I read the article on American songwriter Shel Silverstein and the songs he had written over the years, including ‘Sylvia's Mother', with much interest. (The Weekend Sun, page 10, May 19, 2017.) Some people who are into music may know that he was not just a writer of pop/rock songs in the 70s – his songwriting career started well before that.
He started writing really good folk songs in the mid to late 1950s through to the 1960s and 70s (when he branched into country and pop/rock music).

The original American folk group, ‘The Weavers', (Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman and Lee Hays,) recorded Shel's song ‘The Blue and the Gray', a poignant little ballad about two brothers who fought on opposite sides in the American Civil War, on their 1957 album ‘Travelling On', their first recording after being black-listed by the Senator McCarthy ‘reds under the beds' witch hunt in the early 1950s.

I also owned, in the 1970s, a Judy Collins album with the song ‘Hey Nellie, Nellie' on it, about black American history from the end of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination, to the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s, spanning 100 years. I'm sure there are other songs in that vein as well.

A brilliant songwriter, and I'm sure a fine man, as so many of his songs reflected a desire for social and economic justice for all.

J Watkins, Katikati.