In January of 2017, as the Trump administration was getting started and the nation was erupting in reaction to his actions, the Washington Post published a column by Richard Just arguing that the music of the sixties folk singer Phil Ochs is more important today than ever. In the column Just stated, “[A]s we enter the Trump era, and as a new mass protest movement begins to take shape, his music would be worthy of a revival.”1 Ochs’ songs are directly relevant to the situation America faced under Trump, Just wrote, because they deal with the “deepest questions about democracy, dissent and human decency in a grim political age.” He cited Lady Gaga’s singing of Ochs’ “The War Is Over” as an example, pointing out the way the song “suggests how political resistance in any age can be enlivened, refreshed and perhaps even galvanized by jarring notes of artistic creativity.”2 He also cited “There but for Fortune” as a “succinct reminder of the ethical basis of modern liberalism: that in a world with no level playing field, we have sizable obligations to those who are less lucky.”3
At the time Just wrote, Trump had been president for only a few weeks and already there had been daily protests all across the nation. The University of California at Berkeley was once again exploding with protestors, with reports of violence and riots on campus. As the New York Times reported, the triggering action was the university Republican Club’s scheduling of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulis, a reporter for the right-wing website Breitbart and a white supremacist provocateur. Yiannopoulis is no ordinary conservative. His speeches frequently take a hard turn toward hate speech (in a talk at the University of Wisconsin he ridiculed a transgender student by name) and he often attacks other races. Controversy tracks him like a heat-seeking missile.
At Berkeley he planned to publicly “out” transgender students.4 Because of his history, Berkeley students and more than 100 faculty members petitioned the administration to cancel the speech. Citing free speech, the university’s chancellor refused to do so. Protestors turned out and before long the protests turned violent. The speech was canceled.5 A complicated situation quickly turned into a two-sided argument. Protestors on both the right and the left engaged each other, each blaming the other for the riots and the cancelation of the speech. Representatives for both sides said that peaceful demonstrations would not have shut down Yiannopoulis’s speech; therefore the escalation was either, depending on your viewpoint, necessary or the most extreme form of censorship.6
Berkeley students claimed that the violent people were not students but community members who came to the campus to run wild. On CNN, former United States secretary of labor and current Berkeley professor Robert Reich repeated a never-confirmed rumor that the rioters were bought and paid for right-wing activists—hired to come to the event and stir up trouble.7 Whoever they were and wherever they came from, school or community, they were there and the campus found itself divided and fighting, just as it had been back in the “Free Speech” days of the early sixties.
It was then that the calls like the one Richard Just issued for a revival of Phil Ochs’ music began going out. Many writers published pieces declaring that Phil Ochs was needed again. Peter Stone Brown published an article in Counterpunch asking, “Where Is Phil Ochs When We Really Need Him?” In it, Brown says, “Considering the state of America in the 21st Century, I think about Phil Ochs a lot and what he might’ve written and sung about what’s going on now. Where is Phil Ochs when we need him?”8 David Hinkey, in his article “Forty Years Later, We Still Need Phil Ochs,” discusses how Ochs could distill the essence of a situation or an event into a song then goes on to say, “I can’t count the number of times during those years when I’ve been talking with someone about the events of the world and one of us would say, ‘We really could use Phil Ochs.’” Yes, we could. When he was on his game, in the middle 1960s, Phil Ochs could turn a situation into a song that distilled it to exactly what mattered.9
So, why is the music of Phil Ochs—and, I would argue, folk music in general—so badly needed today? Rob Young explains it this way:
Interest in folk music and other buried aspects of national culture tends to be reawakened at moments when there’s a perceived danger of things being lost for ever. Successive folk revivals of the 20th century drew their impetus equally from the two historical landmarks that most permeate the British collective unconscious: the industrial revolution and the first world war. In the late 1960s and early 70s, fear of annihilation, technological progress and a vision of alternative societies filtered through popular and underground culture, conspiring to promote the ideal of “getting back to the garden.”10
Among a large segment of the population, Trump’s election meant a dramatic move away from the garden that was the Obama administration. Folk music is a means of understanding these seismic cultural shifts that are continually happening and helping to create an alternative. These are songs that explain the tenor of the times to their audiences.
To explain why people perceive a fresh need for folk music in our political realm we should probably understand the circumstances that brought our present situation into existence. Like so much of our culture today the phenomenon has its roots in the sixties. At that time, drawing on the roots their forerunners planted in the union movements of the thirties and forties, folk singers—following in the path of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers, and the Weavers—artists of a new generation, stepped forward and created their own response to the world in which they found themselves. Foremost among these artists who mixed music and radical politics were Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Carolyn Hester, and Bob Dylan. Although the work of other artists will be considered, this book will primarily utilize those five as examples. These are the singer-songwriters who stepped forward and helped change America. This book aims to show why and how it happened and what that early activism means to us as we go forward.