The Mumpsimus

photo by William J. Smith/AP, via Washington Post Via a series of Tweets from Tamara K. Nopper , I learned that William Worthy recently died at the age of 92. I knew very little about Worthy the man, but his name has been one I've known since childhood, because of a Phil Ochs song about him, "The Ballad of William Worthy" . My father was a DJ at a radio station in Massachusetts in the 1960s and played that song one day, because though his politics were rather different from those of Ochs or Worthy (he voted for Nixon and generally supported the Vietnam War), he loved to challenge authority and get in trouble. That he did. As he told it, a bunch of little old ladies wrote letters to the station to demand that this upstart DJ be fired. The station manager screamed at him never to play anything like that damned song ever again. By the time I was old enough to be taught the contents of the record collection at home, I heard that story and listened to the song. It...

Most people my age have never heard of Phil Ochs , a singer-songwriter of the 1960s who, for a brief time at least, was as prominent in the folk music world as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Ochs's early work was mostly very topical (his first album was titled All the News That's Fit to Sing ), and his later, less-topical songs never really caught on beyond Ochs's already-established audience, many of whom wanted him to return to recording songs with only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment. His later years were marred by alcoholism and mental illness, and by the time he hanged himself in 1976, at age 35, he was remembered -- if he was remembered at all -- as a relic of the previous decade. But when I was growing up, Ochs was famous in our house. As a radio DJ in Massachusetts in the mid-60s, my father almost lost his job because of an Ochs song called "The Ballad of William Worthy". My father was no bomb-throwing radical -- he always voted for Republicans, includ...