The earliest recording of a Dylan composition, a 1962 rendition of "Blowin' in the Wind" by the New World Singers, is sung in the old way -- handsomely, evenly, with idealism buoying what in the author's own voice would bite and sneer with the dawning anger of a new generation. Seeger himself walks the line on a 1963 version of "Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," singing out with conviction but little emotion, letting Dylan's lyrics speak for themselves in a way their clenched-jaw author never would.

Dylan, and all those influenced by him, quickly abandoned the traditional troubadour's twinned faces of smiling good humor and dolorous tragedy to indict injustice and hypocrisy with cutting sarcasm, indignant anger and the obliterating belief that the world was about to change if they had anything to say about it. Then Dylan released "Like a Rolling Stone" and pulled off his end-of-the-innocence electrification at Newport in the summer of '65. (Seeger, making a famously myopic gaffe in an otherwise clear-eyed career, literally wanted to pull out the electric plug.) The folkies who loved him for singing about Hattie Carroll, Davey Moore and "Masters of War" saw him as a traitor, abandoning the righteous cause for something as trivial as artistic vision or, worse, commercial ambition. Whose back pages were those? Like hardcore punk rock years later, commercial marginalization wasn't a hazard, it was a trademark of quality. If a lot of people liked you, how good could you be?

Dylan moved on, in part by honing the blade of sarcasm and irony that had been a tool of many a protest songwriter into a far more dangerous weapon. Humor, from bitter mockery to lighthearted amusement, was wielded well by protest singers, and this collection offers plenty of examples. Reynolds, who wrote, and here sings, the classic "Little Boxes," a wry commentary on conformity and suburbia, finds urban decay just as rich. "The Faucets Are Dripping," an anti-landlord screed, has witty couplets like "The reservoir's drying, because it's supplying/The faucets that drip in New York." Peggy Seeger's 1970 feminist work song, "Gonna Be an Engineer," makes pointed fun of the clichés that kept women underpaid and underemployed. Ernie Marrs raised a stink at the time with the jocular irreverence of "Plastic Jesus," but the Fugs ("Kill for Peace") and others really pushed the limits of ironic detachment. (Check "The Willing Conscript," Paxton's deadpan depiction of a soldier asking to learn to kill and maim, sung here by Seeger.)

Given the subject matter, it took real poets to keep a straight face and not succumb to deadly earnestness or ineffectual anger. Paxton sings "Train for Auschwitz" ("The passengers condemned to die/But no crime have they done") as if the Holocaust was news in 1963. Likewise, the piercing Canadian soprano Bonnie Dobson's "Take Me for a Walk," an anti-nuclear song also known as "Morning Dew," sinks into glum ponderousness that could only be deflated by the ingenious sarcasm of Tom Lehrer, the singing Harvard math professor who kept a safe and apparently intentional distance from the folk movement. Even Ochs' previously unreleased "Freedom Riders," while as commendable in sentiment as any tune here, is blunt and amateurish. Leave it to the Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, a singing civil rights activist prominently featured on Disc Five, to let anger ring in the pseudo-spiritual "Nothing but His Blood," an agit-prop singalong that couldn't have failed to get fists pumping back in the day.

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It's August 1964. The late summer haze, how the Yankees are doing, cute beatnik girls I'll never see again, a planned overnight trip to a nearby ski lodge and thoughts of the impending school year blow away as news filters into camp about the KKK's brutal murders of three young Freedom Riders in Mississippi. Two of the victims were from New York, and a couple of the counselors knew one of them, Andy Goodman, pretty well.

We had sung the songs and knew the battle that was raging, but what we did not truly understand was how ordinary people, people we knew, were willing to die so that others they would never meet might move one step closer to freedom. The songs became personal and very, very real.

It's April 1965. I'm in Washington, protesting the war with thousands of other new lefties (and my mom). We chant "Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Judy Collins, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez sing. I run into kids I know from camp. We know that our fight is different than, say, the Freedom Riders, or the Wobblies, the early trade unionists or the victims of the HUAC blacklist, but we know it is also the same. We know all the words to their songs -- they are our songs -- and we sing them, proud and strong, guided by the belief that we are part of a chain and each song is a link in it.

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