They say in Harlan County,

There are no neutrals there.

You either are a union man

Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

Which side are you on, buddy,

Which side are you on? . . .

This, Laura, was a protest song back in the thirties. They really cared which side you were on, then. Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers Talked Union all up and down this great land of ours. Detroit to Frisco, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem. Left wing, they called them. Unpatriotic--Moscow agents.

The bit now, though, is world brotherhood. Finish the bomb tests or we'll all be finished. Leadership, peace. Down with fence-straddling. Down with wishy-Washingtonism.

You didn't really have to be against anything to come to the Hoot. Some were attracted by the singing. Some by the unescorted girls--four of them with guitars. The novices sat quietly and beat their lips in time to the music. If you had a tie on you were a novice.

But there was also the hard-core, the part of the folk song crowd which really believes that if you're gonna split atoms, well, you can't split ranks. They knew most of the words. They sat on the floor. One caried a copy of No More War. There were too few of them.

A lanky Southerner in casual garb attracted a small crowd. "Just passing through town. Heard about this Protest Hootenanny." A few minutes later he grabbed the spotlight.

"I learned this song from a buddy down home," he drawled, motorcycle boot pounding in time to the strum-scratch arpeggio-scratch of his guitar. "A member of the Party. There's two kinds of party, you know. He was in the one with a capital P."

He tucked his cigarette behind his ear, lit. One girl snickered. "Well, anyway, he used to work for all these causes. You know, the dockworkers, integration, the miners--there's always a cause to work for if you've got the ambition." He flicked the ash into his dungaree cuff.

"Once he was working for the Jews, and fell for this girl. One day he called at her home and her parents threw him out. Wrote this song about it."

Worked for equal rights