In this, the season of the Great Boxed Sets (Bob Dylan's Biograph, Atlantic Records' fourteen-record history of R&B), Who Knows Where the Time Goes? may seem like an extravagant footnote. A four-record set documenting the career of the late English folk-rock singer Sandy Denny, it contains no "hits" other than her wistful signature ballad "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" But it covers a significant but short-lived period in British pop when groups like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, with Denny on vocals, traced Bob Dylan's Appalachian source material a few steps further back to their own native folk minstrelsy.

Yet the pensive beauty and earthy joy of Denny's seminal experiments with Fairport (and its founding guitarist, Richard Thompson), like the 1969 album Liege and Life, have in turn inspired young bands like R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs. The influence of Denny's warm alto and richly lyric songwriting can also be detected in the work of new female singer-song-writers like Suzanne Vega and the Maniacs' Natalie Merchant. In this set's vintage treat, "Sail Away to the Sea," recorded in 1967 by Denny with the Strawbs when she was only twenty, there is a hearty womanly glow in her voice – a poignant straightforwardness that would later heighten Fairport's electric rush in songs like the folkraga gem "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood," a Liege and Lief outtake included here.

Over its eight sides and forty-three tracks, more than half of which have never been issued before in America, Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (compiled by her husband, guitarist Trevor Lucas, and producer Joe Boyd) eloquently states the case for Denny's pioneering importance and continuing influence. Her recordings with Fairport Convention, like "Tam Lin," a stormy rendition of a Robert Burns witch story, epitomize that band's intuitive sense of both the music's history and its emotional origins. Later Denny absorbed her folk influences into a singular vocal and songwriting style, typified by her delicate solo reading of the traditional "Bruton Town" and the intimate home demo "What Is True?"

Sandy Denny was no slouch on straight pop songs either, turning in a delightful cowgirl duet with Linda Thompson on a 1972 cover of the Everly Brothers' "When Will I Be Loved?" and even playing the chanteuse on a version of the Ink Spots' "Whispering Grass." To her, it was all folk music, and that may be the secret of her lasting appeal. When Denny died in 1978 of injuries sustained in a fall down a staircase, pop – not just British folk rock – lost a rare and beautiful voice. This boxed set is worthy of her largely unrecognized talent. Who Knows Where the Time Goes? has captured her finest hours for all time. (RS 470)

DAVID FRICKE