Peter Dreier and Jim Vrabel, writing for The Huffington Post, celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Kingston Trio recording “MTA.”

The group deserves credit for helping to launch the folk boom that brought recognition to older folkies and radicals like Guthrie and Seeger, and for paving the way for newcomers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, and Phil Ochs, who were well-known for their progressive political views and topical songs. . . . What happened to Bess Hawes and Jackie Steiner, the two radicals who wrote “M.T.A.”? Both endured but survived the blacklist, participated in the folk music revival that began in the late 1950s, and helped mentor the Baby Boomer folkies.

In 2008 the University of Illinois Press published Bess Lomax Hawes’s autobiography, Sing it Pretty.