If you miss Phil Ochs in these godawful times, you might be looking for Grant Peeples even if you don't know it. As you may be well aware, Ochs was a Greenwich Village compatriot of Bob Dylan, a fellow folksinger-songwriter who -- unlike Dylan -- did not abandon topical issues for which Dylan famously dismissed him, to his face, as a "journalist."

If Ochs is thus remembered as a protest singer, few of his songs are remembered at all. Mostly, they concerned long-forgotten political causes and disputes, revolutionary heroes of the moment, and excoriations of insufficiently left liberals (e.g., "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," which should not be played within earshot of liberal-loathing right-wingers, whose brains will be immediately and permanently scrambled). The one Ochs song still sung is the moving and apolitical "Changes."

For all the posturing, Ochs -- until crushed by mental illness in his later years -- was a lovable guy both to those who knew him personally and to those who knew him only from his records and concerts. In my New Left Days long decades ago, I observed him, guitar in hand, stand before a mob of hard-left rioters at the1968 Democratic convention and warn them that if they continued to behave with malicious insanity, they would be indistinguishable from the monsters they opposed. That took guts, and it put into words my inchoate thoughts about why I was feeling so uncomfortable with people I had till that week thought of as my allies. It was the beginning of my return to my natural home, a center-left patriotism. I suspect it did something of the same for Ochs as well.

According to his biographers, Ochs (who would die by his own hand a few years later) was at heart a social democrat who most of all admired Robert Kennedy and who never entirely recovered from the trauma of his assassination. There is no reason to believe Ochs would have evolved into what passes for a conservative in America's troubled political culture, but his core moderation and commitment to democratic values would have stilled his enthusiasm for the false gods of Third World revolution such as Nicaragua's Sandinistas, whose trajectory George Orwell could have predicted -- had he been around in the early 1980s when they were all the rage on the illiberal left -- after about three seconds' worth of contemplation.

In any event, Grant Peeples is a sort of Phil Ochs for the 21st century, minus the errors of another era. If we were to meet, I doubt that he and I would have much to disagree about. We share a common moral outrage about what's happened to our country in this century, in particular in the last decade, and we both fear, as Peeples expresses it in the last line of the final cut on A Murder of Songs, that "we're about to start killing each other." To get there, a place even we non-paranoids/non-alarmists recognize as the possible consequence of current strains of irrationality, Peeples has to indulge in some historically dubious both-siderism. But this is, after all, just a song, and in any event, it would be a very bad idea to start killing each other.

A more robust form of topical writing manifests in the wonderful "Insurrection Song (January 6)." Its sentiments are understandably heated, but humor is hardly absent, especially in Peeples' choice to steal the melody of "The Wearing o' the Green" to carry the message. For some reason that cracks me up every time. I leave you with the chorus:

It was an insurrection so patriots must stand
And heed the call for justice and let leniency be damned.
If freedom is just another word for all we have to lose
Let the sons of bitches rot in jail for what they tried to do.