Si Kahn (born April 23, 1944)[1] is an American singer-songwriter, and activist; he is the founder and former executive director of Grassroots Leadership.
Kahn grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. When he was 15 his family moved to the Washington, D.C. area, where he graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. His grandfather Gabriel Kahn, his mother Rosalind Kahn, and his father Benjamin Kahn, a rabbi, instilled a strong sense of the family's Jewish heritage as well as teaching him the rudiments of rhythm and harmony as a child. His uncle, Arnold Aronson, executive secretary of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, helped inspire and shape Kahn's career.[2] In 1965, Kahn earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University.[1] In 1995, he completed a PhD in American Studies from the Union Institute.
Kahn moved to the south as an activist in the civil rights movement and he lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is the founder and former director of Grassroots Leadership, a non-profit organization which advocates for several causes, including prison reform, improved immigration detention policies, and violence prevention. He retired on May 1, 2010. Most of the profits from Kahn's musical performances benefit the group. He has also been involved with Save Our Cumberland Mountains, an environmentalist group which is opposed to strip mining in Appalachia.
Though Kahn writes songs about a variety of topics, he is especially known for songs about workers and their families, like "Aragon Mill" (1974).[1] He frequently writes songs and occasionally performs, with singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon. Kahn usually accompanies himself on a steel-string acoustic guitar, played with brass fingerpicks.
Kahn's younger sister, Jenette Kahn, was president of DC Comics for 26 years until she stepped down in 2002.
Reviewing Kahn's 1974 New Wood album in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau observed "willfully austere Appalachian music" and songs that are "correctives every one (despite an occasional baldness of instructional intent) to the romanticizations of Southern pastoral individualism that are currently so profitable." He called Kahn "an aficionado of poor-white virtues, but not at the expense of his vivid understanding of the labor, sadness, frustration, and small-mindedness that go along with them."[3]
By the time of Kahn's 1979 record Home, Christgau said he was "the most gifted songwriter to come out of the folkie tradition since John Prine", possessing a political outlook in songs that are nonetheless "personal, their overriding theme the emotional dislocations of working far from home." While identifying Kahn's asset as living among ordinary people rather than the folk subculture, the critic credited Kahn's "understated colloquial precision" and concluded that, "some will consider the all-acoustic music thin (it's often solo or duet, twice a cappella) and the voice quavery. I find that both evoke the mountain music of the '20s in a way that makes me long for home myself, and I'm from Queens."[3]
On later albums, Aragon Mill - The Bluegrass Sessions and It's A Dog's Life, Kahn collaborated with the German bluegrass band The Looping Brothers, founded by Ulrich Sieker and Matthias Malcher–two of Europe's best known and awarded blugrass musicians since the 1970s. Kahn himself initiated and featured both albums joining tours in Europe and the United States. It's A Dog's Life (2019) "includes ten previously unrecorded Kahn compositions and features his vocals on three of the thirteen tracks. They include “Government on Horseback," the first single; (Kahn) revives an unrecorded song from 1981.".[4]