That we have King Curtis and Don Covay’s Music for Dancing: The Twist with us at all in the 21st century is sort of a minor miracle. That this set even got recorded and released in 1961 was entirely a matter of market happenstance, since the LP was never meant to be more than an attempt to cash in on the dance craze that Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” had created at the time. DJs in the clubs needed more Twist tracks to spin and practically anything with that name attached to it would get a shot, so to that end, King Curtis (a tenor saxophonist who was mostly known at that time for his session work on the Coasters’ hits) and his club band were brought into a New York studio to record a half dozen Twist tracks as quickly as possible, with the balance of the sessions spent on amped-up versions of big band hits from the 1930s and 1940s. A vocalist was needed, though, and Don Covay — then at the start of his career and in town looking for a deal — was called in to sing. Everything was done quickly and the resulting LP was released by RCA Records soon after the sessions ended in 1961. It sold a few copies because it had the word Twist in the title, and then the pop world spun on to the next big new thing, like it always did, and that was that.

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Jackie Mittoo moved from his native Jamaica to Toronto, Canada in 1968 and quickly threw his hat into the local music scene, bringing with him his funky reggae keyboard sensibility. He had some chart success with the infectious instrumental “Wishbone” (based, it would appear, on the central riff from the Beatles’ “Carry That Weight”) in 1971, and released the supporting album Wishbone that same year. A joyous, upbeat affair that wasn’t reggae at all, but a cosmopolitan mix of soul, funk, gospel, jazz, and fusion with a subtle and compelling Jamaican underside, the Wishbone LP became a rare and sought-after collector’s classic.

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With his background as a television soundtrack and jingles arranger, and his deep knowledge of the history of jazz and popular orchestration, George Tipton was the perfect collaborator for Harry Nilsson in the late ’60s, and he helped bring Nilsson’s wonderfully skewed version of pop music to life on a series of classic albums that flirted with commercial appeal even as they gleefully undermined that appeal with deliberate quirkiness. At some point Nilsson and Tipton reportedly had a falling out, but before that happened, Tipton released this charming set of Nilsson tunes reassembled and reshaped as MOR instrumental fare in 1970.

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Bob Dylan transformed songwriting in the 20th century by dumping everything into a creative blender, from beat poetry to ancient ballads restrung with vibrantly new lyrics, and he has been inherently post modern, well aware-even if it was by accident-of how to navigate the emerging ocean of pop culture and the blessing/curse of celebrity. And he’s done it with his integrity and privacy intact–quite a feat. And he’s done it, for the most part, in public-he releases studio albums regularly, tours in never ending fashion, and since 2006, he has hosted Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour on the airwaves. His shows aren’t just some celebrity DJ spinning favorite records (although Dylan obviously loves what he spins on the air) but are really concise history lessons in American music in all genres and eras, from blues, folk and country to jazz, R&B, soul, rock & roll, bebop, country, and even rap and spoken word, embracing the entire spectrum of ordered recorded sound from the early 1900s forward. Releases like this one, which collects 110 of the sides Dylan has spun on his show, reveal just how impressive all of it is. From an incredibly diverse litany of recording artists that includes Mel Blanc, Lefty Frizzell, Ike Turner, Brenda Lee, Steve Allen, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Cousin Emmy, Billie Holiday, Peppermint Harris and many, many others, Dylan clusters songs around themes ranging from powerful topics like money, war and happiness to whimsical ones like fruit, cats, sugar and candy, until what he has assembled is a delightfully varied playlist of what we have been singing about, complaining about, celebrating, berating, adoring and bemoaning about for the past two hundred years. Dylan’s own recorded legacy is a testament to his searching intelligence and vision, but so, too, is his radio show. He instinctively understands that the whole history of recorded music is available in the 21st century, that it is, in a sense, all of it contemporary, and all of it is swept together on the digital highway. His show sorts through it and finds connections. Call it a fascinating call and response dialogue with America. Hopefully everyone is listening.

