The Best of Broadside, Anthems of the American Underground from the Pages of Broadside Magazine. Eighty-nine songs, including some never commercially released. Compiled and annotated by Jeff Place and Ronald D. Cohen. A five CD boxed set. It was a small underground magazine smuggled out of a New York City housing project in a baby carriage, filled with new songs by artists who were too creative for the folkies and too radical for the establishment. A still-underground Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Pete Seeger, and dozens of others first published songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "Little Boxes," and "Society's Child," in Broadside. The Best of Broadside features 89 songs from the Folkways collection, tapes from the Broadside magazine office, and some tracks released on other labels. The set contains a variety of performers, topics, and musical styles that tell tales spanning the 25 years of the Broadside era (1962-1988), but many of them address contemporary issues as well, since the new millennium has not see the end of warfare, nuclear threat, ethnic conflict, immigrants' suffering, women's unequal rights, ecological devastation, and social injustice. This is the underground music that fueled the innocent-sounding Folk Revival on the one hand and the explosions of angry rock and rap on the other. The Best of Broadside brings an era, its musicians, and its many stories to a new audience. The extensive notes feature the graphics of the original Broadside magazine and provide information on the careers of its many musicians with extensive discographies, the stories behind most of the songs as well as their full texts. They also describe the dramatic history of the magazine itselfa remarkable achievement of dedicated musicians and social activists. This recording received a 2001 GRAMMY Award Nominee for Best Historical Album and Best Liner Notes (Jeff Place).
