Broadside (magazine)

Broadside (magazine)

Broadside Magazine was a small mimeographed publication founded in 1962 by Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and her husband, Gordon Friesen. Hugely influential in the folk-revival, it was often controversial. Issues of what is folk music, what is folk rock, and who is folk were roundly discussed and debated. At the same time, Broadside nurtured and promoted important singer-songwriters of the era.

The mixture of hand-drawn musical notation, typewriter text, and the occasional hand-drawn illustration or photocopied news story anticipated a look that would be more common in zines 20 years later.

By the end of the 1970s, Broadside had basically ceased publication.

Several of the songs recorded for Broadside Magazine over its lifetime were released in 2000 as The Best of Broadside as a 5-CD boxed set, which is the only way most of the recordings are available. The magazine was the subject of questions in one of Bob Dylan's many news conferences, as seen in No Direction Home, the Martin Scorsese documentary on Dylan released in 2005.