Sing Out!/Broadside

SING OUT!/BROADSIDE. Built on the groundwork laid by People’s Songs, Sing Out! began monthly publication in May 1950. Like its predecessor, Sing Out! sought to foster a general revival in folk music and topical songs and create a progressive song movement, spearheaded by a singing labor movement. Many of the same individuals were involved in Sing Out!, and many newer singers, composers, and folklorists, like Sis Cunningham, Gordon Friesen, Malvina Reynolds, and others, found space for their endeavors within its pages. Sing Out! retained and expanded on People’s Songs’ commitment to diverse musical cultures and Pete Seeger remained one of its driving forces. The unexpected commercial success of the Weavers (Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman) provided folk music with an audience far broader than previously imagined and laid the foundation for the folk revival of the mid- to late 1950s and early 1960s. After the first few years of financial uncertainty, Sing Out! managed to find a national audience of 25,000 and influenced the establishment of similar magazines in England, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Sing Out! continued into the 1980s to give lyrics and inspiration to popular struggles of the times.

Critical to any understanding of Sing Out! as a phenomenon is the role of editor/publisher Irwin Silber, whose feisty Marxist editorials set the tone of the magazine during its first hungry decade and well into the 1960s. People’s Songs had been a multifaceted organization that also booked musical artists and sponsored hootenannies. Silber had entrepreneurial relations with various partners, including Hootenanny Records and Oak Publications, but by the late 1950s, he mainly concentrated on his publishing interests. When the folk revival peaked in the 1960s, many new subscribers and advertisers found Silber’s political perspective distasteful. Silber refused to compromise or modify his editorial views. Compounding the magazine’s problems was a disastrous 1965 venture into newsstand distribution that left the magazine deeply in debt. In 1967 Silber was forced out as editor/publisher.

Even after Silber’s departure, ad revenues and circulation continued to drop. Advertisers and subscribers (many of whom were musicians) seemed more interested in supporting publications that embraced rock and drug cultures. Specialized magazines such as Living Blues, Bluegrass Unlimited, and Guitar Player emerged, further fragmenting the folk music audience that Sing Out! once had exclusively to itself.

Broadside, a “sibling” of Sing Out!, grew out of this tradition. A crudely mimeographed bulletin foreshadowing the 1960s underground press, it began publication in February 1962, was issued “about twice a month,” and served as the “National Topical Song Magazine.” Although Seeger acted in an advisory capacity, and Sis Cunningham served as editor, Broadside was the project of a younger generation of singers and writers interested in topical songs in which “the ‘commercial musical world’ had little or no interest.” Broadside’s existence paralleled the emergence of a whole school of talented topical songwriters like Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Gil Turner, Ernie Marrs, Pete La Farge, Ana Perez, Nina Simone, Eric Anderson, Dick Farina, Tom Paxton, and Len Chandler among others. While People’s Songs, and to a lesser extent Sing Out!, derived their inspiration from organized labor, Broadside found its voice in the civil rights movement and the emergent New Left. It issued special reports, articles, and songs by civil rights activists like Charles Sherrod, Bernice Reagon, and Julius Lester. Political, but in a highly undoctrinaire New Left style, Broadside, until its demise in 1970, sowed the seeds of the popular song revolution of that era.

Cohen, Ronald D., Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.

Petrus, Stephen and Cohen, Ronald D., Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Seeger, Pete. The Incompleat Folksinger. Edited by J. Metcalf Schwartz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.

Sing Out! 1, no. 3 (July 1950).

Sing Out! Website. https://singout.org