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Irwin Silber

 
Artist: Irwin Silber
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  • Genres: Folk
  • Instrument: Producer, Liner Notes, Editing

Biography

Irwin Silber prospered as a writer, left-wing organizer, and book editor, but his greatest claim to fame originates from his editorial duties at Sing Out during the 1950s and 1960s. He, like Gordon Friesen and Sis Cunningham of Broadside magazine, became an important broker behind the scenes of the American folk revival. Silber was born on October 17, 1925 in New York City and attended public school in Manhattan. A committed ideologue from the get-go, he had joined the American Student Union, the Young Communist League, and the American Youth for Democracy before his 18th birthday. At Brooklyn College, he formed the American Folksay Group, and remained active in N.Y.C. folksinging circles following graduation in 1945. Two years later, he became the executive director for People's Songs, an organization that promoted folk artists and published the People's Songs Bulletin. Deep involvement with Henry Wallace's third-party campaign for President in 1948, however, would have a disastrous backlash on the American left. People's Songs fell apart in 1949 and many ex-communists -- Silber included -- would be called to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Silber, Pete Seeger, and others persevered, nonetheless, forming the People's Artists in 1950 and establishing a small magazine dedicated to folk music called Sing Out!. Silber knew from his experience with People's Songs that running a magazine was no picnic, so when Sing Out! debuted in 1952, he had no plans to help with the editing chores. When the original editor became sick, however, circumstances dictated otherwise. Silber's work for the small magazine was a labor of love filled with headaches, long hours, and little pay. Sing Out! would only become folk's most respected periodical after years of struggling in obscurity on the edge of bankruptcy. Silber edited "the Folk Song Magazine" from 1951 to 1967, often inciting controversy with acerbic editorials and forthright opinions on political and musical questions of the day. "My regular column, 'Fan the Flames,' frequently drew brickbats from outraged readers," Silber told Kristin Baggelaar and Donald Milton in Folk Music: More Than a Song. In one famous instance, he even offended the Sing Out! staff by writing an "Open Letter to Bob Dylan," a condescending critique of the number one song-and-dance man. "I was always for controversy," Silber told Richie Unterberger, "and it didn't make any difference if it was directed against me or not." By 1967, the ideological battles had taken their toll on Silber, leading him to sell his shares in Sing Out! and leave the magazine. The following year he began writing for the Guardian and became the executive editor of the magazine in 1972. Besides his editorial duties at these periodicals, he has edited and authored a number of books including Songs of the Civil War, The Vietnam Songbook (with his wife, folksinger Barbara Dane), and Socialism: What Went Wrong. Silber also worked for ten years with Moses Asch at Folkways Records in the late 1950s and 1960s, and helped found Oak Publications in 1960. ~ Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr., All Music Guide
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Wikipedia: Irwin Silber
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Irwin Silber (born October 17, 1925) is an American journalist, editor, publisher, and political activist. The co-founder, and former long-time editor of Sing Out! magazine from 1951 to 1967,[1] Silber was perhaps best known for his writing on American folk music and musicians until he left Sing Out! and began writing for the Guardian (US). His creation of Oak Publications was responsible for a large portion of the folk music material available in print during the growth of the revival.

IrwinSilberphoto.jpg

Contents

Activist and author

After leaving Sing Out! in 1968, Silber became cultural editor of the independent radical newsweekly, the Guardian (US) and also its film critic. He began to write on more directly political subjects, specializing in analysis of both national and international developments and developing a broad and appreciative readership. He became the Guardian's executive editor in 1972 and led it into the milieu of the New Communist Movement.[2] Factional disagreements led to a split within the Guardian staff, and Silber left the newspaper in 1979, moving to California to join the leadership of a current within US Marxism known as the "rectification movement." [3]

Silber and blues/folk singer/fellow activist Barbara Dane became a couple in 1964. Among other collaborations, they established an independent recording company called Paredon as a way to distribute and document the incredible variety of musical expression being created by the liberation movements of the 1970s. Dane produced nearly 50 lps and Silber handled the promotion and distribution. They donated the label to the Smithsonian Folkways archives in the mid '80s to insure the availability of the material to the public in perpetuity.

Among Silber's most important political writing is Socialism; What Went Wrong, an examination of the theoretical and practical events in the USSR leading up to its collapse. His only non-political book in the last 20 years is A Patient's Guide to Hip and Knee Replacement based on his own experience with these operations. Silber's most recent book, Press Box Red, tells the story of sports editor Lester Rodney, whose decade-long campaign in the pages of the Daily Worker helped pave the way for the racial integration of major league baseball.

In the December 24, 2007 issue of Newsweek magazine Garrison Keillor of "Prairie Home Companion" fame was asked to name his five most important books. His #2 choice (after the Acts of the Apostles) is The Folksinger's Wordbook by Irwin Silber, a huge collection of "hymns, blues, murder ballads, miner's laments-the whole culture."

The open letter to Dylan

In the November 1964 edition of Sing Out!, Silber wrote an article called "Open Letter To Bob Dylan".

"I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people ... some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way".[1]

Dylan did not like being told how to perform or how to write, and he didn't really like any criticism much either. He replied by telling his manager Albert Grossman that his songs were no longer available for publication in Sing Out!. In the September 1965 edition, Ewan MacColl asked for Dylan to return to singing "... our traditional songs and ballads" because they were "the creations of extraordinarily talented artists, working inside a discipline." MacColl even wrote that Dylan was "a youth of mediocre talent". Also, Tom Paxton wrote an article in Sing Out! in autumn of 1965 entitled "Folk Rot", which criticized the emerging folk rock scene at the time by basically describing the scene as putting style over substance, and he criticized the general popular shift to this trend.

Eventually, in 1968, Silber retracted his criticism in the Guardian (US):

"Many of us who did not fully understand the dynamics of the political changes ... felt deserted by a poet". "Dylan is our poet - not our leader ... Dylan .. is communicating where it counts."

The words quoted above are from page 314 of "No Direction Home: the Life and Music of Bob Dylan" by Robert Shelton.

In "Chronicles Volume One" (2004), Bob Dylan commented:

"I liked Irwin, but I couldn't relate to it. Miles Davis would be accused of something similar when he made the album Bitches Brew ... what I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new images and attitudes into them."

Bibliography

  • Lift Every Voice, Foreword by Paul Robeson (1953)
  • Songs of the Civil War, Columbia University Press (1960)
  • Songs of the Great American West, Macmillan (1967), Dover (1995)
  • Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, edited and produced by Irwin Silber, compiled by Alan Lomax, foreword by John Steinbeck, notes by Woody Guthrie, music transcription by Pete Seeger; Oak Publications (1967), Univ. Nebraska Press (1999)
  • Vietnam Songbook, (with Barbara Dane); Guardian [[2]] (1969)
  • Songs America Voted By, Stackpole (1971)
  • Songs of Independence, Stackpole (1973)
  • Socialism: What Went Wrong? - An Inquiry into the Theoretical and Historical Roots of the Socialist Crisis, Pluto Press (1994)
  • A Patient's Guide to Knee and Hip Replacement, Simon & Schuster (1999)
  • Folksingers Wordbook, Music Sales Corporation (1973, reissued 2000)
  • Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports, Temple University Press, 2006; ISBN 1-56639-974-2

References

  1. ^ Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 74-75 and 264-268.
  2. ^ Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (Verso, 2002), p. 61.
  3. ^ Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, p. 245.

External links


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