Alix Dobkin reads from her Autobiography: MY RED BLOOD June 15, 2010

Alix Dobkin reads from her Autobiography: MY RED BLOOD
Tuesday June 15, 2010 6:00-7:45pm, Hayward Main Library, 835 C St. @ Mission Blvd., Hayward, CA 94541 (2 blocks from Hayward BART)
Come join Alix Dobkin for an evening of memories, song and laughter at the Hayward Public Library. Alix has published the first volume of her autobiography entitled MY RED BLOOD.
My Red Blood describes the beginnings of her career in the late 1950s, when Philadelphia was a hotbed of do-it-yourself culture that magnetized folk music on the East Coast. She was a teenaged, guitar-totin’, card-carrying comrade grounding herself in mushrooming crowds of progressive Jews, self-taught musicians and other local subversives. She met and sang with all the names one associates with the Folk Music movement in America.
Her story, opens much earlier in post-war New York City where, growing up in a Communist family, she watches Jackie Robinson steal home, rubs elbows with radical left celebrities like Paul Robeson, and comes of age under the watchful eye of the FBI. Dobkin herself joins the Party at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts and offers readers a first-hand glimpse of daily life as a young person living under government surveillance. During this time she also matures as a devotee of folk music, having fallen under the spell of renowned performers such as Leadbelly and Pete Seeger.
Over the last 25 years Dobkin has traveled to hundreds of women’s communities in this country and many others. She has had the privilege and pleasure to gather elements of women’s culture to create a body of stories, songs, observations, and opinions, to share. These songs honor and reflect the unique feminist style, substance, issues and values. In addition to seven recordings, Dobkin has one songbook, many years worth of columns and articles, a shelf full of awards to my name; and was voted “All Time Favorite Performer” by Hot Wire magazine, and she has been known to some as “Head Lesbian!” Spin magazine called her a “womyn’s music legend” and the FBI reported that she was a “trouble maker. Come and spend an evening, hear the beginning of this story, listen to some wonderful music and enjoy yourself.

Official Website: http://www.library.hayward-ca.gov