"The Creative Person" ft. Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sain...

Orlando Massacre--Bob A. Feldman

Why Did Vanguard Records Refuse To Produce Bev Grant's 1970's Album?

 

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..." 

How Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber Created Paredon Records

 

In a 1991 interview, 20th-century and 21st-century U.S. jazz, blues and folk singer Barbara Dane recalled how she and former Sing-Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber were able to create the non-commercially-motivated Paredon Records protest folk music recording label:

"Paredon Records, you know, basically came out of the fact that we saw the need, we saw the fact all these singers existed and nobody knew about each other...So I got the idea we gotta have a record label. And I talked to Irwin about it, and Irwin had had a lot of experience with Folkways...And we were actually perfectly suited team of people...

"...So then the question is how do you get the money to do it. So I was just bending everybody’s ear...A couple years go by. I’m telling everybody this great vision I have...

"And finally a friend of ours, who was also someone who had lived in Cuba for a while and was very sympathetic to the politics of it and everything, brought a millionaire friend of hers over to meet us. And he wants to be anonymous so we’re still not gonna give out his name.

"But he thought this was a great idea and decided he would give us, you know, one stock dividend to play around with....Actually, it was supposed to be an interest free loan, but he never came around to formalize any agreement or collect anything on the loan. And he said don’t contact me; I’ll contact you. And he never contacted us again. And so that’s the end of that.

"So we were actually capitalized. I’ll tell you what we were capitalized at. He gave us 17,000 dollars. Which is about enough to put out half of one record, you know, really. And so we just socked it in the bank and started doing it.

"And the concept we had was that we won’t take any salaries or any overhead. We did it out of the living room or the backroom. I had an extra bedroom just then. I did it out of that room or the kitchen table and Irwin did it out of his little home office.

"And...you know, you go rent studios. Nobody buys a studio. Record labels don’t own studios. That’s a different business. And all the other services could be contracted out...that needed to be done to manufacture something.

"So we didn’t have any overhead. It was no overhead involved except maybe some telephone calls and stationary and, you know, the cost of renting a studio or whatever. And all of the things that were involved with producing it....

"I got to be very good at convincing people to write me an essay....You know, `Okay, you’re expert on this. On what’s going on Ecuador. So write me brief little history of Ecuador today.'

"And getting things like that out of people on a volunteer basis. And when we had to pay, we paid.

"But the thing is the object was to not pay out anymore of this budget. So then whatever income came in, and whatever the budget had to use some combination, you go ahead and make more. So you keep reinvesting it. Each record pays for the next one. Basically that’s the way it is…."

U.S. Jazz, Blues, Protest Folk Singer and Paredon Records Co-Founder Barbara Dane

And in a 1991 interview, [the now-deceased] former Sing-Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber also noted:

"I felt that doing this record label was an opportunity to use skills that I had developed over the years in a way that probably, at that time, were not going to be utilized by anybody else...

"Early in the fifties, I actually started a little record label on behalf of People’s Artists called Hoot-N-Anny Records....They were just 78’s at the time. But I think the Weavers' very first recording was done on a Hoot-N-Anny record. I did the “Hammer Song” and the “Banks of Marble. This is before they were recording for Decca.

"And I don’t know, we only did about a half a dozen such records. And then, in the mid-Fifties, we did the first LP of a live folk music concert. It’s called “Hoot-N-Anny Tonight,” subsequently reissued on Folkways under that title. So I’d always been scrambling for that kind of stuff.

"And then in 1958 I went to work for Moe Asch in Folkways, and over the next number of years worked with Moe...I had very little to do with the actual recording. That’s not my thing at all. So Moe was always engineer, the one who dealt with the performers and so on.

"But I became responsible, ultimately, for everything else relating to the production of a record. In effect, Moe would finish a tape master and turn it over to me.

"And I would deal [with]...the metal master, the stampers, the record pressing company, the printers who did the booklet, the people who pasted up the booklet. I’d edited, one way or another most of the booklets, deal with the typesetting, deal with the artists who designed the covers. Coordinate all of the production, and deal with a lot of the distribution also, and a lot of sales promotion stuff.

"So I learned a lot of different aspects of the record business, which put me in a position to know how to get Paredon off the ground and skip over a bunch of stages that somebody with less experience would’ve had to go through in a very painful way. And, you know, took advantage of that experience.

"We started out using the very producers that Folkways use, some of whom I had brought around to Folkways. But the printers, the pressing plants, the artists, the people who made stampers and so on, we used the same ones. They already knew me from the Folkways days. So that helped us establish some credit. And we knew what we were talking about.

