The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer
The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party USA, 1939-1956
by Aaron J Leonard (Repeater Books, £10.99)
MY dad played music a lot when I was a young child. He would come home from work and put an album on his record player, change out of his uniform and drink a beer while he listened.
Usually, his listening fare was show tunes or big band music. On occasion, he would play a Nat King Cole record or something from the Ink Spots. Sometimes, he would put on a record by the folk singer Burl Ives.
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
RON JACOBS is enthralled by an account of the surveillance and political repression on the left in the US
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
RON JACOBS welcomes a survey of US punk in the era of Reagan, and sees the necessity for some of the same today


