The Best of Broadside 1962-1988: Anthems of the American Underground from the Pages of Broadside Magazine (review)

Several years ago while I was wasting time in a used bookstore, I came across a copy of Broadside magazine. Actually, calling it a magazine may have been a stretch. It had that ragged, down-home appearance that let you know that it was homemade and might have been done in someone's basement. I had some vague familiarity with Broadside, and as a musician with an interest in the intersection of music and politics, I certainly was drawn to it. I snatched up the copy and added it to my huge and burgeoning pile of future readings.

Broadside had already ceased publication when I made my purchase. In the heady days of the folksong revival in the early 1960s, however, the magazine had been a vital force. Each issue offered large quantities of topical songs on a variety of political topics, including nuclear war, American Indians, civil rights, Vietnam, labor, migrant workers, and feminism. Musicians combed issues for useful material, and aspiring songwriters submitted their compositions in hopes of being published. Soon-to-be famous singer-songwriters-Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Janis Ian, Buffy Sainte-Marie-happily turned over songs to Broadside and saw their careers enhanced by the promotional prestige attached to the magazine. Folkways issued several recordings of songs by artists who appeared in the magazine, and Oak Publications even published collections of songs selected from Broadside. Unfortunately, Broadside's contribution to folk revival music, the underground scene, and political music has not been well documented. Recent scholarship on the revival began to change this, and now we are fortunate to have this splendidly executed five-CD boxed set with extensive annotation put together by Jeff Place and Ron Cohen.

Broadside was really the brainchild of the husband and wife team, Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen. Readers may already be familiar with Sis from her role in the Almanacs, a 1940s leftist folk group whose members included, among others, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. However, her and Friesen's story is larger than Cunningham's stint with the Almanacs, and Ron Cohen provides a first-rate brief biography of these two rebels as an introduction to this collection. Both were born and raised in Oklahoma and came of age during the tumultuous times of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Raised in poverty, Friesen became a writer and briefly worked with the Federal Writers' Project in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Cunningham went to college and served as a music instructor before heading off to Commonwealth College, an Arkansas labor college with a strong musical orientation. She later served as an organizer for tenant farmers and led a theater group that sought to raise working-class consciousness through stage and song. Members of the Communist Party, they quickly bolted Oklahoma for New York City in late 1941 when the state began to imprison party members.

Once in New York, it did not take them long to meet Pete Seeger and move into the infamous Almanac house. While Gordon searched out writing opportunities, Cunningham kept a full schedule performing with the Almanacs. After moving to Detroit for a few years during WWII, the couple returned to a life in New York that must be judged creative, if tremendously burdensome. Friesen's employment opportunities dwindled as the FBI and its blacklist dogged him from job to job. Cunningham put in time with People's Song in seeking to further a labor-left agenda with music, but with two children and changing musical tastes, she exited the musical scene. Poverty became the rule, and the wolf became a standard fixture outside their door. They nevertheless maintained their faith in the radical cause and the transformational power of music.

Such faith motivated them to launch a topical song magazine as the 1960s began-an idea that had also been circulating in folksong revival circles...