`New City Songster''s Volume 20 Editorial Revisited

In April 1985, volume 20 of New City Songster, a UK protest folk songbook, contained the lyrics to Colin Bargery and Graham Goffee's "Little Boxes," Sue Edmonds" "To Our Town," John Quiggin's "Bobby, I Hardly Knew You," Peggy Seeger's "If You Want The Bomb" and "Ode To A Scab," Andy Victor's "Tales of '81," Sandy Kreitzer's "The Storm," Ewan MacColl''s "Daddy What Did You Do In The Strike?","The Media," "Only Doing Their Job"  and "Miner's Wife," Clem Parkinson's "Temperance Shearers," Mike Waterson and Martin Carthy's "A Stitch In Time," Larry Penn's "Nobody Cares About That," Maria Tolly's "Wishes," Jack Purdon's "Blackleg Mining Man," Kerith Power's "Upwardly Socially Mobile," Ed Pickford's "Hamster Sid," Paul O'Brien's "The Divil's Advice," Craig Johnson, "Down Along The Soo Line," Jan Bessent and Bill Murphy's "My Kitchen and My Loo," Irene Scott's "Screen Printer," Stan Patman's "Anti-Nuclear Angels," Pete Seeger's "My Get Up And Go," Keith Power's "Liberation Road," and Dick Gaughan's "Which Side Are You On, 1984?".  And volume 20 of New City Songster also included an editorial which stated the following:

"It's so easy to give up these days, to get disillusioned, disenchanted, despairing. It is easy to blame the dream and say it is unachievable when it is really the dreamer at fault.

"We have heard it said by many that protest singers, and writers of topical songs, are just `singing to the converted.' Even if this were so, what's wrong with that?  Do not the converted need encouragement and sustenance as we batter our minds and bodies over and over again against the walls of the system? Whoever brings this accusation against those who gather weekly in churches to sing of their hopes and beliefs to one another (and, incidentally, to their god)? We strengthen each other by singing together, and express our single purpose in chorus and verse. The converted DO have the solace of group activity: demonstrations, meetings, jail.

"We also find ourselves alone and still needing reminders of that group. When you're on your way home, going shopping, taking a bath, putting the kids to bed, cooking, washing, standing by your machine, pen-pushing, whatever: it's good to remember that song, that chorus, to have music that reminds you of the ultimate goal and the road that leads to it.

"The converted need to remember constantly that the powers of creation are on OUR side, because it's those powers that are going to bring about the big change that is coming. If we can create songs we can create a good and fair society. If we can beat the sense of isolation we can beat Thatcher. Those who can sing together can fight together."

`New City Songster''s Volume 17 Editorial Revisited

In September 1981, volume 17 of New City Songster, a UK protest folk songbook--which contained the lyrics to Ted Edwards' "The Coal and Albert Berry," Don Minifie's "The Ballad of Pat Brady," Deborah Silverstein's "Draglines," Ewan MacColl's "Nobody Knew She Was There" and "What The Poet Called Her," John Pole's "Under The Leaves of Life,", Clem Parkinson's "Fishes Need--Bicycles," Ewan MacColl's "The Vandals," Yan Sharangparni's "Misfit's Story," Peggy Seeger's "Enough Is Enough," Ewan MacColl's "Kilroy Was Here," Paul Wilson and Marilyn Tucker's "Uni-Multi-Factors International," Jim Moreland and Keith Gregson's "I'm A Pneumo," Clem Parkinson's "Microbe's Picnic," Alan Lavercombe's "Laid Off," Ted Edwards' "Thy Fayther's Comin' Wom," Charlie King's "Taft-Hartley Song" and "The Dancing Boilerman," and Rod Shearman's "Is The Big Fella Gone?"--was published. And volume 17 of New City Songster also included an editorial which stated the following:

"...There has never been a greater need for good songs. We are standing on the brink of the Third and Last World War, at a crossroads that has no left or right turns, only forward and backward.

"The songs that are coming in reflect varying attitudes toward this cliff-edge, but they essentially all say the same thing: the human race is in trouble, there is alienation on all fronts. It is no longer just the boss against the worker, but male vs. female, old vs. young, city vs. country, big business vs. the people, first vs. second vs. third worlds, black vs. brown vs. yellow vs. pink vs. white. And of course, the nuclear threat hanging over the whole thing.

"It is hard to write hopeful songs these days, but we are doing it. That is the job of the artist, not to point the finger and say `Look at all that's wrong with the world' and then cut his throat. He/she must point to the way out. In all the songs in this volume, the huge issues of unemployment, race hatred, class war, ecological devastation, nuclear cataclysm are put into perspective as obstacles that we can overcome. This is done by personalising, by putting into detail the human response.

"It isn't only the comedy reactions of the characters in UNI-MULTI_FACTORS INTERNATIONAL, or PAT BRADY--nor the use of BIG  FELLA as an endearment to the whale--nor the detailed descriptions in NOBODY KNEW SHE WAS THERE. It is all these approaches at once, a total of individual human actions which is presented. Faced with nuclear annihilation, you feel mighty small. You may say, `What can one person do?' then, in despair at your seeming impotence, do nothing. But the bucket fills with water drop by drop until one mighty small drop takes the water over the top. No drop is indispensable to the final spillout. All the songs, all the constructive responses to the world situation are now not only important but vital.

"The first drop in the bucket is just as important as the last."

`New City Songster''s Volume I Introduction Revisited

In late 1968, volume 1 of New City Songster, a UK protest folk songbook--which contained the lyrics to Ewan MacColl's "Ballad of the Big Cigars," "Lament for the Death of a Nobody," "Brother Did You Weep?," and "Student Edward" protest folk songs, the lyrics to Peggy Seeger's "Song of Choice" and "I Support The Boycott" protest folk songs, and the lyrics to the Critics Group "Grey October" anti-Vietnam War protest folk song--was published. And volume 1 of New City Songster also included an introduction which stated the following:

"This is volume 1 of a continuing series. It is not a folk magazine as such, with articles, reviews and traditional songs, but is strictly devoted to circulating new songs: songs for tomorrow, today and possibly yesterday, but no further back. While realizing the value of placing new songs in a cultural context, i.e. publishing them side by side with their traditional predecessors, it is undoubtedly a fact that many new songs have immediate topical relevance and are often out of date before they are published: others may deal with burning issues, too burning perhaps for most `folk' magazines to handle. As a result, people do not see them, often till too late--and they do not get sung."

Matt Jones' `Remembering Brother Kirk' Obituary Article From 1986 Revisited

U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter and Movement activist F.D. Kirkpatrick in 1960's

Following U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter and Civil Rights Movement activist Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick's death on August 16, 1986, the also now-deceased 1960's Freedom Singers group member and late 20th and early 21st-century U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter and Movement activist, Matt Jones, wrote the following obituary, titled "Remembering Brother Kirk,"  (which first appeared in issue #176 of the now-defunct Broadside topical folk song magazine). 
"Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick or `Brother Kirk,' as he was affectionately called, was a major contributor to folk music in the 60s and an outspoken advocate of freedom and justice in America and abroad. Kirk was born in Haynesville, Louisiana on August 12, 1933, the first son of Rev. and Mrs. John L. Kirkpatrick. Before he became a minister, Kirk's father was a tenant farmer for a wicked landowner named Crump. After Kirk's mother died during childbirth, the landowner immediately confiscated the property and ordered them off the farm. `He took everything. We had no place to go,' Kirk said. The pain and anguish in his face made his account so vivid that it seemed as if it had just happened. `I was just a lad of a boy at the time,' Kirk told me. However, that incident was a major contributing force in the development of Kirk's fighting spirit, which we knew so well.

"In 1955, Kirk became an All-American fullback at Grambling College and later played professional football for the Kansas City Chiefs. As a pro-football player, Kirk found that all the positions of power and leadership were held by the whites. `It was our tenant farm all over again,' said Kirk. The burning desire to free himself and his people from injustice was constantly in his mind.

"Kirk was ordained by the Church of Christ in God in Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964. He formed the Deacons for Defense, which defended the lives and homes of Jonesboro citizens on many occasions. This experience led him to join Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1967, at Dr. King's request, Kirk came to New York to organize the Poor People's March on Washington, which aimed to unite poor whites, blacks, Indians [Native Americans], Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans.

"I first met Kirk in 1968 at the home of Gordon Friesen and Sis Cunningham, where both Kirk and I were living. Gordon and Sis are the founders and creators of this very magazine, BROADSIDE. Hearing Kirk sing freedom songs reminded me of my experiences as the director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers. I was overjoyed to know that the work was being continued. When Kirk and I met we became brothers immediately. We sang together and had the opportunity of watching Sis and Gordon, the most important collectors of topical songs in the 1960s and 70s do their work.

"Brother Kirk spread the philosophy of Dr. King throughout the East Coast and, as an outgrowth of his work, the `Hey Brother Coffeehouse' was formed at St. Gregory's Church in Manhattan. Here, hundreds of folksingers sharpened their talents and developed their political consciousness under Kirk's direction.

"He was also a leading force in the fight for justice for the Palestinian people and for the oppressed in Northern Ireland. In recent years, he dedicated his life to working with the homeless in New York City and in Philadelphia. He was also editor-in-chief of the Many Races Cultural Foundation's newsletter, The Freedom Press.

