Koch's reissue of AT CARNEGIE HALL! restores all 32 cuts from the original 1962 two-LP release.

Flatt & Scruggs: Lester Flatt (guitar); Earl Scruggs (banjo).

Additional personnel: Burkett H. "Buck" Graves, Billy E. Powers (guitar); Paul Warren (violin); English P. Tullock, Jr. (bass).

Producers: Don Law, Frank Jones.

Reissue producer: Dave Nives.

Recorded live at Carnegie Hall, New York, New York on December 8, 1962. Originally released on Columbia (8845).

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were big news at the height of the late '50s/early '60s folk revival. New York City was essentially ground zero for a mania that extended to all things musical and Southern. So something of a love-fest occurred when Flatt and Scruggs and their polished bluegrass band rolled into town on one December night in 1962 to play no less a venue than Carnegie Hall.

There are screams from the crowd for "Martha White" (the theme song from the band's radio sponsor), and Scruggs has no choice but to encore the banjo showpiece "Flint Hill Special." To know what the Foggy Mountain Boys sounded like in their natural habitat, you'd have to go to transcripts of the band playing a school auditorium or radio hour somewhere south of the Jersey Turnpike. CARNEGIE HALL still gives you a taste of how Flatt and Scruggs put together a show before their original band disintegrated under the weight of the revival itself. As you might expect from a live recording of this era, the sound favors the top end. Vocals, fiddle, and banjo breaks come through best, especially as the band performs with only two microphones among its six performers.