Agnes Cunningham

July 1, 2004

© Los Angeles Times

Submitted by: Sandi Carter

Anges Cunningham, 95; Folk Music Pioneer

Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, co-founder of the influential folk-song magazine Broadside, has died. She was 95.

Cunningham died Sunday at a nursing home in New Paltz, N.Y., 75 miles north of New York City, her daughter Jane Friesen said.

Onetime Communists and labor organizers who had survived the blacklist era of the 1950s, Cunningham and her husband, Gordon Friesen, started printing the mimeographed Broadside in 1962 in their New York City apartment and sold it for 35 cents. For nearly three decades, the magazine published more than 1,000 songs, including early works by Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Janis Ian and Tom Paxton.

"This very small magazine, it reached key people throughout the country," Pete Seeger told the New York Times in Wednesday's editions. "When a good song came along, it got picked up right away."

Cunningham invited musicians to her Upper West Side apartment, where the couple recorded reel tapes of guitar ballads and protest songs. It was in Cunningham's living room that Seeger recorded his nuclear war parody "Mack the Bomb." Dylan's folk anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" was first published in Broadside.

Fifteen albums of Broadside songs were released by Folkways Records.

In 2000, songs from Broadside were made into an album, "The Best of Broadside 1962-1988: Anthems of the American Underground From the Pages of Broadside Magazine." It was nominated for two Grammys in 2001 for best historical album and best liner notes.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Cromelin noted that "Best of Broadside" added up to "a stirring, sobering document on the great currents of dissent in 20th-Century America — stirring for its ability to provoke thought and action, sobering in its reminder that most of the issues that inspired it four decades ago are still around, waiting for a song."

In 1997, Cunningham gave her collection of 236 three-inch reels to the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina.

Born in Watonga, Okla., Cunningham graduated from college there. She married Friesen in 1941. That year, the couple moved to New York and into the communal Almanac House in Greenwich Village with Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others. An accomplished accordion and guitar player, Cunningham performed with Guthrie in the 1940s and joined the Almanac Singers, a group that included Guthrie, on their 1942 album, "Dear Mr. President."

Her husband died in 1996. Cunningham is survived by two daughters, three grandchildren and a great-grandson.