Phil Ochs did not want to go to Mississippi. He had heard how, just a few days earlier, Robert Parris Moses, the man who was trying to talk him into going south and singing for the Freedom Riders, had been beaten senseless and arrested by white men in Amite County. He also knew that when Moses challenged the attackers in court before, he wound up being escorted by police to the county line after an all-white jury acquitted the men who beat him almost senseless.1 And this was not the first time Moses had attracted violence in Mississippi.
Ochs wanted nothing to do with it. Sure, Moses came to the civil rights movement early. In 1961 he became the director of SNCC’s Mississippi Project and, in that position, was asked to register African-American voters in the state.2 According to Bruce Watson, Mississippi had made the least progress in the field of civil rights and was determined to maintain its record. In Georgia, 44 percent of the African-American population was registered to vote, in Texas 50 percent, and in Tennessee 69 percent. In Mississippi, however, a mere 6–7 percent of the African-American community was registered and eligible to vote.3 Moses was determined to change those figures and he was asking Phil Ochs, among others, to help him do it.
There was little in Phil Ochs’ background to indicate that he would become a mover and shaker in the movement. Born in El Paso, Texas, on December 19, 1940, Ochs grew up the son of an army doctor who had received a medical discharge. Ochs’ father, Jacob “Jack” Ochs, returned home with a case of bipolar disorder and suffering from severe depression, two conditions from which his son would also suffer later in life. His conditions rendering it difficult for him to hold down a job, Jack Ochs spent his working life floating from hospital to hospital, so the family moved often, finally settling in Columbus, Ohio.4
In high school, Phil Ochs demonstrated an interest in the discipline, regimentation, and spectacle of the military, which led him to choose to attend military school instead of the public high school. He had earlier demonstrated a talent for music, playing the clarinet in the orchestra at the Capital University Conservatory of Music; at the age of sixteen, he became the orchestra’s principal soloist. Classical music was only one of his interests, though. At this time, he developed what would become a lifelong fascination with the work of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley as well as the country music of Hank Williams, Sr., and Johnny Cash.
Ochs spent three years at Staunton Military Academy in Virginia and after graduation attended Ohio State University. There he got his life turned around and found his direction by meeting a fellow student named Jim Glover:
It was the wall of Elvis pictures which first caught the eye of the student from the floor below as he passed Philip’s room one day on his way to study group. “Heartbreak Hotel” was on the phonograph. Jim Glover walked into Phil’s room to get a closer look.
“Where’d you get the pictures, man?”
“I collect them,” Philip said, without looking up from the magazine he was reading while he sat on his bed.
“Do you have any pictures of Woody Guthrie?”
“Never heard of him.”
Jim asked Philip if he’d ever heard of the Weavers. He said no.
Or Pete Seeger? Not him either. Jim took him down to his room. He wanted to play some of his own records. A couple of 78s later, Philip told Jim he was looking for a new roommate. The next day he helped Jim move his stuff upstairs.5
While giving Ochs a basic education in folk music, Glover taught him to play guitar and introduced him to radical politics. Soon the two of them were playing out, billing themselves as the Sundowners, although Phil preferred to refer to themselves as the Singing Socialists. The act broke up when Jim Glover moved to New York City to become a professional folk singer. Phil stayed in Ohio, working small clubs and coffeehouses, and began fusing his interest in politics with his interest in folk music by writing and performing topical songs. Soon he followed Glover to New York and began the slow but steady process of becoming Phil Ochs, the second-most well-known composer of protest songs in America. Electra Records signed him to a contract and in 1964 his first album, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, was released, followed a year later by I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore. Both albums contained pro-civil rights and anti-war songs.
Now, however, Robert Moses was asking Ochs to live what he was singing; he wanted him to go into the territory he’d been writing about, taking his life in his own hands and become an activist rather than an artist. Writing topical songs was one thing, Ochs thought. Sticking your face inside the lion’s mouth to sing them was something else altogether. Moses’s request that Phil Ochs and his folk-singing compatriots go to Mississippi came about because the 1964 Newport Folk Festival had been the most successful one ever. A total of 77,000 people had attended, up from 30,000 in 1963.6 That turnout gave Moses an idea. If the performers from the festival, which had been a harvest of protest songs, went south to sing those songs for the Freedom Riders, who were crisscrossing the state in a dual effort to integrate the state’s mass transportation system and to register voters, they could open up the voter lists by adding thousands of new names.