"So we were able to move into production in a relatively smooth way, fairly quick. And then, once we had the records, we were able to utilize the contacts I’d made in terms of distribution--in some cases. I mean a lot of Folkways distributors didn’t--you know-- didn’t know what to do with this type of material."

Paredon Records Coo-Founders Irwin Silber and Barbara Dane 

 

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

`We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement' 1963 Introduction: An Excerpt

In 1963, the introduction to the We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement songbook (that was compiled by Guy and Candie Carawan for SNCC and published by Moe Asch's Oak Publications) indicated how non-commercially-motivated Freedom Movement protest folk songs, that working-class people of various racial backgrounds and Movement activist/organizers collectively created in 20th century, differ from most of the commercially-motivated pop songs that get played on corporate media conglomerate radio and television station programs in 21st-century, in the following way:

"Freedom songs today are sung in many kinds of situations: at mass meetings, prayer vigils, demonstrations, before Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins, in paddy wagons and jails, at conferences, work-shops and informal gatherings. They are sung to bolster spirits, to gain new courage and to increase the sense of unity...

"The freedom songs are of many kinds and range through many moods. The important ones are the old, slow-paced spirituals and hymns (some in the minor mode) that sing of hope and determination, and, the rhythmic jubilee spirituals and bright gospel songs that protest boldly and celebrate eventual victory. These are in the majority and usually have new or revised words to old tunes...Finally, there is a small miscellany of songs imported from the north, including a couple of revised union songs and a handful of newly adapted folk songs. These have come from exchange students, freedom riders, folk singers and hit records...The students have been responsible for making up most of the new lyrics and singing new life into the old songs...

"...No other songs have been able to express so closely the feelings of the participants or have been so easily adapted to fit current situations as some of the old spirituals. When sung with anything approximating the old time style and spirit, they are unbeatable..."

`They Drove Woody Guthrie' protest folk song lyrics

(chorus)
If you write too many songs and you side with the poor
And you refuse to be a wage slave
They will say you’re “insane”, they will put you away
Like they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave.

(verses)
He walked around the land and spoke with men and women
And wrote a thousand songs to tell the truth
The media barons, they felt he was too red
And his exclusion drove him to booze. (chorus)

He wrote a big long book which no one would publish
Because it spoke too much of love
He saw that nine-to-five was a big waste of life
But few understood what he said. (chorus)

They said he was “too old” to refuse to settle down
They ordered him to act like other men
But when he refused, they said he had “a disease”
And they locked him in a mental hospital bed. (chorus)

The capitalists got rich from the songs of the communist
Whom they kept hidden away with the insane
They marketed his legend while they took away his pen
Yes, they drove Woody Guthrie to his grave. (chorus)

The "They Drove Woody Guthrie" protest folk song was written in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Woody Guthrie's `Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti' Album Revisited

Quotations From Pete Seeger: Folk Music vs. Show Business

In his July/August 1974 Sing Out! magazine column (that's included in the book Pete Seeger: In His Own Words which Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal edited), Pete Seeger criticized the way most music magazines cover the folk music scene for the following reason::

"What's good about folk music is that it is not show business. It should not be show business.

"But the trouble with most `folk music' magazines...is that they tell me what professional performer is singing here, and why that one is better than some other one. And somehow millions of people have gotten the idea that folk music is somebody standing on stage with a guitar in his or her hand. I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with giving such a false impression..."

`Bloody Minds' protest folk song lyrics from 1967 and 2010

This protest folk song was written in March, 1967, in Furnald Hall dorm at Columbia University to protest the university's institutional membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think tank. Last verse of lyrics was added in 2010.

lyrics

Come, you Bloody Minds
Look what I done find
I done did research
IDA exists
Laugh between your walls
Sit behind your desks
Watch your missiles fall
IDA exists.

The value-free school
Your mask we see right through
The weapons of the Pentagon
Their brains procured by you.

Godly Grayson Kirk
On the board he knits
Smokes upon his pipe
While his bombers bite
Problems he assigns:
“How to make men die?”
Professors they plan
Death for Viet Nam.

In ’56 to serve Defense
Five schools they did combine
Four years later
Columbia
It joined the bloody minds.

City slums they rot
Homeless live in lots
Atoms to destroy
They’re your little toys
Oh, they pay you well
To create a hell
Did you see the news?
Twelve children they slew.

A division
Its name Jason
In summer they study
They meet, they talk
They plan, they plot
Counter-insurgency.

