All the News That's Fit to Sing

About All the News That's Fit to Sing

All the News That's Fit to Sing was Phil Ochs's first official album. Recorded in 1964 for Elektra Records, it was full of many elements that would come back throughout his career. It was the album that defined his "singing journalist" phase, strewn with songs whose roots were allegedly pulled from Newsweek magazine. It is one in a long line of folk albums used to tell stories about everyday struggles and hardships. Among these stories was that of William Worthy, an American journalist who traveled to Cuba in spite of an embargo on the country who was forbidden to return to the United States. Civil rights figures Medgar Evers and Emmett Till were lionized in "Too Many Martyrs" (alternatively known as "The Ballad of Medgar Evers".) Two "talking blues" using the melody to the old folk song "John Hardy" jabbed sarcastic at Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells", was set to music. "The Thresher" was an ode to the sinking of the nuclear-powered American submarine USS Thresher: "And she'll always run silent/And she'll always run deep." The song "Celia" is about the long separation of William J. Pomeroy and his wife, Celia Mariano Pomeroy, because of their opposition to the colonial occupation of the Philippines by the United States. Also included was one of Ochs' most well-known songs, "Power and the Glory". more »