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Tom Paxton's political work is most like Ochs' - rough-hewn and topical. He was even quicker than Ochs - if there was a hot topic, Paxton could crankout a song for it. Many of these short-lived gems are captured live on the recent Vanguard re-release, though the best of the bunch, "Talking Watergate," is from the 70's.
Joan Baez's political art is more defined by the issues she has tended to tackle. At least until very recently, the songs she has tended to prefer are neither as clever as Ochs' or as poetic and oblique as Dylan's. They are flat, forgettable speeches in song that decry evil and proclaim the good. In fact, most critics of Baez have always wished she'd stay away from politics altogether and stick to her job of putting new life into traditional folk songs. Compounding the problem is the terrible beauty of her voice. Her operatic renditions of heartfelt, but clunky pleas on behalf of workers, migrants and soldiers are simply a bad combination (I know I should have examples here, but none come to mind - write me). More recently, Baez has toured with songwriters like Dar Williams, Richard Shindell, and now Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer, leaning heavily on their songwriting expertise, with generally fine results.
Like Baez, Pete Seeger, and the members of Peter, Paul and Mary were more important as performers than as writers, though Seeger and Peter Yarrow wrote songs of their own. Seeger chose political material similar to Baez in its directness and heavy-handedness, but with his down to earth personality and musical style, he was able to bring them off. Peter Paul and Mary were significant largely because they were excellent musicians who, at least for a while, displayed excellent taste in songs. Their easy-listening musical style allowed them to translate songs by Dylan and others into forms that appealed to the popular ear. Like the Kingston Trio and Limelighters before them, they took the rough edges off of authentic folk music and the accusatory tone out of the political songs and made them palatable. For this, they have suffered cruelly at the hands of critics, but their role was crucial in making folk music the popular phenomenon that it was.
Buffy St. Marie deserves special mention because her writing has always been strong, on the poetic, symbolic side, and she was a pioneer in widening the civil rights discourse beyond black and white, addressing Native American issues in particular. Her songs "Universal Soldier" and "Buffalo" remain highly-singable classics.
Another
writer who deserves special mention is Tom Lehrer. Lehrer, a mathematics professor,
played piano, and based his work in the Tin Pan Alley, Broadway Musical style.
This jaunty, kitschy musical style was perfectly wedded to satirical lyrics
in a way that shocked and delighted at the same time. Lehrer's subjects were,
on the whole, social rather than political issues. He dealt with war on many
occasions, as in "World War III Rag," "Who's Next," and
"Werner von Braun," and his song "Pollution" is one of the
earliest to tackle that subject. But his specialty was skewering foolish people,
institutions, intellectual fads and modern life. Among his classic pieces are
"Vatican Rag," "National Brotherhood Week," "Poisoning
the Pigeons in the Park," "New Math," and "Masochism Tango."
Lehrer claims that after Watergate, nothing seemed funny to him anymore, and
in fact he stopped writing and went back to math.
Along with Dylan, Paul Simon is the only major songwriter to emerge from the 60's and continue to function as an artist throughout his career. Political songs were not a big part of his repertoire, but the few that he contributed were outstanding and influential. Like Dylan, he preferred the symbolic mode of the poet, as in "The Sounds of Silence." He also turned traditional songs like "Scarborough Fair"* and "Silent Night" into anti-war protest songs by adding the canticle to one and the jarring news report to the other.
Of course no discussion of the 60's would be complete without mentioning Arlo Guthrie's 18 and a half minute epic, "Alice's Restaurant."
* see Paul Castle's interview with Martin Carthy, from whom Simon stole the arrangement to "Scarborough Fair." They recently performed together.
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Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com
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