Lovers they must part
Lamps they now are dark
Knowledge turned to swords
Kirk sits on the board
Schools changed into guns
For the Pentagon
Students now they learn:
How to make kids burn.

You stand in class
You spout your facts
A noble scientist
But then at night
You join the fight
You do secret research.

Wall Street banks collapse
Workers get laid-off
Laser beams command
Bombs on Afghanistan
Drones built by IDA
In Pakistan they slay
Robot war research
Makes professors rich.

In 2010, scientists again
They do space war research
With DARPA funds in secret labs
They threaten all the Earth.

Murder poor peasants
With the tools you sent
Orphan thin children
Help the junta win
Kill them with your mind
Paralyze their spines
Someday you will die
And in slime you’ll lie.

`Columbia' protest folk song lyrics from 1966

The historical protest folk song, "Columbia," was written in the Furnald Hall dormitory on Columbia University's campus in late 1966 to protest the Columbia Administration's complicity with the U.S. war machine during the Vietnam War Era.
(lyrics)
Oh, educate Columbia Pursue the truth Columbia Exalt the mind Columbia Research and find Columbia And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool." Invite the spies Columbia The C.I.A. Columbia Give them a room Columbia To recruit spooks Columbia And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool." Help the Navy Columbia R.O.T.C. Columbia Teach a course for Columbia "The Art of War" Columbia And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool." Secret research Columbia You'd best not snitch Columbia At campus labs Maybe some bombs? For electronic war Design lasers And "humanize and civilize With reason as your tool."

Gordon Friesen's `The Strange Death of Phil Ochs' `Broadside' Magazine Article of 1976 Revisited

         

(In the October-December 1976 issue of the now-defunct Broadside: the topical song magazine,” a founder and longtime editor of that non-profit folk music publication who died in 1996, Gordon Friesen, provided U.S. music fans with the following interesting alternative take on the 1960s topical and anti-war protest folk singer-songwriter Phil Ochs’s strange death to that presented in the 2011 documentary film about Phil Ochs, There But For Fortune, which was later broadcast in January 2012 on the PBS series, American Masters)

"It is indicative of the depth of the brainwashing to which the American people have been systematically subjected that too many of them accept Phil Ochs’ death as a not too uncommon breakdown of a personality. But the accumulated facts raise more than a suspicion that a plot existed leading to his deliberate destruction. Let us look at some of these facts which would impel the reactionary, fascist-type U.S. imperialists to reach the decision that Phil Ochs must die.

"The brainwashing of the people by the U.S. ruling class has created a tendency by artists, especially dissident songwriters, to underestimate the ferocious measures the ruling class will employ to destroy them. We know that the Wobbly balladeer Joe Hill was framed and executed by a firing squad (Phil knew this and even wrote a song expressing his admiration of Joe Hill). The woman radical songwriters, Fannie Sellins and Ella May Wiggins, were shot to death by police. Aunt Molly Jackson and her fellow songwriting relatives, Jim Garland and Sara Ogden, were forced to flee for their lives from the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal fields.

"A fascist vigilante mob, aided by N.Y. State and local police, tried to murder Paul Robeson at Peekskill. He was finally silenced and driven into exile by the U.S. government. Even Woody Guthrie stated in print he was under surveillance by what he called the F-B-Eyes. Many Pete Seeger concerts were picketed by John Birchers handing out inflammatory leaflets urging at least by implication, violence against him. In 1940 the Oklahoma Red Dust Players were raided and scattered to the winds.

"One can conclude that Phil Ochs was an even greater threat than these to the U.S. imperialists. In his early songs he defended Castro Cuba and the Vietnamese liberation fighters against the imperialistic designs of Washington. His songs became more and more pointed. “White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land”, “Santo Domingo”, “United Fruit” (where he approves of “young men going to the mountains to learn the way of the rifle” instead of slaving at pitiful wages for the American exploiters). But it was “Cops Of The World” with such lines as “here’s a kick in the ass, boys”, and “clean your johns with your flag” because “we’re the cops of the world”, and “Ringing Of Revolution” where he looks forward to the destruction of the last vestiges of the desperate decaying ruling class by the exploited masses, which really stuck like a bone in the throat of the U.S. imperialists.

"A special threat was the wide circulation of Phil’s songs abroad. Books containing materials about him and his work were published in Spain, France, and other countries. The Spanish book reprinted “Cops Of The World” for its example of an Ochs song and the author likened Phil’s guitar to a machine gun. The first edition sold out so quickly, mainly to students, that the Franco regime did not have time to suppress it, as it did any further reprintings. Individuals and groups sang his songs in Japan, Scandinavia, Holland, W. Germany and many other countries.

