Blowing in the Wind
Jewish Protest Singers in the 1960s (apart from Dylan)
[This piece is based on my recent book Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil].
The early to mid-1960s may well go down in history as the era of protest. The baby boomer generation, born in the wake of World War Two, growing up in a period of unprecedented prosperity and generally benefitting more from education than their parents, looked at the injustices of the world around them and complained.
Chief among their causes were opposition to the Vietnam War, support for the struggle for civil rights among Black Americans and rejection of the values and consumerism of their parents’ generation. Among those with a social conscience who raised their voices in anger were a disproportionate number of Jews.
Music drew the boomers together, it was their currency. In an age when mass communication was just beginning, and social media had not arrived, music, particularly folk music, was the medium through which they transmitted their ideas. Bob Dylan, of course, was the stand-out folk/protest artist, the one who articulated the feelings that so many could not put into words, the man who gave the protestors the anthems they sang as they demonstrated. But while the erstwhile Bobby Zimmerman was the best known of all the protest singers, his was far from being the only Jewish voice.
Perhaps the most overlooked Jewish singer of protest songs was Phil Ochs. A tragic figure, his career came to an end after he fell into a deep depression, leading to his death in 1976, at the young age of 35. Unforgiving and graphic in his condemnation of the injustices he highlighted, during the early days of the Vietnam war, his was the unrivalled voice of protest, with songs like What Are You Fighting For?, Talking Vietnam Blues and One More Parade, all released in 1964. His 1962 song, Vietnam, was the first ever protest to be written about the War, while his satirical Draft Dodger Rag, about an 18-year-old making every excuse to avoid being enlisted, was inspired by his younger brother Michael Ochs, one of the first to be expelled from the Reserve Officer Training Corps for organising protests against the draft. It was Phil Ochs, not Bob Dylan, who tapped into the rage felt by the audience at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival; he received a standing ovation when he sang about the brutal police response to an anti-segregation protest by black school children, a few weeks earlier in Birmingham, Alabama.
America was rocked in 1964 by the murder of three civil rights activists who were taking part in the Freedom Summer campaign to encourage members of the Black community in Mississippi to register for the vote. The three activists, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman had been among the 1,000 mainly white middle-class students who volunteered to spend their summer on the campaign. One Black and two Jews, they had just visited the burnt out remains of Mount Zion church, one of twenty churches firebombed that summer by the Ku Klux Klan, when they were arrested by a deputy sheriff. They were never seen again. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were friends of Andrew Goodman. Simon released He Was My Brother as an anti-racist protest in his memory.
One of the most unusual names to crop up in the list of Jewish activist singers is that of Theo Bikel. Unusual, because Bikel is far better known as the first actor to play the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, a part he played over 2,000 times across the USA. Born into a passionately Zionist family in Austria (his father had named him after Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism), as a teenager he fled the Nazis with his parents. Managing to circumvent the British restrictions on Jewish entry into Palestine, they settled on a kibbutz. Theo took up acting, appeared in a few stage roles in Tel Aviv, including the first production of the play that would evolve into Fiddler on the Roof, and in 1946 went to London to study at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts. He acted in several roles on the London stage, before moving to the USA where he appeared in Hollywood movies and TV programmes, creating the role of Captain von Trapp in the original stage version of The Sound of Music. He was as prolific as a singer as he was as an actor, making over 40 albums, mainly of Jewish and Russian folk songs.
Bikel, who once said that music was ‘one of the few answers to the chaos that we have’, put the principle into practice through his involvement in the civil rights movement. He steered Bob Dylan towards practical civil rights activism by quietly paying his plane fare to travel to a small gathering of black farmers in Mississippi. Dylan went with Bikel and Pete Seeger, to get national publicity for a voter registration campaign. The trip was not Dylan’s idea; indeed, when Theo Bikel suggested to Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, that he should go, Grossman told him that he wouldn’t be able to afford the plane fare. Bikel told Grossman that he would pay it, and that Dylan wasn’t to know.
The vast majority of activist singers, Jewish or otherwise, were American. But not exclusively. Among the leading figures of the British folk-protest movement was Leon Rosselson, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. In 1961 he collaborated with the Liverpudlian folk singer Stan Kelly, releasing an extended play album called Songs for Swinging Landlords To. The title was a spoof on Frank Sinatra’s hugely successful album Songs for Swinging Lovers. The four tracks on the disc, all unashamedly partisan in their left-wing politics, were Greedy Landlord, Oakey Evictions, The Man Who Waters the Workers Beer and Pity the Downtrodden Landlord. Among the lyricists on the album was the acclaimed scientist, Barnet Woolf. Like Rosselson, he was the son of Jewish immigrants,
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott didn’t think of himself as a protest singer or activist; he wore a cowboy hat, modelled himself on Woody Guthrie and, as far as most of the public knew, he didn’t have a drop of Jewish blood in him. Those who had been at his very first concert in New York knew differently. He told them that he was Elliott Charles Adnopoz, a doctor’s son from Brooklyn and that his parents Abe and Flossie were in the audience that evening. He became a cowboy after listening to stories of country life, told by his father Abe Adnopoz, who had grown up on a farm in Connecticut. His protest songs were not those typical of the 1960s. His complaints were based on those sung by Woody Guthrie, on the hardships of life during the depression.
Woody Guthrie was the archetype for activist singers but by the 1960s he was too unwell to write topical protest. He was not Jewish. But his wife was and so therefore were their children. And Guthrie seems to have an emotional connection to Judaism; he composed seven songs about the festival of Hanukah – more than any Jewish composer has ever written. He had no truck though with Jewish sentimentality. Irving Berlin’s God Bless America is an uncompromisingly patriotic song written by an eternally grateful Jewish immigrant. Guthrie’s riposte, This Land Is Your Land, written by a man whose American roots ran deep, for whom American life and hardship were inseparable, is a world removed from such schmaltz.
The era of Jewish protest singing did not last long. Folk music lost its popularity, and the protest singers grew old or moved on to other things. Still, it was fitting that Guthrie’s son, Arlo, brought the brief period of Jewish musical activism to a close. His 18-minute-long Alice’s Restaurant is both a protest against the Vietnam draft and a musical comedy sketch. Less earnest than early protest songs, Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant can also be seen as a spoof on the genre itself.
Arlo Guthrie converted to Catholicism in 1977 though of course that does not divest him of his Jewish identity. But according to Google, his barmitzvah teacher was Meir Kahana, the violent, far right zealot whose followers continue to abase the name of Judaism today. It is hard to think of a teacher more at odds with Arlo Guthrie’s roots. Little wonder that he converted.