"Brother Kirk died on Saturday morning, August 16, 1986, in New York City, after a brief illness. He had turned 53-years old on August 12. Kirk had five daughters: Camilla, Alfreda, Brunella, Freddy (deceased) of Grambling, Louisiana and Sojourner Christy Damio-Kirkpatrick of New York City.

"On Monday, August 25, 1986, people gathered at St. Gregory's Church from around the country to pay tribute to Brother Kirk: Palestinians, Jews, Irish, Blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, the homeless and the elderly. They were all there. From Pete Seeger to Mother Clark. They were all there. Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) and Bernadette Devlin McAlisky could not come, but sent telegrams. Kirk was my right arm. I loved him. We dreamed the same dreams and fought the same fight. I felt obligated to give this tribute to Kirk. It was a great celebration and tribute to his life and work.

"Brother Kirk is dead, but his spirit lives on in each of us. He never compromised his principles, regardless of the consequences. He fought for freedom and justice at every turn. `We are all significant on God's keyboard,' was his statement to the world. He believed in humankind and never allowed anyone to denigrate any one branch. He worked for the rights of the least powerful of his comrades: the Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland and in the U.K.; the Palestinians, who have been persecuted and are now scattered all over the world; the homeless and hungry Americans who live in the alleys and gutters of our country; the freedom fighters of Soweto who now rise from the ashes of apartheid; the Native Americans who are a constant reminder of our government's most heinous crime--the extermination of a race of people for the gain of land." 

Freedm Singer-U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter-Movement organizer Matt Jones

Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick's Black History Protest Folk Song Video Revisited

The late 20th-century U.S. Civil Rights Movement activist-organizer and protest folk songwriter-singer, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, produced this educational folk song video, in the years prior to his death in the 1980's, which reveals some historical facts that many U.S. history textbooks have often failed to include.

Abbie Hoffman's 1969 `Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album" Book Revisited

In his classic Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album" book of 50 years ago, 1960's U.S. antiwar movement organizer/activist and Chicago 8 Trial defendant Abbie Hoffman indicated how the U.S. hip capitalist rock music industry entrepreneurs and rock capitalist musicians who put together the Woodstock Music Festival in August 1969 apparently failed to reflect the egalitarian values of the 1960s antiwar and anti-capitalist Movement's counter-cultural hippie youth culture:

"...The za-za world of rock is almost entirely an uptown plastic dome. Up at Woodstock it meant living at the Concord hotel or the Holiday Inn in Liberty and buzzing in stoned out of your head in a helicopter. It meant being hustled under guard to a secluded pavilion to join the other aristocrats who run the ROCK EMPIRE...

"I emerged exhausted, broke and bleeding from the WOODSTOCK NATION. It was an awesome experience but one that made me have a clearer picture of myself as a cultural revolutionary--not a cultural nationalist, for that would embrace a concept of hip capitalism which I reject...Cultural revolution requires people to change the way they live...

"The four promoters of Woodstock Ventures are Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman and John Roberts...Lang owned a head shop in Coral Gables until he got the idea for Woodstock Ventures. Kornfeld was a rock promoter for ...bubble rock groups...Rosenman and Roberts had the bread. Roberts' old man owned a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical firm...

"...Brothers and Sisters, we have a duty to each other to work out the problem of the vultures that prey on our culture and indeed on the rest of the world culture as well...The Big Boys are going to get together and sort of figure out how they can make some bread on the Woodstock Nation or, if not directly, how they can suck its energy. All that has to be fit in along with Columbia Records pulling ads out of the underground press in an effort to cripple them. A to P research firm had suggested two ways to prevent another Chicago from happening.

"1. Cancel the policy of youth fare on airplanes.
"2. Urge Columbia Records to pull out of the underground press...

"...These guys were prepared to do anything to stay in business, even grow their hair a little longer and put on some beads.

"Fit all that in with Love Food, Inc. selling sawdust burgers for outrageous prices on the highest hill in WOODSTOCK NATION and shoveling real money with real shovels into Wells Fargo Trucks, all the time guarded by cops who weren't holding flowers in their hands, no sir. These are things that weren't announced from the stage in that syrupy smooth groovy voice, nor talked about in the psychedelic hand-outs and press releases of Woodstock Ventures...

"What are you gonna do with your bread, brother rock stars? Are you gonna help build and defend the WOODSTOCK NATION NOW, or are you just gonna piss it all away?...

"...Revolution was becoming a saleable commodity and the only way to deal with that was to try and rip off the bread and spread it around like the manure it was...No real hip activist could just sit by and watch skilled promoters create events that gathered huge numbers of young people and made exorbitant profits without eventually taking an interest..." 

