrote a book, The Country and City, all about “the Matter of Britain,” though Williams’ ideas – to say nothing of William Empson, or E. After initially modeling what’s at stake in the recovery of the Sixties generation in the person of Vashti Bunyan, a folksinger who worked with the crucial producer-arranger Joe Boyd during the late Sixties, Young’s six hundred page history opens on a one-hundred page survey of the British modernist composers in their treatment of “the folk” – a frequently rehearsed theme, after all, in modernist and cultural studies.

It is an idyllic creation, and makes a fascinating counterpoint to the more Edenic aspects of his music – you could almost see it as an organic song inscribed in the landscape. He resurrects and contemplates the work of many lesser-known musicians, among them John Martyn, Mick Softley, Shirley Collins and Bill Fay.

Contemplating the bucolic cover image of an album by Heron, he sums it up perfectly: "John Constable has become court photographer to the counterculture.In the late 1960s, with popular culture hurtling forward on the sounds of rock music, some brave musicians looked back instead, trying to recover the lost treasures of English roots music and update them for the new age. Electric Eden constructs a new mythography out of old threads, making antiquity glow with an eerie hue. A career like Martyn’s deserves more than Electric Eden’s contextualization, and despite having interviewed Richard Thompson for this book, Young has almost nothing to say about him (Thompson, tellingly, didn’t give him much).