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I thought she had the most irritating voice -- I wasn't too big on the folkies anyway.

Can't disagree with the first part. She wrote some great music and pretty good poetry, though, so I bought all her stuff "back then"--same-same with Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson and many others who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, or didn't try.

Back then, I thought I was going to get rich writing music and singing (I still believe I was good enough, just not good-looking and politically correct enough, but I'm sure some might disagree ;-). At any rate, when I heard something I liked, I wanted to hear the songwriter do it, even if I didn't like their interpretation much. The hippie "interpretation groove" thing, you know?

Sometimes subtle changes in style or lyrics make large differences in effect or "meaning." Covers of Sylvia Fricker's "You Were On My Mind" and Dylan's "One Too Many Mornings," as well as Buffy Sainte-Marie's cover of Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game"--which grabbed even this then-mostly-closeted Republican at the end of The Strawberry Statement--come to mind.

I wasn't big on "the folkies," either, at first; I had a rock band, until rock went psycho. I became a folkie around the time my favorite rock group (maybe still my favorite group) did "Eight Miles High" (a good song, but a better folk song than a psychedelic rocker, for my tastes).

Besides, doin' folk by myself meant I didn't have to split with three or four other folks :-). I never got rich at it, but it paid for most of my education (a law degree I no longer use) and got me lots of--uh, well, I had a lot of fun...

All that was our music, though, and it's a big part of our memories now, even for those of us who've rejected its message as we "grew up." My non-classical library is about two-thirds "oldies," and I have a lot of music. Some commie makes a few cents every other time I order a CD--but at least the message of the radical stuff is long since lost on me.