That said, sometimes even her toughest tunes are tempered with witty, gentle imagery and some are even downright funny. In the thirteen songs on Sings the Truth, there are blatant or subtle references to slavery, nuclear testing, income inequality, racism, the KKK, middle-class conformism, and oh so much more. She is, after all, a singer of songs of discontent. The truth ain’t always easy to hear and Reynolds wasn’t known for being a softie. He also wears the hood.” Her airy, low-larynx’d notes-one of my favorite aspects of her voice-which appear here and there throughout this record, in this song act as a nice bit of text painting when she sings “down there.” The final verse issues marching orders to the listener: “We sing you this song / so you know what’s true / and you’ve gotta take it with you everywhere you go / because it’s up to you.” The higher-up man / won’t do you any good. The fix is in, she claims, with lyrics like: “They throw you in a jail / all covered with blood. In her song, “What’s Going On Down There,” which appears on her second release, 1967’s fittingly titled Malvina Reynolds…Sings the Truth-this week’s Album of the Week-she speaks to the American political and legal system that looks to hold tightly to its power with white-knuckled fists against any sense of justice. Reynolds, above all, was interested in singing the truth. About the song “The Judge Said,” mentioned above, Reynolds would say, “We got out this great statement, this great song. She saw her music as providing a function beyond the aesthetic: she wanted to effect real change. Contemporary reviews of her albums pointed out this fact with adjectives like “primitive,” “childlike,” “unsophisticated,” and just plain “not beautiful.” She herself acknowledged the lack of polish in her voice, but of course that was no matter. Pretty soon she was turning out song after song after song!” In Seeger’s words, “I remember thinking, ‘Gee, she’s kinda old to get started.’ I had a lot to learn. Born in 1900, she was approaching fifty when she first met Pete Seeger-nearly twenty years her junior-at a California hootenanny and hit him up for advice about how she might begin to do what he was doing.
Reynolds was a late-comer to the world of music. Simonson was recalled in that special election, and, in his stead, the people of Dane County voted in Moria Mackert Krueger, Madison’s first female judge. The sleeve of the 45 had a two-paragraph detailing of the situation (with an all-caps headline, “THE JUDGE WHO SANCTIONED RAPE”) along with the lyrics of her freshly penned song, “The Judge Said.” If you’ll indulge me, these two verses of the song will give you a pretty good idea of the cut of her jib: She took it upon herself to help the cause in the way she knew best: she wrote a song, called in favors to get it produced quickly as a single, and distributed them like handbills. One person in particular who took note was Malvina Reynolds, who, by 1977, nearing her 80s, was a well-established singer-songwriter. Needless to say, the story made national news, and a petition to hold a recall election was successful, with over 36,000 signatures. It was 1977, but the circumstances surrounding his recall remain all too familiar today: faced with three teenaged boys who had pleaded no-contest to the gang rape of a girl in a high school stairwell, he added to the injustice of his paltry sentences the stunning insult of blaming the victim for dressing “inappropriately.” “Are we supposed to take an impressionable person 15 or 16 years of age,” he said of the teenaged rapists, “and punish that person severely because they react to it normally?” He went off on a tear and rattled off a handful more gems, complaining that he can’t go around exposing his genitals “like can the mammary glands,” pointing out the existence of women in court rooms who have the gall to not wear a bra, and that women in court and in schools wear “dresses up over the cheeks of their butts.” Rolling Stone later quoted him as saying “Whether we like it or not, women are sex objects.” The first judge to be recalled and replaced in the state of Wisconsin was Archie Simonson of Dane County.