Various Artists: The Best Of Broadside: 1962-1988

When people talk about the folk revival of the late '50s and early '60s, chances are they're talking about two styles of music. There's the kind, like the music of The Kingston Trio, that dressed up traditional songs for popular consumption. Then there's the kind that used the folk-song style to talk about, and protest, the events of the day. Musicians who took the latter approach almost invariably read and contributed to Broadside, a mimeographed magazine published by Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friessen from their housing-project apartment in New York City. The idea was simple, and for most of Broadside's existence—excepting a brief hiatus and a brief buyout—it stayed the same: to publish what Cunningham and Friessen liked to call "topical songs" alongside relevant articles and whatever else made sense. Over the years, Broadside attracted the support of performers such as Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone, Phil Ochs (who became closely associated with the publication), Janis Ian, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and many others both well-known and relatively anonymous. In fact, one of Broadside's most notable qualities was its democratic spirit: Cunningham and Friessen were less interested in publishing material of the highest possible quality than publishing material of relevance. In their best moments, they got both. The new, exhaustively annotated five-disc set Best Of Broadside collects 89 songs originally recorded for the magazine, in many instances performed during the publishers' periodic hootenannies or for Broadside's occasional album collections. It's a drop in the bucket when you consider that Ochs alone contributed 73 songs, but it nicely conveys what Broadside was all about, serving as fascinating listening in its own right. Roughly arranged by topic, Best features selections addressing nuclear concerns, the civil-rights and black-power movements, class differences, and a variety of other issues. Its high points reveal just how powerful a multitude of voices singing about the world can be, and how often those voices belong to obscurity. Strictly speaking, no one here was making folk music, but time may ultimately have returned their music to the folk canon. Still, as Best Of Broadside drifts further away from its roots, it becomes spottier musically, if no less fascinating historically. Without much of his craft or subtlety, the influence of Dylan looms a little too large over many performers, but the songs covering Broadside's controversial drift toward more radical politics in the late '60s and '70s—or was that simply the drift of its contributors—reveal a lot about the tenor of the period. Best Of Broadside captures its era well, and its best moments are a reminder that the quickest way to get someone to think about a subject may be to get them to sing about it, a lesson that has as much to do with Broadside's legacy as the songs themselves.