It was not possible to avoid politics at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963 and nobody was surprised. Folk music in America had been entwined with politics since at least the Great Depression and the events of 1963 had made the year far more politically charged than normal. Due to the history of the folk movement, it was inevitable that political protest would become the theme of that summer’s Newport Festival.
Ever since the 1940s, folk singers had been protesting against racial discrimination; campaigning for civil rights and equality for the African Americans of the Southern states. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had been the movement’s most prominent voices; branded as seditious by the government they had been blacklisted for their pains. Nevertheless, as the years passed and the Civil Rights campaigns in the South gathered pace, more and more folk singers, both black and white, added their voices. They sang for racial equality, the end of segregation and the enfranchisement of black voters.
Jews were highly visible in the folk movement. Izzy Young ran the Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village, the heart of the folk scene, and Jerry Halpern’s Music Inn was where the performers bought their instruments. Moses Asch, son of the Yiddish novelist Sholom Asch created the Folkways record label, responsible for most of the folk albums of the period. Irwin Silber edited Sing Out!, one of New York’s two premier folk magazines, George Wein was in charge of the Newport Folk Festival and Albert Grossman managed many of the artists. There were Jewish folk singers too; Bob Dylan of course, born Robert Zimmerman, the faux-cowboy Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, a doctor’s son from Brooklyn who had come into the world as Elliot Adnopoz, and Phil Ochs, who saw no need to change his name.
Phil Ochs has never received the recognition he deserved. Born to Jewish parents in Texas in 1940, he learnt to play the clarinet as a child, spent two years at a military academy, dropped out and travelled to Florida, where he was arrested and jailed for a fortnight for vagrancy. He went home, studied journalism at Ohio State University, switched from the clarinet to the guitar and began playing in folk clubs. He considered folk music to be a form of journalism, telling the magazine Broadside that, “before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music”.
Seeing himself as a musical journalist, Phil Ochs reported on the newspaper correspondent William Worthy’s arrest and conviction for visiting to Cuba, penning a ballad mocking the government’s understanding of what it meant to live in the free world.
“William Worthy isn't worthy to enter our door,
Went down to Cuba, he's not American anymore,
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say,
You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.”
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