As we have seen, even though the Supreme Court had affirmed integration in 1961, public transportation remained segregated in the Deep South and local Jim Crow laws declared that African Americans were to occupy only the back of busses.7 As we also discussed, the actions of the original thirteen young people who went south as Freedom Riders inspired thousands of idealistic young white kids, primarily college students and recent college graduates, to go south to help integrate the transportation system.8 As Moses, the president of CORE, had organized the Freedom Riders, he was fully aware of how dangerous this particular mission was. He knew of the violence perpetrated by Klansmen and other white supremacists, the firebombing of busses, and the fact that the Klan was given permission by Bull Connor to beat up the Freedom Riders for 15 minutes before he ordered his deputies to stop them.9 He also knew that when violence didn’t seem likely to stop the activists the authorities turned to mass arrests. By the time Ochs was offered his opportunity to go into the front lines and face the hatred, the Freedom Riders had become a familiar topic in civil rights circles.
On May 24, 1961, when they first arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, they were summarily arrested and jailed for “breaching the peace” because they used “white only” bathrooms and water fountains.10 But as we have seen, not even jail stopped them. Following Dr. King’s example, they refused to be bailed out and released, announcing that they would not pay fines for unconstitutional arrests and illegal conviction.11 The state of Mississippi lost the public sympathy game and this time they lost big. President Kennedy issued his new desegregation orders pulling white and colored signs forever, ending separate drinking fountains and bathrooms. From then on, lunchrooms and terminals would be integrated, as would the busses. Bob Moses had his victory. He did not, however, feel like retiring from the ring. Being able to move freely and drink water where you wanted was a major victory, certainly, but why not go bigger? None of this progress made any real difference if people could not cast a vote, so acquiring voting rights was Moses’s plan from the beginning. He would secure small victories that would lead to securing the big one: the vote.
The Mississippi constitution, drawn up in 1890, contains clauses on poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests that were designed to prevent the black population from voting. When the Freedom Rides succeeded, local black leaders in Mississippi such as Medgar Evers asked SNCC to lead a voter registration drive. Moses, ready to build on his victory, said yes and Mississippi Summer resulted.12 Moses had two goals for the summer’s activities. The first, of course, was to register voters. The second was to show the rest of the world how absurd and dangerous this situation was. That’s why he needed folk singers.
Moses was making progress, but changing the dominant culture of Mississippi was a slow and dangerous process marked by arrests, beatings, shootings, arson, and murder, all committed by white supremacists. Now he wanted to bring the Freedom Riders’ work to a higher level of public awareness. A group of thirty-five of the nation’s finest and most popular folk singers could accomplish that. This was the situation facing Phil Ochs when Moses came to Newport.
As a member of the dominant 5 percent of the civil rights movement, Moses did not get turned down very often. In fact, all he had to do was bring up the idea and most of the singers were ready to go. Carolyn Hester, at that time one of the most popular folk performers in the United States (she had been recently been named by the Saturday Evening Post as “The Face of Folk Music”), declared, “You almost didn’t want to stand up and say you were an American, if you didn’t go.” There was no getting around it: Phil Ochs had to put his body and his life on the line by going south.
