In any group of Buffy songs there are decorous waltzes, lyrical efflorescences weighted with imagery which does not exclude an occasional glimpse of a steel mind. Her French style torchers have all the gripping qualities of that superannuated mode, combined with unconventional love song lyrics. Other love songs are warmly sentimental, with haughty and forbidding undercurrents. One quality they all have in common is their lively tension.

Buffy's songs have a variety that makes them seem written by women from different backgrounds…. (pp. 61-2)

The most carping criticism comes from the genre loyalists whose boundaries she crosses. The pop audience has little patience with a writer of songs of social concern. They accept her ballads. The folk-protest group disdain the ballads but applaud her antiwar and socially conscious songs, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone," "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying," and "Suffer the Little Children." She...