THE INTERNET helps keep me from being a fathead (I ...

Anyway, kicking around the web and checking out CD notes, I was surprised to find out how little I actually knew about Malvina Reynolds, the Singing Grandma of 60s and 70s protest who spent much of her life in Berkeley, CA. She seemed to have come from nowhere in her own 60s, skewering the complacent and cheering on the social revolution. Turns out she was the daughter of Eastern European Jewish socialists, married a 1930s labor organizer, picked up a passel of college degrees (including a PhD in English), and worked in a bomb factory after having been denied teaching jobs as a leftist. She'd been hanging around with Pete Seeger and friends for more than a decade before her first albums came out.

With a Jewish Mama voice lying somewhere between Fanny Brice and Ethel Merman, Reynolds could lay down a soothing lullaby of hope, a gently mocking protest anthem, an uproarious dig, or (especially in the years leading up to her death in 1978) a ripping, scathing indictment of official moronism. To me, her songs carry particular authority because of her age. Dylan, still a curly-headed spaz when he recorded "The Times They Are A-Changin'," hadn't done much to earn his vocal sneer. But Reynolds in "Little Boxes" observes the human worm from the height of experience: "And there's doctors and lawyers/And business executives/And they're all made out of ticky tacky/And they all look just the same."

It's funny as hell, it's disturbing, it's oh-so-on-the-mark. Reynolds was always a mistress of the telling detail. In 1977, she responded in "The Judge Said" to an antiquated Madison, WI, ruling that blamed a 15-year-old girl for her own rape: "Like a mountain's there to climb/And food's there to be eaten/Woman's there to rape/To be shoved around and beaten."

It was recorded as a single and mailed out with recall positions. The judge was removed.

Her earliest songs had a softer touch, but still that wonderfully descriptive flair. From "Bury Me in My Overalls" (1956): "Give my suit to Uncle Jake/He can wear it at my wake/And bury me in my overalls."

I find myself wanting to quote too many of Reynolds' lyrics. But they're far more powerful when pushed out by that sometimes-cracking old-lady voice. Rosalie Sorrels, who worked and sang with Reynolds for many years, has recorded some of Reynolds' works. I haven't heard them and don't want to. The plain fact is, nobody else should sing these songs. Ever. They are Reynolds' in a superbly personal way.

Which makes it particularly upsetting that you have to jump through hoops to find many of them. The only easily available anthology, Ear to the Ground, includes everything quoted above, but, damn it, leaves out one of my favorites: "The faucets are dripping in old New York City/The faucets are dripping, and oh what a pity," written in the mid-60s in response to drought and a collapsing plumbing infrastructure. It's also missing some later pieces I've heard only once and love but can't track down.

What's Out There: Amazon has Ear to the Ground. Some early work is available only directly from Smithsonian Folkways and her many children's songs wait at www.sisterschoice.com/catalog.html.