Joan Baez's September 1966 `American Folk Scene' Interview Revisited : An Excerpt

Joan Baez at a 1960's Anti-War Rally

Following are some excerpts from an interview with 1960's U.S. anti-war/civil rights movement protest folk singer/activist Joan Baez that was conducted by telephone on Labor Day, Monday, September 5, 1966 by David A. De Turk and A. Poulin, Jr., which first appeared in the 1967 book that they editied, The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival:

INTERVIEWER: On the basis of what you have been discovering for yourself in the past year or so, what is your impression now of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement?
BAEZ: Well, as I look back, that movement was--not bad, but they didn't really know much of anything. I didn't know much, either! But, it was what we refer to now as an "unviolent" movement; that is to say, they used nonviolence because it seemed the most intelligent, but they would have been happy at any moment to switch to something else if they thought it would work better.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it was very effective?
BAEZ:  Well, in a way, except that if each of those students really knew what he was doing and really knew what he was asking--if he was saying, "We're not going to take any more of this gas,' then he had to be ready to leave school. The problem was that most of them, I think, were not ready to leave school.

INTERVIEWER: Would you agree that it would be virtually impossible to bring about any lasting changes at the university?
BAEZ: Ummm--not if they were ready to leave! And they should be ready to leave because I don't think they should have been there in the first place!...

INTERVIEWER: You have said that you think one of the basic problems with the traditional college setting is that it still "tends to assume that war is okay," that there are "justifiable" wars. Do you see this among the faculty as well? Normally, aren't faculty thought of as being "liberal"?
BAEZ: Oh, good Lord, that word "liberal" is just, I mean, practically meaningless. Most good liberals still think it's okay to kill people.

INTERVIEWER: Under certain circumstances?
BAEZ: Yes, and they insist everything depends on the circumstances and those circumstances exist all the time; we just manage to create them...

INTERVIEWER: You've implied previously when we've talked that what you sing reflects the state of your thinking at the time; you choose songs because they are saying something to you. What kinds of songs are you singing now and is there any particular reason for this?
BAEZ: Well, that's sort of funny because right now in this unquenchable search for some kind of reality that I'm involved in I'm not terribly interested in music right now and it occurs to me I hadn't really realized what was happening. I tried a rock'n'roll record this year--and I really ended up that I don't want to put it out, and I'll tell you why.

INTERVIEWER: Was that Dick Farina's "Pack Up Your Sorrows"?
BAEZ: Farina's, yes...I realized when I was listening to the tapes and trying to put the record together that something was wrong. And I never could figure it out until we were reading Gandhi and he said something about art. He said how you could never accept art for art's sake. Then he said he rejected it, he didn't say it was necessarily bad, he said he rejected it because it didn't represent truth, it wasn't involved with truth, and I realized that that was really what was wrong with that record. Not that it was false or lies or anything, but just that it had nothing to do with anything meaningful, most of it...The rock songs are not necessarily untrue, but what Gandhi also said was that art must elevate the spirit. Rock'n'roll does not elevate my spirit...

INTERVIEWER: Have you felt that Dylan's newer material still says something to you?
BAEZ: It says something to me when I'm feeling at my absolutely most destructive. I think it is very, very destructive music--and quite beautiful, some of it, you know, but for me it's when I feel mopy and very unspiritual, or whatever you want to call it.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you call it "destructive"?
BAEZ: Well, that's all he's saying. I mean, up to a point, Bobby and I said about the same thing. What we both said was that everything is completely screwy and there just doesn't seem to be much reason to anything, and then we split when I said you had to find out whether there was a reason and you had to give something to the people who are starving and you have to try to stop murdering even though it seems impossible, but what he said was--`Screw it.' I mean, you can't do anything and just forget it and I'll get my kicks while I'm here. I mean, that's what I get out of the music even though some of it is--I mean, he's such a musical genius that it's so beautiful to the ear, except that it's very discouraging. I mean, putting out a song like "Everybody Must Get Stoned," that's just the opposite of helping anyone to care. I mean it's just so destructive somehow.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel there's a kind of "retreat" involved here?
BAEZ: Oh, complete, yes. I think he doesn't want to be responsible for anybody, including himself.

INTERVIEWER: He has said as much in various interviews.
BAEZ: Yes, he's pretty straight about that. I just think it's rather--I can't help thinking it's sad. Because he's so powerful.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think he would be happier if he could find the strength to go back to attempting to fight it rather than not?
BAEZ: Something like that, yes. I mean, it's hard to judge who's going to be happiest now, but he doesn't appear to me to be a very happy young man...
(end of excerpt)