Heart’s Ease by Shirley Collins: Buoyed by the warm reception greeting her 2016 comeback, Lodestar, this British folk heroine returns with a dozen more explorations of the traditional and the neo-traditional songbooks.

Of all of the snark that ensued upon the Dixie Chicks’ rebranding themselves “the Chicks,” none was funnier than this observation from the libertarian gadfly Tom Woods: “Now that’s a relief. I think everybody assumed they supported slavery with that earlier name! And when they eventually get told that the word ‘chicks’ trivializes women’s lives, well, we can look forward to new releases from ‘The.’”

What is not a laughing matter is the Chicks’ new release, Gaslighter (Columbia). Would that it were.

Shine On: Badfinger 1974 by Badfinger: Ultimately, nothing—not the power-­poppy “No Matter What,” not the radiant “Day After Day,” not the as-featured-on-Breaking Bad “Baby Blue”—dispels the pall that has hung over this tuneful foursome ever since its dissolution amid litigation, infighting, chicanery, and suicides.

Thomas Fortmann: Gimme Twelve by various artists: Fortmann is the kind of composer about whom it’s tempting to say that he’s “still finding his voice.” On the evidence of these seven neo-impressionistic chamber pieces, however, he’s probably not looking. Other than their adherence to the chromatic scale, little unites them, resulting in a stylistic eclecticism made even more striking by the employment of five different ensembles and one solo organist to do the performing.

The great Charlie Daniels was 83 when he died from a stroke two days after celebrating one of his favorite holidays: the Fourth of July. Who else but a proud, fiddle-­playing lover of the Red, White, and Blue would have recorded enough patriotic songs to release a 15-song compilation titled Land That I Love as Daniels did in 2010? It’s almost as if he’d foreseen Donald Trump’s problems with getting permission to use the music of liberal rock stars for his rallies and said, Here, Mr. President. You can use these instead.

George Crumb: Metamorphoses (Book I) by Marcantonio Barone: The subtitle: Ten Fantasy-Pieces (After Celebrated Paintings) for Amplified Piano. The composer: a nonagenarian who shows no signs of slowing down. The paintings: Two apiece by Klee and Chagall, one apiece by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Dalí, Whistler, Kandinsky, and Johns.

Although she died in 1984, Bessie Jones is a woman for our times. The granddaughter of a slave, she grew up in rural Georgia and at 30 underwent a transformative Christian experience, eventually becoming a one-woman, gospel-folk-song revival. In 2014, Tompkins Square released Get in Union, two CDs of mostly a cappella recordings made by Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers for Alan Lomax in 1960. An expanded, digital-only edition has just been released by Global Jukebox.