Henry the Human Fly

After leaving Fairport Convention but before he began recording with his wife Linda, with whom he rewrote the British folk-rock rule book, Richard Thompson made this odd but thoroughly delightful album under his own name. Here we see intimations of just about everything to come in his long and celebrated career: the puckish and unabashedly Anglophilic humor (“Roll Over Vaughn Williams”), the bone-deep assimilation of British folk tradition (“Nobody’s Wedding”), and the tendency to lapse into black despair (“The Poor Ditching Boy”). And, of course, the guitar solos — unspooling with apparently limitless invention in a tone and style completely his own. He was 23 years old.