1960s topical folk songs would have been blacklisted during the McCarthy era

Evidence

Jack Newfield’s topical folkies—Buffy Sainte-Marie, Len Chandler, Tom Paxton, and, interviewed for his piece, Phil Ochs—struck him as “frontier outlaws,” putting out songs that, back in the days of the House Un-American Committee and Joe McCarthy, “would have been blacklisted by every record company and radio station in the land.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 662

Categorization

• XREF: The blacklisting contrast measures the changed political-economic conditions for dissent, a concrete data point for the ‘why culture stagnates now’ comparison the reader is building. — connects to: New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism