Broadside Ballads, Vol. 3: The Broadside Singers

On Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1, the first album in a series of recordings made of songs published in the topical folk song magazine Broadside, one of the performers went under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt to mask his “exclusive” affiliation with a major record label. (Hint: he sang songs written by Bob Dylan, who was said to have brought him to the studio.) On this third volume in the series (the second having been performed entirely by Pete Seeger), an ad hoc vocal group has been assembled, consisting of “nine nameless writers,” as Phil Ochs (himself clearly one of them) puts it in his liner notes. The anonymity may reflect the increasing popularity of young folk singer/songwriters, with the performers here already contracted to such labels as Elektra Records and Vanguard Records, or about to be, but nevertheless feeling sufficient allegiance to Broadside magazine for championing their songs when they were unknown that they have shown up here. The songwriters are credited, and in some cases the lead singers, handling the verses before being joined by a chorus of others on the refrains, are identifiable as the songwriters. That is the case with Phil Ochs’ chiding of labor unions for their resistance to the civil rights movement, “Links on the Chain,” for instance, as it is with Tom Paxton on the leadoff song, “Ain’t That News”; Dave Cohen (later known as David Blue), who sings “More Good Men Goin’ Down” without any vocal accompaniment; Peter La Farge on the harrowing “Rattlesnake”; Gil Turner on the anthemic “Carry It On”; Patrick Sky on the tongue-in-cheek “Causes (Give to the Cause)”; Len Chandler on the impassioned anti-slavery ballad “Father’s Grave”; Ernie Marrs on the amusing poem “The Scruggs Picker”; and Eric Andersen (joined only by Ochs on the choruses) on “Plains of Nebrasky-O.” They would seem to be the nine nameless writers making up what Ochs calls “a sort of left-wing New Christy Minstrels.” They double on a few more songs they didn’t write, with Paxton demonstrating his gift for satiric material, even when written by somebody else, by taking the lead on Matt McGinn’s “Christine,” a song about the Profumo Scandal, and on Malvina Reynolds’ “The Faucets Are Dripping.” Ochs leads the group through Mark Spoelstra’s “Times I’ve Had.” Other unidentified vocals are less obvious, and there may be some other songwriters lurking here and there; whoever it is who’s singing Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Immigrante (Welcome, Welcome Emigrante),” a penetrating female voice in the chorus sounds like it may be Sainte-Marie herself. Ochs describes the composers included as “the 14 most prolific topical writers in the country,” which is not the same thing as saying they are the best. But they are actually quite good in many of these songs, and if Ochs also acknowledges that the record “is essentially non-professional in approach,” just as the hand-mimeographed Broadside magazine is, the performances nevertheless bring out the smart, emotional, and sometimes comic aspects of the songs. The Broadside Singers may be even shorter-lived than their true model, the Almanac Singers, but on their one album they demonstrate how much young talent there is in the topical song movement of the ‘60s. – William Ruhlmann