Rick,

The early Sing Out! magazine was basically Irwin Silber as editor. He had a confrontational style which made for interesting reading IMO. Pete forgave Josh for his role in the HUAC procedings. Josh was threatened and persecuted and it wasn't easy for a black man in those days. Big Bill Broonzy was refused a passport for writing the "Black Brown and White Blues". Burl was another story however. He implicated a lot of people and they lost their jobs apparently.

The dividing line was one of Irwin's political views between those who were accepted as being on the left and those who had sold out to the establishment. It didn't have an awful lot to do with just music as you stated. This is one of the problems in the defining war about folk music. The political aspect of this kinda' muddies the waters about the music. It's still a problem today in the perceptions about folk music. I'm going through something like this now in a controversey with Studs Terkel in Chicago. I can send you articles about this if you are interested. My e is

Later there were furthur political exchanges between Irwin and Izzy Young. Izzy took exception to the politicizing of Sing Out! and the two had some interesting discussions. In today's Sing Out! it's a non issue.

The show biz types in the "commercial" end were seen as sell-outs mainly because they represented a business approach to music that could be defined as being "capitalistic". Hence show business becomes equated with capitalism and sell-outism. I think that this is a flawed concept. This is not to say that the music biz doesn't have it's share of greedy and crooked folks but it's not fair to generalize.

And then there's the other aspect of performers who copyrighted all the folk music they could get there hands on in the 60's. Milt Okun, Bob Gibson and others. Their reasoning was something like this. The record companies have to pay royalties to songwriting artists. If the song is registered in PD, the company pockets the money they would have paid to the artist. Why should they be allowed to do that? Let 'em pay the performer for the song since there are comparitively little performance rights monies available for the performers in the recording biz. Most of it goes to the songwriters.

Many people like Lomax copyrighted songs to protect them from being taken over by the pop folk stylists. The issue of morality regarding the copyrighting of PD material wasn't as clear in the early 60's. Besides, artists were automatically credited with PD songs they didn't write by the record companies who didn't recognize (or said that they didn't) PD material.

Geez. We've got enough for a couple of new threads here.

Frank