Contemporary folk artists like Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Eric Andersen, Jackie Washington, and Len Chandler were enthusiastically on board for the trip. Bob Dylan, never one either to be pressured into a decision or to follow someone else’s directive, went back to New York after the festival. At the festival he had introduced a new song, one he had just written which was perhaps the best topical song of its time. “Only a Pawn in Their Game” was about the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The veteran actor, folk singer, and writer Theodore Bikel, already in Mississippi, could not understand why Dylan had turned down the opportunity to come to Mississippi and sing that song for the people who had inspired it and needed to hear it. He called Dylan and told him he had to come down and sing that song for the people. “I can’t,” Dylan said. “I’m broke. I don’t have the money.” Bikel sent him a round-trip airplane ticket and Bob Dylan came down to join the company.13
No one provided a plane ticket for Phil Ochs. He drove down from New York with Eric Andersen, another folk singer with whom he’d performed at Newport and who, when they got back, was to be featured on Vanguard’s New Faces of 1964 album. Phil, who was drunk most of the way down, had to let Andersen drive. At this time he had no idea he was suffering from bipolar disorder, but knew he was getting more and more paranoid as they entered what Andersen called “Southerntown, Mississippi.” In the sixties paranoia wasn’t unusual among progressives but was a natural response to the fact that, in more cases than not, the FBI was monitoring the words and actions of the New Left. After his death, for example, the FBI released a file of more than 500 pages on Ochs.14 Under those conditions, a touch of paranoia was not outside the norm and Phil Ochs began feeling it as soon as they entered the South.
When he and Andersen had been there for two days, the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found. On June 21, 1964, Goodman and Schwerner—two New York City members of Moses’s Council of Federated Organizations who were in Mississippi for the voter registrations drive—were, along with Meridian, Mississippi, activist James Chaney, arrested while driving through Meridian. After questioning by the police, the three young men were released, but as they drove off they were followed by a group of white supremacists, a group that included members of the Meridian police department. They were pulled over and shot, then their bodies were dumped in an earthen dam.15 When their corpses turned up, a shock went through the entire protesting community, both local and from out of town. All of the folk singers on the trip recognized that Mississippi was in a dangerous time and was a dangerous place, but their efforts had to be undertaken nonetheless. Carolyn Hester said, “We sang in churches, we sang in people’s houses. It was hard, and it was scary, and we were staying in their homes, on their side of town, and making their lives more difficult and more dangerous. But it was all … necessary. It was all necessary. I’m not sure we did anything except go there and say we see you, we love you, and we’re with you. I don’t know if we accomplished anything more than that. But we did do that.”
Phil Ochs agreed it was necessary, but, already paranoid, he became convinced that he was going to be murdered. Still, he went ahead and performed. However, each time he went onto the rickety homemade stage, he made Andersen stand watch, scanning the crowd for assassins. His paranoia grew by the day and he could not wait until the week he had pledged to the cause was up so he could go home. However, when he wasn’t singing, he was out talking to the crowds, working them like the journalist he had trained in college to become, conducting interviews, and writing down in the reporter’s pad he always carried what the local people had to say. When he got back to New York, all of those quotes would come in handy.
According to the Ochs biography Death of a Rebel, one night that fall he and Eric Andersen were playing the Gaslight. While Andersen did the opening set, Phil Ochs sat with Dave Van Ronk at the bar drinking as Ochs told Van Ronk how horrible Mississippi had been. Van Ronk was not impressed. Mississippi had no lock-hold on ugliness, he said, declaring that Ochs could have found just as much racial hatred down the block there in the Village. Even as Ochs took the stage, they continued arguing.
After a couple of songs, Phil Ochs asked the crowd to raise their glasses and join in a toast. As they did, he broke into “Here’s to the State of Mississippi.”16 The song was built on his observations from his time in that southern state, as well as quotes from the citizens he had interviewed. He sang about the bodies beneath the state’s muddy waters, about the still-segregated schools that did not teach black kids but instead taught white kids to hate, about the cops he accused in the lyrics of being murderers and more. The crowd in the Gaslight went berserk over the song, cheering, whistling, stomping, standing. That was more than the old-line Marxist Van Ronk could take. Storming his way to the stage, he screamed that Phil had it all wrong. Why shovel blame on Mississippi when it just as bad down the block as it was down South? Phil, he said, had reduced the problem to a “liberal’s mentality, so very unimportant.”17 Phil didn’t think the song was unimportant at all. What he had wanted to do was to express all of his rage and anger and confusion, to provide an emotional response to the horrors that he still felt about Mississippi Summer. He wanted an Aristotelian purgation, where, by expressing his choking emotions, he could rid himself of them. If he could not conquer racism by going into its heart, he could fight it the best way he knew—through a good topical song.