“It Isn’t Nice” (live) by Judy Collins from Fifth Album [1965]
I just finished my first semester of graduate school with a whirlwind final three weeks (I read something like 20 full books and skimmed another 10 or so, wrote 50 pages in three papers, and gave two paper presentations). Thank you for sticking around in my Tumblr absence. I’m back, at least for a few weeks.
One of the seminar papers I wrote tried to answer the question, “why the folk boom?” Why did folk music become such a popular genre between 1958 and about 1965, and not something else (say, calypso, which threatened to become massively popular in 1957)? And why then, as opposed to some other time? I won’t rehearse the paper here, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading some of the books for it. To anyone interested in this era, I highly recommend Ronald D. Cohen’s Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), an incredibly detailed chronicle of the whole revival, and Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), a more eloquent history of the various strands of American culture that intersected to make the folk boom what it was.
To inspire myself in the writing process, I also listened to a lot of urban folk music from the late ’50s and early ’60s. Above all, I found a new appreciation for the songs of Malvina Reynolds.
Popular memory usually recalls the images of famous young stars like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul & Mary. But this 60-some-year-old understood the changing world as well as any of the disaffected youngsters around her. Her songwriting captured much of the spirit and many of the concrete goals of the various freedom movements (Civil Rights, New Left, peace/anti-war, Free Speech, etc.). Like members of these related movements, Reynold’s became more upset as violence against the Civil Rights Movement escalated and as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations repeatedly failed to protect Freedom Riders and protesters in the South, and her lyrics became more acerbic and more cynical.
In 1964, Reynolds wrote “It Isn’t Nice” to explain and justify the direct action tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. In her own performance, the music is jaunty and light in contrast to the serious protest lyrics. Soon after she published the song, singer Barbara Dane changed the melody a bit, added a more consistent chorus, and overall made the song a much more direct attack on establishment policies. Judy Collins then recorded it for her creatively-titled Fifth Album, released in November of 1965. This is my favorite version and the one posted above.
It wouldn’t take too many lyrical changes, I think, for this to become an OWS anthem. The song is especially effective in its attack on lack of government action in addressing grave injustices:
You were quiet just like mice,
Now you say we aren’t nice,
And if that is Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
