"Links on the Chain," which I learned to sing (if not quite play) that summer, wasn't your typical protest song. While others attacked oppressive governments, laws that need changing and assorted social inequities, this one targeted the labor movement for abandoning its progressive principles. Ochs himself was not able to stay on course either, but his early work stands as a monument to those op-ed columnists of song, people who knew and believed things and made it their duty as soldiers of conscience to convince others. "Now it's only fair to ask you boys, which side are you on?" sang Ochs. He might as well have been challenging the whole artistic community around him.

As silly as that question might sound to a 21st century pop performer, for whom choosing sides means shilling for either Coke or Pepsi, the Greenwich Village folk singers of the day were all, to one degree or another, on the left. (Ochs later etched the dividing line for '60s political conviction in the scathing "Love Me, I'm a Liberal.") Starting in 1963, as thousands of young people repeatedly gathered in Washington and other cities to speak out for civil rights and an end to the war in Vietnam, singers like Ochs, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Pat Sky, Eric Andersen, Judy Collins and Joan Baez took the podium and spread the news their way. They weren't consciously positioning themselves as a marketing strategy, buying credibility with a little pro bono service to the cause, they were following through on the impulse that had drawn them to make music in the first place, building links on the chain fed them by Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson and others.

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"Links on the Chain" opens "The Best of Broadside 1962–1988," five CDs of music from the recorded archives of Broadside, a magazine that began publishing the words and music of topical folk songs just as they were needed to fuel one of the great grass-roots political movements of the 20th century. A youthquake on a collision course with good old boys like Burl Ives and Theodore Bikel and button-down stylists like the Kingston Trio, intellectuals with guitars became the bards of conscience. Let Peter, Paul and Mary score the hits: Music's acoustic missionaries were scribbling their news songs to change the world, not sell records.

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