Tom Paxton had a big following in the late 1960's and with just his own songs and an acoustic guitar could easily hold a huge festival audience.
Widely known as a folk singer, Tom Paxton's songs cover a wide range of topics, from the serious and profound to the lighthearted and comical. He never shies away from the most difficult subjects for a song writer (even more recently 9/11), but he also has the lightest of touches when it comes to "short shelf life songs" or topical songs about current events and things in the news.
Of the songwriters on the NY Greenwich Village scene of the 1960s, Dave Van Ronk said "Bob Dylan is usually cited as the founder of the new song movement.. but the person who started the whole thing was Tom Paxton.. he set himself a training regimen of deliberately writing one song every day. Dylan had not yet showed up when this was happening, and by the time Bobby came on the set, with at most two or three songs he had written, Tom was already singing at least 50 percent his own material. Prior to that, the folk community was very much tied to traditional songs, so much so that songwriters would sometimes palm their own stuff off as traditional".
Paxton describing his political views "that he belonged to no organized political party... Being young and impassioned almost automatically put me over on the radical side of most issues. Being older, I find myself still more or less there, somewhat to my surprise".
Happy Birthday Tom.
Here is a tale set during the Vietnam war...
