And the picking, too, is superb: "Cripple Creek", an instrumental breakdown, barely lasts a minute and a half, but both Garcia's banjo and the guitar-playing are equal to that of any major folk festival habitués of the time.

Only a few years from dashing headlong into the neon-pulsing present tense of LSD, Garcia and others first dove deep into a mythic past that seemed to come alive in the grooves of old records and zoetrope-like flicker between banjo rolls.

"[9] On jambands.com, Kristopher Weiss said, "Keeping in mind that this set was never intended as anything other than a one-off college radio broadcast and certainly never envisioned as a commercial release — particularly 54 years after the fact — Folk Time is remarkably solid.

And given that it provides Deadheads a chance to hear Garcia as he's never been heard before and regular music lovers a glimpse of the Grateful Dead's roots, it stands as a critically important missing link to the vaunted San Francisco sound, folk, bluegrass and the catchall known as Americana.

The 54-year-old recording has been vividly restored, entirely blemish free.... Before Bob Dylan had blown up, before John Hartford and Sam Bush created newgrass music, before the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band bridged rock and bluegrass, there was the Hart Valley Drifters.