When I first started listening seriously to folk music in the late 1960s, I repeatedly encountered John Greenway's name as the writer of liner notes on albums by Ramblin' Jack Elliott and others. That's all I knew about him at the time.

Later, I saw him on William F. Buckley's television show "Firing Line," during which Buckley remarked that Greenway's politics were so hard-core that they fell to Buckley's right. At one point Greenway remarked that persons who smoke marijuana should be executed. He didn't seem to be joking.