Content area
Full Text
Music critic whose influence on the US folk scene brought him into conflict with Bob Dylan
Irwin Silber was a towering presence in the US folk scene. He edited Sing Out!, the world's longest-lived folk-music magazine, during one of the folk scene's most critical and fraught periods. Famously, in November 1965, he was at the helm when he publicly griped in its pages about Bob Dylan's "reneging" on his protest-song pact and playing amplified music - plus damning him in passing for being seduced by fame. Some commentators later fingered him as the object of Dylan's most bilious piece of vitriol.
Silber was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1925. Somewhat precocious, having skipped several grades, he graduated from high school aged 15. While majoring in English and American history at Brooklyn College between 1941 and 1945, he went through a series of folk-related experiences. In the welter of the times they included Margot Mayo's American Square Dance Group and, far to its left, American Folksay, the singing and folk-dancing group that he co-founded and that put on Silber's folk plays Circle Left and Tomorrow Is Good Morning. He also experienced the radical Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, a gathering with an ersatz Indian-sounding name derived from Workers Children's Camp, and most especially, the Almanac Singers. This forerunner of The Weavers had a floating...