Broadside anthology

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Links on the chain

Broadside published songs by writers who wanted to change the world --
including a young Bob Dylan. A five-CD set marches through the great folk
mag's past.

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By Ira Robbins

Sept. 19, 2000 | It's August 1965. The Beatles are set to perform at Shea
Stadium, but I'm stuck at summer camp in upstate New York, a few miles from
the farm that would later host Woodstock. I'm sitting under a big oak tree
with an equally outsized acoustic guitar. I'm learning to stretch my
11-year-old fingers into the awkward shape of a G chord from the camp's
music counselor, a college student orphaned a decade earlier when the
government executed his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for leaking
atomic secrets to the Russians. In the lyrics of Phil Ochs, we were
building another link on the chain.

"Links on the Chain," which I learned to sing (if not quite play) that
summer, wasn't your typical protest song. While others attacked oppressive
governments, laws that need changing and assorted social inequities, this
one targeted the labor movement for abandoning its progressive principles.
Ochs himself was not able to stay on course either, but his early work
stands as a monument to those op-ed columnists of song, people who knew and
believed things and made it their duty as soldiers of conscience to
convince others. "Now it's only fair to ask you boys, which side are you
on?" sang Ochs. He might as well have been challenging the whole artistic
community around him.

As silly as that question might sound to a 21st century pop performer, for
whom choosing sides means shilling for either Coke or Pepsi, the Greenwich
Village folk singers of the day were all, to one degree or another, on the
left. (Ochs later etched the dividing line for '60s political conviction in
the scathing "Love Me, I'm a Liberal.") Starting in 1963, as thousands of
young people repeatedly gathered in Washington and other cities to speak
out for civil rights and an end to the war in Vietnam, singers like Ochs,
Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Pat Sky, Eric Andersen, Judy Collins and
Joan Baez took the podium and spread the news their way. They weren't
consciously positioning themselves as a marketing strategy, buying
credibility with a little pro bono service to the cause, they were
following through on the impulse that had drawn them to make music in the
first place, building links on the chain fed them by Woody Guthrie, Paul
Robeson and others.

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"Links on the Chain" opens "The Best of Broadside 1962-1988," five CDs of
music from the recorded archives of Broadside, a magazine that began
publishing the words and music of topical folk songs just as they were
needed to fuel one of the great grass-roots political movements of the 20th
century. A youthquake on a collision course with good old boys like Burl
Ives and Theodore Bikel and button-down stylists like the Kingston Trio,
intellectuals with guitars became the bards of conscience. Let Peter, Paul
and Mary score the hits: Music's acoustic missionaries were scribbling
their news songs to change the world, not sell records.

(Complete article at salon.com)


Louis Proyect

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