Monday, January 23 at 10:00 p.m.
– Examine the life and artistry of activist and singer-songwriter Phil Ochs. –
One of the most politically active singer-songwriters to emerge in the 1960s, Phil Ochs was inspired by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, but also by Elvis Presley and John Wayne. He was a journalism student in college, which, perhaps, informed the extent of his protest lyrics — always witty, topical and insightful, always slightly haunting. Such songs as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “Love Me I’m a Liberal,” “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” “Power and the Glory,” “The War Is Over” — and “There But for Fortune,” famously covered by Joan Baez — are inseparable from the anti-Vietnam War era. Ochs was vocal and visible at political rallies, the Newport Folk Festival and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. A cohort of Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman, his ultimate disillusionment with the government and several of his heroes — and a familial tendency to bi-polar disease — led to his suicide in April 1976.
To learn more about this program, visit pbs.org/americanmasters.
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