Sing Out!

Sometime in 2017, Mark Pawlak drove to my condo in Bedford to pick up bagfuls of literary magazines I was donating to UMass Boston’s Healey Library for its new collection, The Cid Corman Small Poetry Press Archive. Among the journals I’d sorted while boxing material for Mark were issues of the folk magazine Sing Out! Mark didn’t want them—it wasn’t, after all, a literary magazine and it wasn’t published in Massachusetts. But as I looked through the issues, all from the 1960s, I started to think about how, until recently, song has been segregated from literature.

When Ploughshares published the supersized fourth issue of its second volume, editors Frank Bidart, Lloyd Schwartz and Robert Pinsky wanted to include work by Bidart and Schwartz’s friend Elizabeth Bishop. They needed something not under her first-look contract with the New Yorker, so Bishop offered translations of Brazilian carnival sambas, topical song lyrics traditional to each carnival season. Bishop didn’t need the Nobel committee to tell her that songs were literature—nor did Langston Hughes, or our new poet laureate, Joy Harjo.

I’m not sure how five copies of Sing Out! survived my dozen moves since high school. I think my mother must have saved them. Part of the 1960s folk craze, I’d taught myself to pick out melodies on the guitar, and in the February-March 1963 volume I’d annotated the chord changes for “Guantanamera,” the lyrics a poem by Cuban national poet Jose Marti. A note in the issue observes, “Ironically, Guantanamera means ‘girl from Guantanamo,’ site of the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba today.” The comment probably referred to the Bay of Pigs disaster, but the irony cuts even deeper today.

Sing Out! was a mishmash of transcriptions of traditional and contemporary songs, DIY advice, scoldings over “folkum,” news of a fresh trove of Woody Guthrie songs taped when he needed cash then forgotten by his record company, and scholarly papers like one on politics and African music. Izzie Young wrote a gossip column and Nat Hentoff listed performers blacklisted by network TV, including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and The Tarriers, a multi-racial group allowed to appear after “’Hootenanny’ was threatened with public disclosure of its apparent reason for their exile.” Against their political grain, Sing Out! also published songs of the Ku Klux Klan collected by Guy Carawan, the man who introduced “We Shall Overcome” to the civil rights movement.

Earnest and scrupulous, was Sing Out! supported by more than its contingent of folkies, folklorists, and ads by record companies and guitar/dulcimer/banjo makers? When my mother told me that the magazine was a Communist front, I was indignant. Was she right—was all that concern for African politics, the preservation of American song traditions, international music, and civil rights funded by the CPUSA? My memory says yes, that something in the flood of documents released after the breakup of the Soviet Union confirmed it—but my research is inconclusive. It’s hard to interpret the magazine’s blueprint for how to build a twelve-string guitar as a way of encouraging workers to seize the means of production.

Founded in 1950, Sing Out! persisted on line until 2014. Articles from the early 1950s and 1960s included “’Male Supremacy’ and Folk Song,” and “Can an All-White Group Sing Songs from Negro Culture,” grappling with issues of sexism and cultural appropriation years before such terms existed. But its most important function was as a repository of art stained with history, from songs by Bob Dylan and Pete LaFarge and Phil Ochs to Appalachian murder ballad, chain gang hollers, and this song, “A New Decree Was Issued in Vilna,” from the Warsaw ghetto (lyrics translated from the Yiddish by Ruth Rubin):

In Vilna a new order was issued,
To round up the Jews from the small towns,
Old and young were brought,
Even sick ones on cots.

The camp was crowded together,
And then the sorting began:
Jews from Oshmene remained in Vilna,
And Jews from Sole taken to Kovno.

The train went slowly along,
With its sirens whistling,
Ponar Station: the train stops.
The cars are detached.

Everyone realized that they had been tricked,
They were being led to the terrible slaughter.
They smashed the door from the car
And tried to escape.

They threw themselves upon the Gestapo
And tore their clothes off.
Beside the Jews there remained lying
Several Germans, bitten to death.

The ghettos of the province
Gave four thousand martyrs.
And their clothes were shipped back
In the same cars that brought them.

I wouldn’t want to exclude this extraordinary document from the canon of literature because it’s a song. Nor would I want to exclude this ditty about moonshine from the Depression years, collected by the New Lost City Ramblers:

One drop will make a rabbit whip a fool dog,
And a taste will make a rabbit whip a wild hog,
It’ll make a toad spit in a black snake’s face,
Make a hard shell preacher fall from grace.

Certainly there’s room in a compilation of literary magazines for the scholarship, cultural essays, research, and pungent lyrics printed in Sing Out! With life more interstitial, and genres more fluid, I’d like to welcome these words meant for music but vivid on their own, the way a dialogue resonates before an actor speaks a line of script.

Delayed Flights

Death On-Demand