The folk scene’s key figures were under FBI surveillance

Evidence

Broadside’s editors had long been on the FBI’s radar. Pete Seeger, a sometime member of the Communist Party, recalled Cunningham as a leader in the party’s Greenwich Village Branch, charged with the hopeless task of getting Woody Guthrie to fulfill his party assignments. Dylan’s prime press advocate Robert Shelton, a onetime member of a Communist youth group, was likely, if not rigorously, surveilled as well. So perhaps was Broadside, which held monthly meetings, attended by Len Chandler, Phil Ochs, Pete and Toshi Seeger (who underwrote the publication), and others, in which Dylan regularly participated into the spring of 1963. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1883

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader claim that illegal/subversive conditions (here, surveillance of the left) shaped the density of creative activity.
• QUESTION: How much did the threat of surveillance structure participation in the folk movement? Worth chasing whether authors self-censored.