Yes it makes you feel very humble to see how much someone like Malvina Reynolds accomplished. Living in England my first contact with her work was in the 1960's. Pete Seeger came over and played a popular TV programme called Sunday Night at the London Palladium. He played a 12 sring and he opened with Liba Cotten's Freight Train, The What did you learn in School Today? then Little Boxes, which was in the charts.

later on the Searchers had a minor hit with What have they Done to the Rain. It was widely reckoned to have been a bit of misfire as it was the first one of their songs not to get in top five.

Later on I became a folksinger/songwriter of sorts. i can remember Malvina featuring on a very late night documentary, and she was feeling very hard done to by the powers that be , because she was writing songs and no one was getting behind them. It was a tough time to be a folksinger, with her sort of agendas. Folk music was split into two distinct camps - traditional singers trying to recreate the music of long ago, and folk comedians who were precursors of the modern alternativew comedy movement. Both camps highly professional in presentation, and almost completely uninterested in the idea of a living artform that took on the wrongs of society.

We miss out so much when music is so tightly formatted the way it is. One can't help but feel , Malvina would have loved the internet with its powerful tools for disseminating music and it ability to publish and subvert, and organise!

alan whittle