Fast Folk Musical Magazine

At the beginning of the 1980s, it would have been easy to suppose that the spark which had ignited the folk boom of the 1960s was long since extinguished. The artists who abetted and benefitted from that boom had gone in various directions, most of them dropped from record labels by the mid-'70s, and only such minor commercial entities as The Roches and Steve Forbert had made any noise at all using New York's Greenwich Village as a base in the late '70s. But, in fact, a whole new generation of performers was coming up, and if the record labels were going to ignore them, they were nevertheless determined to support their own community and foster songwriting themselves. Performers such as Jack Hardy, David Massengill, and Rod MacDonald set up the Songwriters' Exchange so that writers would have a forum for their work to be heard by their peers. This resulted in an album on Stash Records released in 1980. In 1981, the group formed a cooperative that took over booking of SpeakEasy, a Village club. And in February, 1982, the cooperative launched The CooP, a combination magazine and record album featuring the work of new songwriters. A decade later, The CooP, renamed The Fast Folk Musical Magazine, was a non-profit corporation that had published over 70 issues and served as the launching pad for such nationally recognized performers as Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman. The selected albums listed below may or may not be in print at the present time. To order any of them, write to: The Fast Folk Musical Magazine, Inc., P.O. Box 938, Village Station, New York, NY 10014. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide