1. Sister Fleeta Mitchell and Rev. Willie Mae Eberhart, "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down" (from The Art of Field Recording: Volume 1, Dust-to-Digital)
2. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, "I'm Not Gonna Cry" (from 7-inch, Daptone)
3. M.I.A., "Boyz" (from Kala, Interscope)
4. Bjork, "Earth Intruders" (from Volta, One Little Indian)
5. Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators, "Blues Downtown" (from Keep Reachin' Up, Light in the Attic)
6. Arthur & Yu, "Come to View" (from In Camera, Sub Pop)
7. Bonnie "Prince" Billy, "The Way I Am" (from Ask Forgiveness EP, Drag City)
8. Iron & Wine, "Resurrection Fern" (from The Shepherd's Dog, Sub Pop)
9. Bowerbirds, "In Our Talons" (from Hymns for a Dark Horse, Burly Time)
10. Radiohead, "Reckoner" (from In Rainbows, Radiohead.com)
11. No Age, "Neck Escaper" (from Weirdo Rippers, Fat Cat)
12. Pissed Jeans, "People Person" (from Hope for Men, Sub Pop)
13. Old Time Relijun, "Indestructible Life!" (from Catharsis in Crisis, K)
14. Marc Sultan, "Beautiful Girl" (from The Sultanic Verses, In the Red)
15. The White Stripes, "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" (from Icky Thump, Warner Bros.)

I spent a sizable chunk of 2007 listening to records made before 1935—trawling university archives, sinking loads of cash into eBay auctions, pleading with 78 collectors, popping up at suburban yard sales and patiently sorting through stacks of scratched Dan Fogelberg LPs before walking away, tired and empty-handed. When I wasn't acquiring ancient songs, I was bickering with myself, trying to nail down the cultural and musical distinctions between bluegrass and old-time, Delta and Hill Country, Appalachian folk and country, America and Americana. At night, when I curled into bed and closed my eyes, I still heard crackles and pops. Everything smelled like dust.

When I started listening to new records again, I found myself craving things that sounded old and rickety—it wasn't so much that I yearned for revivals (more the opposite, really), it was that I wanted, desperately, to hear songs that sounded as tenuous and weird as the slabs of shellac I'd since come to covet.

Some of the connections here are obvious: Dust-to-Digital's latest box, The Art of Field Recording: Volume 1, is stuffed with previously unreleased field-recorded Americana gems from archivist Art Rosenbaum's personal collection. Sister Fleeta and Rev. Willie Mae's rendition of traditional spiritual "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down"—which opens the first disc—is chilling, transcendent, perfect. I've hollered along to this song hundreds of times before, but this particular version, sung this way, is still the best thing I heard in all of 2007. Bonnie "Prince" Billy's cover of Merle Haggard's "The Way I Am" feels so delicate and bare you can practically see through it; Iron and Wine's "Resurrection Fern" features one of Beam's most heartbreaking acoustic melodies (when the pedal steel bits pipe in, I invariably buckle). Other tracks included are less overtly archaic, but still wobbly and bizarre: Old Time Relijun's "Indestructible Life!," Pissed Jeans' "People Person," M.I.A.'s "Boyz," and Bjork's "Earth Intruders" all sound like they were dug up from holes in the ground—there might not be banjo involved, but these tracks are just as vivid, just as serendipitous, as anything else I heard this year.

Amanda Petrusich is the author of Pink Moon (Continuum). Her second book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music, is forthcoming from Faber and Faber. She writes about music for Pitchfork, Spin, Paste, ReadyMade, eMusic, and The Oxford American.