People Take Warning!, a three-disc, 70-track collection of murder ballads and disaster songs originally released on commercial 78s between 1913 and 1938 is, in spite of the archaic song structures and often crude sonic qualities on display, strangely contemporary in tone and feel, maybe because we’ve always been drawn to the scene of the accident, and even in this 21st century world of the Internet and all-day, all-night news channels, that’s still as true as it ever was. We just don’t write songs about such things so much anymore these days, and since one can just flip on the TV to get up to speed on the latest round of personal, local, and global tragedies, that’s probably understandable. A quaint view of why these old songs were so popular back in the day is to say that’s how the news traveled back then, but that wouldn’t be true. The news media in the early 1900s in America was every bit as dogged and sensational as it is now, and these tragic songs didn’t carry the news so much as give it all a community focus, functioning as street-corner sermons, cautionary tales, or just plain gossip given melody. Some of these songs are straight observational narratives, but some of them have definite agendas. There’s a big difference here, for instance, between Charley Patton’s two-part personal epic “High Water Everywhere,” recorded in 1929 and containing Patton’s chilling appraisal of the Mississippi flood from two years earlier and the way it was handled, and Elder Curry’s sanctified “Memphis Flu” from 1930, which determines the influenza epidemic of that same year was God’s stern judgment on the moral paucity of the human species. Both songs carry news, and news that is deeply tragic, but to quite different ends and purposes.

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The Marketts weren’t a band in the standard sense, but a collection of veteran Los Angeles session players assembled by producer Joe Saraceno to capitalize on the emerging surf music scene of the early 1960s. Loosely known as “the wrecking crew,” and including, among others, guitarists Tommy Tedesco and Rene Hall, sax player Plas Johnson, bassist Jimmy Gordon, and drummers Earl Palmer and Ed Hall, the so-called Marketts probably had more in common with 1940s jazz than they did Dick Dale, and the charming collection of shuffles, stomps and trippy lounge jazz they produced for the surf market is really a genre all its own. The group’s first single, 1962’s “Surfer’s Stomp” b/w “Balboa Blue,” is indicative, featuring a lazy, sax-led shuffle on the A-side, reprising the same rhythm on “Balboa Blue,” only with a different melody line (again led by Johnson’s sax), that generates a leisurely, joyous, and infectious groove. It was wonderful stuff, and while this version of the Marketts (they were really more a brand than a group) was marketed as a surf outfit, their gentle merging of R&B and small combo swing is really something else again, a style that — for lack of a better term — might be called “surf jazz.”

By all accounts, Tom Darby and Jimmie Tarlton were an acrimonious duo, thrown together more by opportunity than any pressing desire to play music together, but in spite of the tension between them (or maybe because of it), the body of work they recorded together for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1933 is as singular and distinctive as any in early country or blues. Both were fine guitar players, with Darby generally handling the lead vocals and Tarlton the harmonies, but the difference maker was Tarlton’s striking slide guitar style. Tarlton played with the guitar in his lap Hawaiian style, and reportedly fretted it with a wrist pin from a car. His slide lines give everything the duo recorded an eerie, exotic presence that, coupled with their impeccable vocals, makes them utterly unique.

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Although marketed as a surf band, Minnesota’s Trashmen were decidedly landlocked by geography, but not by spirit. The group’s odd mix of surf, R&B, sneering garage pop, and psychotic instrumentals made them one of the most eccentric and interesting of the groups that sprang up around the surf craze of the early 1960s. Essentially a northern cover band that wasn’t afraid to take chances, the Trashmen played every gig like it was Saturday night. Sundazed’s Live Bird ‘65-’67 collects several rare live tracks of the band in action on the dance circuit, and it captures the kind of offhand, humorous dementia that they channeled into their shows, climaxing in a near-six minute version of the group’s wacky masterpiece, the manic “Surfin’ Bird.” But this was a surprisingly versatile and nimble band, and their live versions of Booker T. & the MGs’ “Green Onions” and James Brown’s “Mashed Potatoes” spotlight a funky little R&B groove, while “Same Lines” sneers along with the best of 1960s garage punk, and “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” is skillfully executed faux doo wop. Two of the songs in the Live Bird set, “Bird Dance Beat” and “King of the Surf,” were recorded at the Home School for Girls at the Saux Centre in Minnesota in 1966, and the mere thought of young, impressionable girls listening to this band of goofy maniacs is a sobering one.