From the definition of a first folk music repertoire in the late 40’s and early 50’s, politics and folk music were linked. The roots of the music as a popular art form in the political left maintained a permanent space at the folk music table for songs that addressed social and political issues. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, and Phil Ochs in the US, and Ewan MacColl in England were important influences on Canadian songwriters. The peace, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements, to mention the most important, had a resonance in Canada and songs from these movements were widely sung in folk circles. Yet by and large there is a dearth of songwriting by Canadian folk songwriters that deal with Canadian issues. The Travellers recorded an album of Canadian labour songs as their centennial project, and continued to perform topical material from a previous age but they were not writers. Canadian folk singers relied on interpretations of non-Canadian material or commented in general terms on the ills of the world. Despite or perhaps because of the strong Canadian nationalist movement in the 60s and 70s most political commentary was aimed at the misdeeds of our neighbors to the south. Lightfoot’s Black Day In July and Ian Tyson’s “House of Cards” are examples, not to mention Ohio by Neil Young, who by then had moved to the United States. Even the “quiet” and then the not so quiet revolution in Quebec, including the declaration of the War Measures Act did not inspire much more than a maudlin plea for unity by Ian Tyson and Peter Gzowski in the early 60’s Song for Canada. In the ironic and the satirical compositions of Bob Bossin and Nancy White there was a whiff of rebellion, as there also was in the work of Perth County Conspiracy, but it was a few women writers influenced by the women’s movement and aboriginal songwriters, for whom Canada was not any better than the US, that the few songs with bite were found. Rita MacNeil in her first album, Born A Woman and Willie Dunn with his Ballad of Crowfoot are exceptions that stand out in two decades regarded in popular mythology as the time of the protest singer. The vast majority of singer songwriters who emerged in Canada in these decades turned their art to celebrating the land and exploring universal themes. They created a vocabulary of Canadian images that matched the new sense of national identity that produced such diverse phenomena as Trudeaumania and the Waffle. For the first time there was a bank of Canadian contemporary songs that went beyond ditties and approached art.