"It was naïve on Phil’s part to think when he undertook several jaunts in the early seventies to foreign nations that he would be treated like an ordinary tourist. He was met at two South American airports by police who arrested him, jailed him overnight and deported him the next day. From recent revelations it becomes obvious that the local authorities were acting under orders from the C.I.A. He was welcomed only in Chile where he sang together with Victor Jara, the popular Chilean peoples’ singer (Jara was destroyed in a bestial fashion when the C.I.A.-Ford-Kissinger sponsored Chilean fascists overthrew Allende in 1973. The police smashed Victor’s hands with their rifle butts, gave him his guitar and taunted “Now play and sing.” Then they murdered him).

"When Phil tried to visit his ancestral Scotland the London police intercepted him and put him on a plane back to the United States. He got off at Dublin. Here communications between the C.I.A. and the Irish authorities seemed to have lagged, for Phil was allowed to stay all of two days in Dublin before being deported to New York.

"On an African trip he was set upon by three thugs who paid special attention to crushing his voice box. Again the participation of the C.I.A. seemed unmistakably obvious. He came home barely able to croak and could never again sing like in the old days.

"Meantime the activities and programs of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. were slowly coming to light through hearings in Washington and books by former agents who could no longer endure the inhumanity of these secret organizations—their assassination plots, poison dart-guns, drugs to induce incoherency, burglaries, arming foreign fascists to overthrow their democratic governments, the use of informants and disrupters, spreading of lies, clawing through personal mail, bugging telephones, planting listening devices in citizens’ cars. And so far this seems only the tip of the iceberg.

"The F.B.I. even had an elaborate program designed to induce dissidents to commit suicide. They confessed they had tried it on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this instance they failed. But who knows in which cases they have succeeded. In 1965 another Broadside songwriter “committed suicide.” He was Peter La Farge, adopted son of Oliver La Farge, first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature—the book was “Laughing Boy,” a sympathetic treatment of the Navajo Indians. The F.B.I. took an interest in Peter and began hounding him when he organized FAIR (Federation for American Indian Rights). Several months before he died, the F.B.I. raided his New York apartment at midnight. They scattered and tore up his papers; they put handcuffs on him and dragged him to Bellevue in his pajamas. They put pressure on Bellevue to declare him insane, but Bellevue could find nothing wrong and turned him loose.

"When Phil came back to New York last summer [in 1975] he was still full of plans. He was arranging to go to a place in New Jersey for a six-weeks “drying out” period under supervision by medical experts. Then he planned to set up what he called Barricade House, where he would issue a newspaper, record protest singers and make films. He already had the building picked out in SoHo.

"People ask us what motivation would the F.B.I.-C.I.A. have in wanting to see Phil dead when he could no longer sing or write. We answer that this was their motivation: Phil still had tremendous organizing ability, as witness his organizing the Chilean benefit. Barricade House would have been a great threat to the ruling class. We can visualize the F.B.I. doing one of their infamous psychological profiles on Phil Ochs. They asked the computer, what is his greatest weakness? The computer spat back: ALCOHOL! The next step of the F.B.I. is to assign agents to exploit this weakness in their intended victim; I would be very suspicious of the “friends” who attached themselves to Phil and kept plying him with alcoholic drinks.

"I am afraid we didn’t take to seriously Phil’s daily insistence that the C.I.A. and F.B.I., and later with the collaboration of Mafia hit men, were out to murder him. He sought a place to hide and tried to hire a bodyguard; he carried an iron bar, a big scissors and other means with which to defend his life.

"Where did these threats come from? What really happened? Perhaps some commission five or ten years from now will bring out the true details of how Phil Ochs met his strange death. We should finally learn how the great song-poem “Crucifixion” became a personal prophesy of the fate of its author. 

--Gordon Friesen (Broadside, 10-12/76/issue 133)

Broadside magazine co-editors Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen

FBI Spied On Topical Protest Folk Singer-Songwriter Phil Ochs In 1960s and 1970s

(Phil Ochs--by Kenneth Tash - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45279727)

In his book Death Of A Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs, Marc Eliot described what happened at the Chicago 8 trial when 1960s Topical Protest Folk Singer-Songwriter Phil Ochs arrived to testify in Dec. 1969:

“…After a brief series of questions to establish that Phil was a singer by profession, Kunstler began to weave Phil into the pattern of the defense:

KUNSTLER: Now Mr. Ochs, can you indicate what kind of songs you sing?

