Ochs was known as the troubadour of the New Left. He was the most radically committed performer of the Sixties, several steps beyond Jane Fonda and about on a par with Dick Gregory. He wrote topical songs of protest and was as happy singing them at the barricades as at Carnegie Hall. They were, as he well understood, a form of political theater. They could stir emotions and, under the right circumstances, provoke action. This is what he deeply hoped would happen. Ochs wrote songs with lyrics worth listening...

Bob Dylan is 21, Phil Ochs 22, Mark Spoelstra 23, Len Chandler and Tom Paxton 25, and Peter LaFarge is the oldest of the bunch at 32…. Besides their youth they have another thing in common: they belong to a whole new school of topical songwriter-performers that has emerged in American this past year or so and is today at a peak of song production. Much of their work is of a surprisingly high artistic quality, and according to some critics may be superior as music and poetry to anything of this nature...

The girl on the ticket line wanted "two tickets to the Bob Dylan concert." In fact the evening was a "Concert Tribute to Phil Ochs," and the irony would not have been lost on Phil. Even past the very end he didn't give the people what they wanted…. Phil killed himself. If you must gauge your life, I think a good standard would be your effect on your friends. Another, if you're lucky, would be your effect on the public at large. Phil's friends gathered ...

Phil's early songs, with humor, compassion, and anger, cut through conservative and liberal excuses for inaction. Often the songs would follow one after the other, three or four in a week, then a "dry period", and then some major event would happen and there was Phil, lying on the couch picking his tunes, matching lyrics, writing, rewriting and rewriting…. [The] songs Phil wrote came to reflect mass movements. The songs were better written and more incisive. Finally, the "...

If Bob Dylan is the king of protest—and some might say he's already abdicated—Phil Ochs … is the president. Still in his mid twenties, he has reached a position where Dylan can say of him: "I just can't keep up with Phil. And he's getting better and better and better."…

Phil Ochs is one of those songwriter-performers who continues to hit where it hurts; who keeps trying for a clean knockout. It is true he writes "Changes," but in almost the same breath he turns out the Brechtian "Cops Of The World," one of the most scathing indictments yet of the brutal stormtrooper arrogance of Americans who contemplate themselves as the noble policemen of the globe…. In a sense Ochs is writing from the inside, as a representative of the social strata wh...

[Phil Ochs] has been especially effective in his talking blues, where his wonderful sense of humor has forced hostile audiences to laugh and even question their beliefs on such controversial topics as Cuba and Vietnam. Ochs' style is not poetic, it is, rather, straightforward and natural, well adapted to the understatement of the talking blues. (pp. 87-8) ["Talking Cuba"] is typical of Phil Ochs' work in its humor, and in the number of its versions—he is always rewriting a...