Irwin Silber's 1965 Newport Folk Festival Program Booklet `Topical Song Revolution at Midpoint' Excerpt

1965 Newport Folk Festival Program Booklet

In an article that first appeared in the 1965 program booklet of the Newport Folk Festival, titled "The Topical Song Revolution at Midpoint," then-Sing Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber wrote the following:

"The profit-motivated formula songs that have been spoonfed to the American people by both Tin Pan Alley and Nashville for the last half a century make up, as a body of expression, one of the most flagrant insults to human intelligence in recorded history...

"But topical songs are not the invention of the twentieth century. The idea was not patented by Sing Out! or Broadside magazine. They are not the brain-children of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan or the civil-rights movement...

"The tradition of topical song is as old as human communication--for wherever art has been central to life and to the needs of society, artists have commented upon and attempted to affect the events of their time and the human condition...

"The tradition, no matter how dormant, had never died. Before World War I, the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) had fanned the flames of discontent with their insurrectionary propaganda songs and ballads. In the Depression years, textile workers in the South and garment workers in the North put their protest into songs. The line of continuity embraced Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl. The Almanac Singers and the C.I.O. organizing drives of the late 1930's, the topical Broadway stage and the meaningful music of Earl Robinson and Marc Blitzstein and Harold Rome.

"In the postwar years, People's Songs was the rallying point for the topical song. Even in the intellectually barren decade of the 1950's, dedicated partisans of unpopular causes sang out for civil liberties and peace. And through it all, over all the decades of this century, the blues developed as a magnificent creative expression so based on the reality of Negro life in America it needed no categorization to define its status...

"Topical song has proved its worth and strength many times over these last years. But perhaps the time is due...for some careful evaluation of where it's all at right now. There are some signs of danger blowing in the wind.

"Not the least of these has been the emergence of cults of deification around our most popular singers. The personality cult is the very antithesis of a meaningful and continuing expression--for it cuts the artist off from his roots and his strength, the contact with everyone else's reality. The idolization of the `artist as hero' has been the ruin of more good poets than one would comfortably choose to name--and the application of this circumstance to the topical song movement of our own time is not hard to find...

"Another danger in the current picture is the process whereby listening to `protest' songs replaces the act of protest...

"The most urgent danger sign, however, is the dollar sign. What with hit records, TV appearances, major concert halls and folk-festival spectaculars--the financial worth of protest is only one step removed from being measured in the Dow-Jones average. It must strike some observers as ironic and odd that the most earnest endorsers of the `new' protest are Columbia Records and Time magazine...

"Let there be no mistake...Our artists, our singers, our writers who try to sing of life...are our voice, our conscience...But we must constantly be demanding of them else their art will rot and be turned against them and us.

"Perhaps by way of conclusion, we should abandon the concept of Topical song. It is not enough that a song's subject matter be of topical concern. We should demand insight and partisanship and protest and affirmation from our songs--no matter whether we call them topical or not. For, in the final analysis, it is not art that is our ultimate goal--but life."

Sing Out! Magazine Editor Irwin Silber with Pete Seeger