AFTER several weeks of cover stories on politics and international crises, we shift key, clear our throats, and sing out this week on the prevalence and proliferation of folk singing in the land.

It is an agreeably entertaining subject--except, of course, to the participants. If all the world is divided into those who can't live without folk singing and those who can, the inside world of the folk-singing cult itself is further divided into the purists and the entertainers. Somewhere in the center of all the fuss, and appealing to both sides, is Joan Baez, our cover girl.

Contributing Editor John McPhee, who wrote the story, was able to approach it with the detachment of a Princeton man who got through college before the whole twanging subject loomed so large. He cared more about sports. His father, an M.D. on the Princeton University faculty, is physician to the U.S. Olympics teams. At Princeton, McPhee himself roomed with "the greatest football player" in the U.S. that year, Dick Kazmaier, and when TIME put Kazmaier on the cover in 1951, McPhee, as one of his roommates, was subjected to the kind of TIME interviewing he has later inflicted on a succession of show-business celebrities. Later, in a postgraduate year at Magdalene College, Cambridge University, England, McPhee was elected captain of the university basketball team--one place in the world, apparently, where a man can be 5 ft. 7 and still make the team.

A bright-faced and quick-tongued fellow, McPhee earned his way through college as the "teenage student" member of the Twenty Questions radio and television program, and was the world's oldest living teen-ager when at 22 he gave up dividing the world into animal, mineral and vegetable for profit.

In training for this week's cover, he put on stereo earphones ("so that only I would be driven crazy") and listened to so many folk-singing LP albums that "my ears literally have calluses," and he hopes the twanging sound in his head will soon go away.

McPhee, who lives in Princeton with his wife Pryde and three daughters, is the author of TIME covers on Sophia Loren, Jackie Gleason, Jean Kerr, Lerner and Loewe, and Mort Sahl. He wound up liking all his subjects, even if his style has acid as well as adulation in it. He certainly likes his beat: "I have so much fun I sometimes feel guilty."

I/ONRAD ADENAUER, who visited the ' -U.S. last week, bothers to list only two foreign "decorations" in the latest German Wer 1st Wer (Who's Who). They are "Knight and Grand Cross of British Order of St. Michael and St. George (title of nobility 'Sir,' 1957), chosen Man of the Year by the American newsmagazine TIME, 1953."

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