Oscar Brand Biography
7 February 1920, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. This well-known folk satirist and former student of psychiatry started something of a revival in the 40s because of his WNYC folk music radio show The Folksong Festival, which was first broadcast on 10 December 1945. As a performer, Brand, who played guitar and banjo, was known for songs such as "Charlotte The Harlot", "Blinded By Turds", "Seven Old Ladies Locked In A Lavatory" and "The Money Rolls In". Despite its popularity, satire was not a new phenomenon, as his Election Songs Of The United States contained some numbers dating back to the 1800s. Eventually the radio show became simply Folksong Festival and featured a number of emerging talents in the folk field. Names such as Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Judy Collins, Odetta, Phil Ochs, and countless others, have all passed through. Such has been the success of the show that it is still broadcast weekly, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 1995 and its 60th anniversary in 2005. The programme was awarded an entry in the Guinness Book Of Records for the Longest Running Radio Series With the Same Host.
During the 60s, Brand hosted Let's Sing Out, a Canadian television show that, apart from including Gordon Lightfoot and Judy Collins on occasion, also featured a number of other artists and performers, blacklisted in the USA during the McCarthy era. During this period, Brand had refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Brand has recorded over 90 albums, and in his time has acted and written books. He has recorded for Elektra Records, ABC Records, Folkways Records, Riverside Records and Impulse! Records, written songs for Harry Belafonte and Ella Fitzgerald among others, and has appeared in films and on television.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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