Everything about Irwin Silber totally explained
Irwin Silber (born
October 171925) 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, 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. 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.
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.
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'd somehow lost contact with people ... some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way".
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Dylan didn't 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 didn't 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."
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
Further Information
Get more info on 'Irwin Silber'.
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