Sis Cunningham

Nearly contiguous first-edition run of the first 96 issues of Sis Cunningham's essential document of the 1960s folk movement, including Bob Dylan's first appearance in print, as well as the first appearance of his "Blowin' in the Wind."

• Includes issues: 1-64, 66-72, 74-85, 87-90, 92-93, 95-96; 91 issues, plus separate index to the first 37 issues.
• Edited by Sis Cunningham (American).
• (New York): (Broadside), (1962-1968).
• Staple bound.

"In following the example of their 17th-century predecessors, Cunningham [...] adopted perhaps the oldest surefire method available: a simple songsheet available on street corners. It was a sudden and direct way of getting a song from the writer to any amount of willing singers. A song which appeared in the afternoon might, somewhere, become a rousing anthem on that very same evening." — John Kelly

With the possible exception of the field efforts of Alan Lomax, arguably no one did more to preserve American folk music than Sis Cunningham and her rag-tag zine Broadside. Issued in its first decade on a mimeograph "discarded by the American Labor Party" (Cohen 11) out of Cunningham's NYC apartment, Broadside ran for more than 25 years, focusing less on the more anthropological folk covered by competitors like Sing Out! and more on the increasingly countercultural and topical folk arising out of the Village. She later described the vivid scene: "For years Broadside operated on a shoestring. The people who helped us financially were the Seegers, Pete and Toshi. They contributed thirty-five dollars weekly to cover the cost of paper, envelopes, cans of mimeograph ink, and, in the very beginning, postage [...] Our office was the small front room of the low-income project apartment in which we lived [...] This room was also where we ate our meals; we cleared the dirty dishes off the table and went to work cutting stencils on a manual Underwood typewriter [...] When the time came, we set up the mimeo machine, a hand-cranked one [...] [a] friend coming back from Cuba said [... it] was exactly the same model as the one Castro had in the Sierra Maestra" (275).

Broadside would most significantly introduce Bob Dylan to the larger folk community, publishing him in their first issue ("Talking John Birch") — the singer's first appearance in print anywhere. Perhaps most importantly, it printed his "Blowin' in the Wind" in their sixth issue, predating not only the song's release on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan the following year, but even the song's recording (in July of 1962). Dylan would go on to appear more than two dozen times over the magazine's first decade.

Other contributors across the run include Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Martin Luther King, Theodore Bikel, Malvina Reynolds, Vanessa Redgrave, and Richard Farina. Printings for these early issues were small (usually around 300), and distribution spotty. Early issues are scarce, and substantive sets rare. A nearly complete run of the most important years of this important music publication.