OCHS: I write all my own songs and they are just simple melodies with a lot of lyrics. They usually have to do with current events and what is going on in the news, which goes back to journalism, and you can call them topical songs, songs about the news and then developing into more philosophical songs later…

KUNSTLER: Now did there come a time when there was any discussion of Yippie plans with reference to the convention, the Democratic National Convention?

OCHS: Yes, there were. I don’t remember the exact date because there were several meetings, probably, Jan. or Feb. of 1968…

KUNSTLER: Where did these discussions take place?

OCHS: The Lower East Side, different apartments, sometimes Jerry’s apartment and sometimes Abbie’s apartment…

KUNSTLER: Can you indicate in general to the court and jury what the plans were for Yippies in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention?...

OCHS…What Jerry Rubin said to me was that he planned to have a Festival of Life in Chicago during the Democratic Convention, basically representing an alternative culture on the assumption that they felt the Democratic Party did not represent them or a whole large mass of the American public. They wanted to have, therefore, an alternate convention. They would theatrically sort of spoof the Convention and show the public, the media, that the Convention was not to be taken seriously because it wasn’t fair, and wasn’t going to be honest, and wasn’t going to be a Democratic Convention, and so they would have essentially events they hoped to do in Lincoln Park. They hoped to get permits. They discussed flying to Chicago to talk with Mayor Daley or people working with Mayor Daley. They several times mentioned they wanted to avoid any violence…” (Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 4/10/96)

Coincidentally, until his suicide on April 9, 1976, the FBI showed a special interest in investigating Phil Ochs. As The Politics of Rock Music by John Orman recalled in 1984:

“The quintessential ‘60s person not only had a cult following of politicos, folk junkies, protest fans, and movement freaks but also had a `following’ in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, it is clear that the FBI kept a domestic file on Ochs from 1963 until his suicide. As Ochs always said, `They [the government] have files on me this thick,’ and then he would laugh. He was absolutely correct. The FBI has released over 400 pages from the Phil Ochs file, and it is clear from the documents that the FBI spent an extraordinary amount of time following, checking up on, and detailing the activities of Phil Ochs…

“Agents checked Selective Service, insurance companies, the American Federation of Musicians Local 802 in New York, neighbors at 139 Thompson Street in New York City, the Credit Bureau of Greater New York, Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Bureau of Special Services (Red Squad), Board of Elections—Manhattan, and other sources…The FBI then checked with an acquaintance of Ochs who resided in Greenwich Village who was a folksinger and guitarist. This person was also the subject of an FBI New York file…

“The Los Angeles FBI office investigated Ochs from Aug. 31 to Dec. 12, 1968, and forwarded data to the New York office…

“…Ochs…refused to be interrogated by FBI agents on Oct. 1, 1968…

“…He was busted for possession of marijuana on Oct. 5, 1968 by the Los Angeles police department’…

“In 1973 the Agency added Ochs’ phone number to their computerized telephone file…”

(Downtown 4/13/94)

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 22 with Len Chandler

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest22

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 20 tribute to Woody Guthrie

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest20

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 16 with Mimi and Richard Farina

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest16

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 14 with Political Folk Songs

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest14

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 6 with Malvina Reynolds and Jack Elliott

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest06

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 2 about Lead Belly

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest02

Non-Commercial Topical Protest Folk Songs vs. Commercial Pop Protest Songs

Non-commercially-motivated people who have felt enslaved, oppressed or economically exploited have always--either individually or collectively--created public domain, topical folk songs that protest against the System that enslaves, oppresses or exploits us. And non-commercially-motivated people--either individually or collectively--have always written public domain, topical protest folk songs that urge those who sing or listen to these non-commercial protest folk songs to collectively revolt and make a political, economic and social revolution.

Some commercially-motivated songwriters, professional entertainers and global corporate media conglomerates, however, sometimes made a lot of money by writing, singing or marketing some privatized/copyrighted topical protest songs to a mass audience of vinyl record or cd consumers in the 20th-century.

Yet despite the commercial success of some of the commercially-motivated individual professional songwriters and entertainers--who capitalized on the global corporate media conglomerates' transformation of some topical protest songs into commodities--most people on earth in the 21st-century are still enslaved, oppressed or economically exploited by the System.

Protest Folk Magazine believes, however, that a topical protest folk song should be a public domain tool for creating revolutionary social change--and not just an additional way for professional songwriters, professional entertainers or global media conglomerates to make a lot of money in the 21st-century, while most of us folk on earth continue to live in poverty, under the System's current global economic set-up.