Portside

The big crowds at Madison Square Garden during wartime and a few years after, the excitement at union halls and summer camps for some of the most interesting musicians and lyricists of the time? Gone — gone, but not entirely forgotten.

“We really got together for the fun of it, singing in Pete’s basement on Macdougal Street,” Mr. Hellerman told The New York Times in 1980. “We sang for unions, at picket lines and at hootenannies, but we had no anticipation of getting jobs. Even Pete, the most accomplished of us, could not get jobs on his own, so we couldn’t expect anyone to pay for four of us.”