Billy Bragg Picks His Favorite Albums

Snakily be-dreadlocked chanteuse raised in Memphis, Tennessee, brings the gospel/country/blues roots for 2013.

What an incredible record. I've been listening to it every day for the last two weeks. I bored the band with it on the way to Belgium. My understanding is, she's from Tennessee. I heard her playing the first track live on "Woman's Hour" [on BBC Radio 4] in the car, would you believe, and I was just like, I... must remember — Valerie June. They didn't have it in the local store, so when I got home — I don't often just download things immediately, but I did, 'cos I liked the bits I heard.

I think the playing's amazing, the singing is great, the songwriting is just impeccable — great hooks, with echoes of all sorts of different styles. I don't even know if she wrote all the songs herself, or if someone else helped her write them. But a really great record, my favorite record of the year so far! I'm hoping I'm gonna get the chance to see her play at the Electric Picnic in Ireland in a couple of weeks, because she's on the bill. Just amazing.

Erstwhile backing combo for Faces/Small Faces legend Ronnie Lane keep his memory alive with a brand-new, barnstorming live set of his tunes.

I was a huge Ronnie Lane fan. I still am. He's probably the only artist whose CD never left my car, and that's saying something — I had this best-of under the dashboard. I was a big fan of the Faces, but when he left I thought they lost something that... they never found again. He just managed to bring together something really special ¬— he takes me to that sweet place somewhere between English music and American country music.

His old band Slim Chance have just got back together recently, I saw them at Glastonbury, and they've put an album out. Obviously Ronnie had an iconic voice, which is kind of irreplaceable, but keeping those songs alive, they're doing us all a favor by doing that, so more power to them.

So this is something contemporary, they're still out there doing it, and the fact that it harks back to the famous travelling show that Ronnie did, the picture on the cover, no-one's ever really done that thing — taking rock 'n' roll round in a tent, just setting up and playing — without permission! It's a crazy hippie type thing to do, but I'd love to do it. They did it in some old diesel van — there's great stories in that Faces biography about him doing it in the '70s — totally crazy, but you have to do those kind of things.

This year's second hook-up with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy for gospel-soul icon and sometime Staples Singer.

Since Mavis signed up with Anti-, she's made some great records. I'm a huge fan of The Staples Singers. Their album Soul Folk in Action — I mean, talk about folk-punk [as Bragg himself has been categorized], what a record that is. So to see her be reborn, initially working with Ry Cooder, now with Jeff Tweedy, I... think they've both been really sympathetic to what she does well. I did some shows with her in 2011, and she's still got the spark. She let me get up and sing [The Band's song] "The Weight" with her, in Los Angeles — how incredible is that? It blew my mind.

54-year-old Franco-Algerian maverick, this year blending North African raï with Western rock, funk and blues with typical garrulousness.

Rachid did an Arabic cover of "Rock the Casbah" [by the Clash], didn't he? I think I may have played with him at Glastonbury one time, when I was doing [Damon Albarn's] Africa Express. That thing tends to be a whole lot of people onstage all playing together, so we didn't hang out as such,... but he was a dude, an amazing guy. For someone from Algeria, he seemed to be pretty rock 'n' roll to me.

Proto-punk R&B guitar-mangler from Canvey Island, in mid-'80s, post-Dr Feelgood solo majesty.

He was down here [in Dorset] a couple of years ago; I took my son along to see him. It just blew his mind. Wilko was very important, coming from Essex, as I do. Much more important than that even, the Feelgoods were the British Ramones, in the sense that they woke everybody up to the possibility of going back to... basics. Wilko is our Johnny Ramone. He's the guy who says, "You can look like a dork, and still be cool." And for those of us that already looked like dorks, that was visionary!

I remember seeing him on the television, and it just did my head in, as a guitar player who at the time was being fed images of Peter Frampton as a guitar hero. You know? Wilko Johnson invented punk just by doing up the top button of his shirt — that's all he had to do, to invent it. He pointed us the way. I didn't ever see him in Canvey back in the day, sadly, but I did see him in Bridgeport last year. That was pretty good.

Ira Lonnie Loudermilk and Charlie Elzer Loudermilk, aka the Louvins, were one of country music's finest old-time duos — here, in fine, god-fearing mood in '59.

One of the greatest country records ever made, if only for the cover — it's a picture of them standing in front of the flaming coals of hell. I love the Louvins for their pure harmony style. They were very influential on the Everly Brothers, and Simon... & Garfunkel. Their songs are just so sad. Someone usually dies in the first verse, or the second, or sometimes they save it right until the end.

But for me it's that high lonesome sound that they've got, which still resonates. If you ever spend any time driving round Appalachia in the United States of America, the Louvin Brothers provide the ideal soundtrack. And there's some crazy Christian songs, too, like "I Love the Christian Life," as covered by the Byrds in Sweetheart Of The Rodeo — that's on here.

