Back in the day, I'd save up my allowance to buy folk LPs, at least by the KT, CMT, and The Weavers. I could usually afford one every five or six weeks or so - and sixty years ago in the summer of 1963, the first album I bought was the Chad Mitchell Trio's Singin' Our Mind. It had a great cover with a full color photo of the three singers posed as if in performance.

Singin' has remained my single favorite folk album for all of those decades since. It is a remarkable piece of work, produced by the late Milt Okun, without a weak or even mediocre track on it.

Its relevance here is simple. CMT fans might recall that that Trio's first albums on Kapp Records (Harry Belafonte's label, and the late Mr. B. deserves credit for promoting CMT into the folk big time) featured photos of the three singers and their first acommpanist Jim (later Roger) McGuinn. But Mercury Records' Singin' Our Mind's back cover photo signalled the change that had occurred. McGuinn had left amicably to perform with Bobby Darin and later to start The Byrds, and he was replaced by Jacob Ander on guitar and Paul Prestopino on guitar and banjo.

The CMT with McGuinn (and uncredited bassist Bill Lee) sounded great, but Ander and Prestopino plus Mercury's superior recording facilities launched them into the stratosphere. To this day there is no folk album that IMO can touch the sound quality of those Mercury recordings.

And that back cover shot features Ander and Prestopino prominently in the foreground. This link -

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155432973551

goes to an Ebay page where visitors can scroll around and get an enlargeable copy of the picture.