Letters to the Editor
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‘Imam Remarks on Holocaust’
As former counsel to the governor for three years (1962-1965) during Governor Rockefeller’s term, I was shocked to read that the “current practice” in the New York State Legislature is that “thousands of community grants allocated each year are lumped into the state’s overall budget and not singled out as line items” for action by the governor [“Imam Remarks on Holocaust May Be Costly,” Russell Berman, New York, April 26, 2006].
This was never the practice in years prior to 1965, as far as I am aware, and I do not recall any amendment of the State Constitution approved by the voters to authorize it, nor do I believe that a state change would be approved by vote of the people.
SOL CORBIN
Manhattan
‘A Tribute Without a Legacy’
Among the players not identified in the photograph with the review of the “Seeger Sessions” was Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, who played the accordion with the Almanac Singers [“A Tribute Without a Legacy,” Martin Edlund, Arts & Letters, April 24, 2006].
Woody Guthrie lived with Sis and her husband, Gordon Friesen, while Guthrie wrote a part of his autobiography, “Bound For Glory.”
The Almanac Singers were part of the lineage of the 1960s folk movement, whose impact was a cornerstone of the lyrics, worldview, other musical genres, and the politics of those times. They were all intertwined.
In 1962, Sis and her husband published the first issue of Broadside Magazine. Through the heyday of the folk period, everyone in that world passed through their apartment door on West 98th Street off of Broadway. Sis and Gordon published the first works of many who later became widely recognized and many who didn’t. What mattered to them was the heart and sensibility that went into a song.
Sis and Gordon’s Broadside Magazine, in truth a mimeographed periodical, published the early songs of Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Janis Ian, Tom Paxton, Buffy St. Marie, and a horde of other singer-poets who lived by William Blake’s definition that the true poet and prophet was not one who predicted the future but one who understood and wrote of the present.
MARK COHEN
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
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