Irwin Silber, a longtime editor of Sing Out!, who co-founded the folk music magazine with Pete Seeger, musicologist Alan Lomax, and others in 1950, died on Sept. 8 in Oakland, California. He was 84 and had suffered with Alzheimer’s disease.

Irwin Silber

Among the prime movers behind the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, Silber viewed folk music as a form of political protest and was executive secretary of the short-lived People’s Songs, an organization promoting the songs of labor and the American people, during the late 1940s before helping to launch Sing Out! and serving as its editor from 1950-1977.

Silber also drew notice in music circles for his sharp criticism of Bob Dylan for abandoning, in his view, the political protest songs that had catapulted him to fame. In a scathing “Open Letter to Bob Dylan” that appeared in the November 1965 issue of Sing Out!, Silber wrote:

“I saw at Newport how you had lost contact with people… Some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way… Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious – maybe even a little cruel on occasion. And it’s happening onstage too. You seem to be relating to a handful of cronies behind the scenes now – rather than to the rest of us out front.”

Although Silber later retracted some his criticism in an article for the Guardian, a radical left-leaning newspaper, for which he was cultural editor and, later, executive editor after leaving Sing Out!, some have speculated that he may have been a target of Dylan’s song “Positively Fourth Street.”

In addition to Sing Out!, Silber with his third wife, Barbara Dane, a singer and political activist, founded an independent record label, Paredon (which recorded protest songs from global liberation movements of the 1970s and later became a part of Smithsonian Folkways). He also established Oak Publications and published a number of notable folk-song collections under its imprint.

“Irwin’s Folksinger’s Workbook was something of an inspiration for Rise Up Singing, and his Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People remains one of the essential guides to the music that rose out of the great depression… there’s no question that his impact on the history of our music is immeasurable,” writes Mark Moss, the current editor of Sing Out!, in a Sept. 9 post on its website.