Irwin Silber
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Irwin Silber (born October 17, 1925) is an American journalist, editor, publisher, radio show host, and political activist.
The co-founder, and former long-time editor of Sing Out! magazine from 1951 to 1967,[1] Silber is best known for his writing on American folk music and musicians. After leaving Sing Out!, Silber became cultural editor of the left-wing newsweekly the Guardian (US) in 1968; he became its executive editor in 1972 and led it into the milieu of the New Communist Movement.[2] Factional fighting led to a split within the Guardian staff, and Silber was dismissed from the newspaper in 1979. He moved to California to join the leadership of the "rectification" faction.[3]
Silber married "fellow traveler" and blues/folk singer Barbara Dane. Together they established Paradon Records, which has recently been donated to the Library of Congress Folklife Center.
His 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 integration of major league baseball.
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[edit] 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."
[edit] Bibliography
- Songs of the Civil War, Columbia University Press (1960)
- Songs of the Great American West, Macmillan (1967)
- 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
[edit] References
- ^ 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.
- ^ Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (Verso, 2002), p. 61.
- ^ Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, p. 245.
