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The Almanac Singers

Sis Cunningham, Woody Guthrie, and Bess Lomax Hawes(back row from left to right), Cisco Houston and Pete Seeger(front row from left to right)

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"Birth of a Broadside", written by Josh Dunson

Broadside's home is a small little room that's got chairs and a sofa with a tape recorder finishing off the bottom wall space. First people Sis Cunningham welcomed in after me was two-thirds of the New World Singers. Gil Turner took out his 12-stringer, borrowed a flat pick, Sis took out the mike for the tape recorder, and out came a talking blues Gil just wrote about the newspaper strike that had us all quietly laughing. We didn’t want to laugh louder than quietly because that might get on the tape.

Before the song’s over, in walks Bob Dylan and Suzy [Suze Rotolo], who sometimes illustrate's Bob's songs. The last verse that Gil was singing had how he was going to see his friend, Bob Dylan, who is a walking newspaper and will give him the lowdown on what's happening in the world. Bob thought it was a great song just from hearing the last verse.

Then, Gil took out his 6-string Gibson, handed it over to Bob Dylan saying how Bob’s new song “Masters Of War” was a powerful and a great one, one of the best Bob had ever written. I kept on thinking he had written a lot of good ones, some that had real lyric poetry like “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” (which makes you think right away of Lorca), and I waited for the images of rain, and thunder, and lightning to come out in great spectacles.

But no, this time there was a different kind of poetry, one of great anger, accusation, just saying what the masters of war are, straight forward and without compromising one inch in its short sharp direct intensity. I got a hunch this is the most difficult Dylan song for others to sing right, 'cause it can so easily be over sung, made a melodrama. But when Bob sings it, it rings honest and true. I hope a record is made of Bob singing this song and that a lot of people will listen to the quiet voice that Bob sings this song in because there is a dignity in the words that comes from when they have been thought about for a long, long time.

And right after that, not waiting for a chance to get two breaths, Bob came along with “Playboys & Playgirls Ain't Gonna Run My World," a group song that like Pete Seeger said later in the evening "is going to be sung by a million people in the next year.” Its tune catches whole crowds easy, and the words come right along from the feeling, Hell man, I was born here and I live here, but I’m not goin’ to let rats knock things down where I was born, where I live.

In the meantime, Phil Ochs, his sidekick, and the third third of the New World Singers, Happy Traum, came in. Boy, this room was so jammed packed with people that there was real foot and banjo and guitar shifting necessary to get Phil Ochs close enough to the mike to record his three new songs. Phil Ochs. What a guy! Quiet, soft spoken, but there with his guitar he spun some of the most real verses that's goin' to be written about the death of N.Y. Youth Board worker Louis C. Marsh and the miners striking in Hazard, Kentucky. There was an immediateness about those two songs Phil did. I got a strong feeling that his song on Hazard is going to be remembered past this strike, and be resung in many strikes to come.

Phil’s last song, a fine one of hope with a great group chorus had the last half of it heard by Pete Seeger who later that night was going to sing at the Hazard strikers rally at Community Church. After hearing the tape of the songs, smiling all the way through, Pete sang a number of new songs sent him recently.

We were all out of breath without breathing hard, that feeling you get when a lot of good things happen all at once. Pete expressed it, leaning back in his chair, saying slowly in dreamy tones: “You know, in the past five months I haven't heard as many good songs and as much good music as I heard here tonight.”

That’s what makes Broadside, all that good singing and all that good writing, plus a lot of hard work, labor pains. In the sheets of paper there are many smiles and many glances of anger, and even more the strong hope that these songs just won’t stay on the mimeograph pages, but will live and be sung.

(Broadside #20, February 1963)