Linda Solomon

American music critic and editor (born 1937)
the music critic

Linda Solomon (born May 10, 1937, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American music critic and editor. Although she has written about various aspects of popular culture, her main focus has been on folk music, blues, R&B, jazz and country music. Living at 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, she became a columnist for The Village Voice, capturing Village night life in club reviews for the weekly "Riffs" column. "The Bet" is a memoir by Ted White describing Harlan Ellison, Linda Solomon and others involved in a curious incident at 95 Christopher in 1960. White wrote:
That summer Harlan found his own apartment three doors up the street, in a building with an elevator. And he met a woman, Linda Solomon, who also lived in the same building. Linda would go on to a career of her own in writing and editing, but that was mostly ahead of her in 1960. Linda had a small but well selected record collection, containing a goodly amount of jazz. A dispute over the bandleader on one record in Solomon's collection prompted Ellison to bet his entire record collection against a single album in White's collection. Ellison also mentioned her briefly in his memoir "Memos From Purgatory."

She began doing record reviews in the early 1960s. Her Village Voice review of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) has been quoted in several books, including David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001):
He stands outside his problems and writes a credo for people to live by. The emotional understatement in his voice emphasizes the power of his lyrics and his genuine concern for the state of the world.

In addition to work as a publicist for Chess Records, Solomon was the New York editor of NME during the 1970s. She has been a freelance contributor to numerous magazines and newspapers, including Celebrity, Country Music, Crawdaddy!, Down Beat, Hit Parader, NME, The News World, Nostalgia Illustrated, SoHo Weekly News and Us. Reviewing country singer songwriter James Talley for the February 4, 1979 issue of The News World, she wrote:
If you like Carl Sandburg, Woody Guthrie, Jimmy Reed and Little Feat, you'll probably like James Talley, his songs and his albums his writing is a home run that touches base for most people. Simplicity is the key, but his lyrics are deceptively simple. She has written liner notes for folk music recordings, such as All Star Hootenanny (Columbia, 1964), along with liner notes for such recording artists as Charlie Byrd, John Handy, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Rich. After 39 years living in New York's Greenwich Village, Solomon relocated to Houston, Texas in 1999. Her father was the author psychiatrist Dr. Philip Solomon, and her maternal uncle was the WPA artist Aaron Gelman.