Scion of the Guthrie folk dynasty strikes out in more alt-rockin' direction for 2013, in team-up with her hubby Johnny.

Sarah Lee I know, obviously, from working with the Guthrie family [on Bragg & Wilco's 1997 collection of unrecorded Woody songs, Mermaid Avenue]. She's a great songwriter as well, and this record, I think, really speaks for her talent as herself. She's moving away from being Woody Guthrie's granddaughter, and coming into her... own now, and I think that's really great to hear. Broadly, I guess it's Americana, and Woody's almost like the father of that, but she's getting her own spin on that now, getting an edge on it, moving out of the shadow of her parents' generation, which includes Arlo Guthrie of course, and into something altogether her own.

Malian Afro-blues troupe, who wield electric guitars with the same defiance as they do AK-47s, in their sideline as political freedom fighters.

They're great. The rhythmic aspect to what they do is so hypnotic, I really, really like that. There's a tiny little bit of that griot playing in the first track on that Valerie June record — she does this weird little rhythm that made me think I must go back and... rediscover some of that stuff, like Tinariwen.

The irrepressible Eric Goulden, wildcat songsmith of New Wave-era proto-indie Stiff Records, as-was in 1980.

A great album, one of my favorite releases on the old Stiff label. Wreckless Eric, again, is almost forgotten now in the pantheon of punk songwriters, and if remembered at all, it's usually for his first album, rather than this, which is his second. But this has got some great songs on it: "Broken Doll" is an amazing... song — I've always wanted to do a cover of it. In fact, Cliff Richard did a version once, I read somewhere. I don't think my flabber could be more ghasted than by the idea of Cliff covering Wreckless.

He's maybe best known for "Whole Wide World," off the first record — I hear my son playing that some nights on his guitar. I saw him play a few times, he was in vogue at Go! Discs [Bragg's old label] for a while, under his real name, Eric Goulden, so I knew him in that period. He was pretty hairy — pretty out there. He didn't have the same self-control, that knotted, chip-on-his-shoulder sensibility that early Elvis Costello had. He kind of let it go. He started out like that, but then he had a few too many drinks, and slept in his clothes. But we've all done that — I certainly have! He's still out there somewhere, still gigging.

Bawdy Anglo-Irish chanteuse, whose cover of Bragg's "A New England" charted high in '85. Tragically, she died at sea in 2000.

A brilliant, brilliant record. You have to understand, Kirsty was the real deal. She was an incredible songwriter, but also an amazing singer. When she makes a record that has both "Walking Down Madison" with Johnny [Marr] on it, and "My Affair," which sounds like something Bette Midler would record — there's... an amazing mind at work there. I know she wasn't a confident performer, she didn't like going out on the road, but when she did, it was amazing.

By the look of things here, it also has me and her dueting on a song called "Darling, Let's Have Another Baby." Hang onto your hat here — it was the B-side of a Johnny Moped single on Chiswick, back in the '70s. Kirsty and I both had our first records out on Chiswick, at the same time — me with Riff Raff [Billy's punk combo], and she was part of a group called the Drug Addix. Chiswick put three EPs out at the same time, and called it Suburban Rock 'n' Roll, all people from outside London. It was the Duke, Riff Raff and the Drug Addix.

Because she'd been on Chiswick, she was familiar with Johny Moped. We were on the Nicky Campbell Show, and we decided to have a go at "Darling Let's Have Another Baby," which is a great song. [Quoting lyric] "Let's make one soon, on our second honeymoon." [Calls it up on computer, song plays in background] Yeah, this is the stuff! [Quoting again] "Darling, if you ever leave me, I'll cry a million tears/ I'll go to the nearest boozer, and drink 10 pints of beer."

There's a Johnny Moped movie? A biopic, with Johnny Depp playing Johnny Moped? That would be so fucking great. Oh, it's a documentary. [A little disappointed.] Oh, OK.

Utterly classic, none-more-English album of New Wave-era observations of East London, set to visionary, Clash-influencing blend of jazz/funk/reggae/blues.

Again, the "Essex man" thing. That really came totally out of leftfield. I'd always locked into Stiff via Elvis Costello, who was a hero of mine. But when you're coming out with stuff like "Billericay Dickie" and "Plaistow Patricia" and "Clever Trevor"…Yeah, it was a world I knew.

That's what punk was all about. It... brought rock 'n' roll home. It was away from the stadiums and the glitter. That shop he's standing outside of on the cover, we had shops like that in Barking — big shop fronts, with loads of hand-written signs. His love of place, I found that really inspirational. That's something I tried to connect with, both in my songwriting, but also in my book, The Progressive Patriot.

Are you familiar with the song, "England's Glory," that's on this Deluxe Edition? He originally wrote it for Max Wall [slapstick comedian]. It's a great song, amazing. It should be our national anthem, really.