Linda Solomon

'Linda Solomon (born May 10, 1937, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American music critic and editor. Although she has written about various aspects of popular culture, her main focus has been on folk music, blues, R&B, jazz and country music. Living at 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, she became a columnist for The Village Voice, capturing Village night life in club reviews for the weekly "Riffs" column.

"The Bet" is a memoir by Ted White describing Harlan Ellison, Linda Solomon and others involved in a curious incident at 95 Christopher in 1960. White wrote:

A dispute over the bandleader on one record in Solomon's collection prompted Ellison to bet his entire record collection against a single album in White's collection.

Ellison also mentioned her briefly in his memoir "Memos From Purgatory."

She began doing record reviews in the early 1960s. Her Village Voice review of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) has been quoted in several books, including David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001):

In 1963-64, Solomon edited ABC-TV Hootenanny, a magazine featuring the folk musicians who appeared on the television series Hootenanny, telecast on ABC from April 6, 1963 to September 12, 1964. For one of the magazine's cover stories she interviewed Chad Mitchell and asked, "I've heard criticism of the Chad Mitchell Trio to the extent that politics and entertainment don't mix, that people come to a club or concert to be entertained and not to be confronted with the troubles of the world. Do you feel that your group is becoming too messagey?"

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