During the tail end of JFK’s thousand days and into LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam conflict, few singer-songwriters mattered more to an audience that wanted music to be politically confrontational than Phil Ochs. He emerged from the downtown-NYC folk scene of the 1960s armed with incendiary topical material, wit and righteous fervor. With Bob Dylan stepping away from “finger-pointing” songs, Ochs was next in line to carry that torch. His songs were blunt and unsparing, like rapid-response reports from the front lines of dissent, and so it came as quite a jolt when this descendant of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger challenged his audience to accept Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly as forefathers of the ’60s revolution.
Read more at…Who Was… Phil Ochs, Really?
Celebrating Phil Ochs 
A friend of mine was at the concert where he first appeared in gold lame and was booed by the audience. She couldn’t believe it, and neither could I when she told me about it. I so wish we could have cloned him, considering the 2016 election–he’d have so much material to work with.
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