Bev Grant and The Human Condition band in the 1970's |
In the Spring of 1975, U.S. anti-war protest folk singer-songwriter Phil Ochs organized a concert in New York City's Central Park, at which he and other U.S. protest folk singers, like Joan Baez and former Newsreel Movement organizer and post-1975 long-time People's Music Network organizer Bev Grant, performed before tens of thousands of anti-war protest folk music fans; to celebrate the end of the War in Viet-Nam.
Vanguard Records had produced vinyl records of Joan Baez singing protest folk songs during the early 1960's. Yet in the 1970's, Vanguard Records apparently refused to produce a vinyl record album in which radical feminist blues, labor movement and People's Music singer Bev Grant and her band, "The Human Condition," recorded the protest folk songs that she wrote in the early 1970's.
In a 1991 interview, 20th-century and 21st-century U.S. jazz, blues and folk singer Barbara Dane (who also co-founded the non-commercially-motivated Paredon Records label that did eventually record a vinyl album of Bev Grant and The Human Condition in the 1970's, titled Working People Gonna Rise!, which included the protest folk songs that Bev Grant had written) indicated why Vanguard Records apparently refused to produce Bev Grant's album in the 1970's:
"Beverly...got signed with Vanguard. Vanguard run by Maynard Solomon. Maynard Solomon wrote a book called, something? What was it? Marxism and Culture. He considers himeself, you know, a political guy.
"And he's the one who put out Paul Robeson's records and Joan Baez and what have you.
"And he said to her: `Come by and bring your--I want your most outrageous, you know--your most political songs.'
"So she brought them over there. And she called me afterwards and said: `Well, he told me to bring my most outrageous songs. But when I got there he said, "`Oh! I didn't mean that far out."'
"So they didn't do a record for Vanguard. Did it for us. Okay..."
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