Top Ten Protest Songs and the Events that Inspired Them

The sixties were a time of immense change in all areas of public and private life, often referred to as a social revolution global in scale. In the United States, for example, social change was wrought by the American civil rights movement, the rise of feminism and gay rights, invention of the microchip and formulation of Moore's Law, and even the rise of neoconservatism. The "Sixties" has become synonymous with all the new, exciting, radical, subversive and/or dangerous (depending on one's viewpoint) events and trends of the period, which continued to develop in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. In Africa the 60s were a period of radical change as countries gained independence from their European colonial rulers, only for this rule to be replaced in many cases by civil war or corrupt dictatorships. Government Several Western governments turned to the left in the early-1960s. In the United States President John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. Italy formed its first left of center government in March 1962 with a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and moderate Republicans. Socialists joined the ruling bloc in December 1963. The 1960s were marked by several notable assassinations, including Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. First Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, is assassinated by Belgian/Congolese firing squad on January 17, 1961 First South Vietnamese president Ngo Dihn Diem (Ngô Ðìhn Dim) is assassinated in coup d'etat on November 2, 1963. US President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on November 22, 1963 in his car during a parade Malcolm X is assassinated on February 21, 1965 The assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. The assassination of presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968. Anti-War Movement A mass movement began rising in opposition to the Vietnam War, ending in the massive Moratorium protests in 1969, and also the movement of resistance to conscription (the Draft) for the war. The antiwar movement was initially based on the older 1950s Peace movement heavily influenced by the American Communist Party, but by the mid-1960s it outgrew this and became a broad-based mass movement centered on the universities and churches: one kind of protest was called a "sit-in." Other terms included the Draft, draft dodger, conscientious objector, and Vietnam vet. Voter age-limits were challenged by the phrase: "If you're old enough to die for your country, you're old enough to vote." Popular music entered an era of "all hits" as numerous singers released recordings, beginning in the 1950s, as 45-rpm "singles" (with another on the flip side), and radio stations tended to play only the most popular of the wide variety of records being made. Also, bands tended to record only the best of their songs as a chance to become a hit record. The developments of the Motown Sound, "folk rock" and the British Invasion of bands from the U.K. (The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, The Rolling Stones ,and so on), are major examples of American listeners expanding from the folksinger, doo-wop and saxophone sounds of the 1950s and evolving to include psychedelia music. The rise of an alternative culture among affluent youth, creating a huge market for rock and blues music produced by drug-culture, influenced bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Doors, and also for radical music in the folk tradition pioneered by Bob Dylan, The Mamas and the Papas, and Joan Baez in the United States, and in England, Donovan was helping to create folk rock. The Jimi Hendrix Experience release two albums in the United Kingdom (U.K.) during 1967 Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love that innovate both guitar, trio and recording techniques. The Beatles release the seminal 'concept' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in June 1967. Bob Dylan releases the Country Rock album John Wesley Harding in December 1967, making the genre acceptable. The Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 was the apex of the so-called Summer of Love. The Band releases the roots rock album Music from Big Pink in 1968. The Rolling Stones film the TV special Rock and Roll Circus in December 1968 which was never broadcast during its contemporary time. Considered for decades as a fabled 'lost' performance until released in North America on Laserdisc and VHS in 1995. Features performances from The Who; The Dirty Mac featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell; Jethro Tull and Taj Mahal. The Who release and tour the first rock opera Tommy in 1969. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band release the avant garde album Trout Mask Replica in 1969. The Woodstock Festival, and four months later, the Altamont Free Concert in 1969. 1960 - The first working laser was demonstrated in May by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. 1961 - First human spaceflight to orbit the Earth: Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1. 1962 - First trans-Atlantic satellite broadcast via the Telstar satellite. 1962 - The first computer video game, Spacewar!, is invented. 1963 - The first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2 is launched. 1963 - Touch-Tone telephones introduced. 1964 - The first successful Minicomputer, Digital Equipment Corporation&s 12-bit PDP-8, is marketed. 1965 - Sony markets the CV-2000, the first home video tape recorder. 1966 - The Soviet Union launches Luna 10, which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon. 1967 - First heart transplantation operation. 1967 - PAL and SECAM broadcast color TV systems start publicly transmitting in Europe. 1968 - First humans to leave Earth's gravity influence and orbit another world: Apollo 8. 1968 - The first public demonstration of the computer mouse, the paper paradigm Graphical user interface, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext. 1969 - Arpanet, the research-oriented prototype of the Internet, was introduced. 1969 - First humans to walk on the Moon: Apollo 11. 1969 - CCD invented at AT&T Bell Labs, used as the electronic imager in still and video cameras. Hundreds of full-length films were produced during the 1960s. The decade is known for being prominent in historical drama, psychological horror, and comedy, as well as the sub-genres of spy film, sword and sandal, and spaghetti westerns, all peaking during this decade. Historical drama films continued to include epics, in the style of Ben-Hur from 1959, with Cleopatra (1963), but also evolving with 20th-century settings, such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Psychological horror films extended, beyond the stereotypical monster movies of Dracula/Frankenstein or Wolfman, to include more twisted films, such as Psycho (1960) and Roger Corman's Poe adaptations for American International Pictures as well as British companies Hammer Horror and Amicus Productions. Comedy films became more elaborate, such as the The Pink Panther (1963), The President's Analyst (1967), or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) elevated the concept of a comedy-drama, where the subtle comedy conceals the harsher elements of the drama beneath, and Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1962) set a new standard for satire by turning a story about nuclear holocaust into a sophisticated black comedy. Beyond the trenchcoat and film noir, spy films expanded with worldly settings and hi-tech gadgets, such as the James Bond films Dr. No (1962) or Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965). Similar to spy films, the heist or caper-films included worldly settings and hi-tech gadgets, as in the original Ocean's Eleven (1960), Topkapi (1964) or The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 film). The spaghetti westerns (made in Italy or perhaps Spain), were typified by Clint Eastwood movies, such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) or Hang 'Em High (1968); however, several dashing Italian actors had their own series of such westerns. Science-fiction or fantasy films employed a wider range of special effects, as in the original of The Time Machine (1960) and Mysterious Island (1961), or with animated aliens or mythical creatures, as in the Harryhausen animation for Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Some extensive sets were built to simulate alien worlds or zero-gravity chambers, as in space-station and spaceship sets for the epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the psychedelic, space settings for the erotic Barbarella (1968), and with ape-city in the original Planet of the Apes. In 1945, World War II ended. By 1946, American servicemen began returning home to start up the families they had had to put on hold for 4 years. Thus began the unusually large bubble in the population curve of America known as the Baby Boom, as gazillions of babies were born all of a sudden in the span of five to ten years. Remember that all those babies born in 1946-1947 would be 18 in 1964-1965 (and eventually 22 and out of college, and into the marketplace in the early '70's, to kick off the Me Decade). What that means is that American society would suddenly find itself catering to a generation of young people in a way that had never occurred before. Sixties rock finds its roots in several places, starting as far back as the big swing bands of the pre-war era that the 60's kids' parents listened to as youngsters: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington's bands are some of the most famous. Except for Duke Ellington, all those bands were primarily dance bands, with big swinging backbeats. You can still hear some of their greatest hits today in such unusual places as the Chips Ahoy commercial (1,000 chips in every bag). There were also the smaller, "rhythm combo" groups, usually of only four or five players. Their tunes were popular on the jukeboxes of the day, but were not considered artistically important which is why we have mostly forgotten them today. The recent Broadway show "Five Guys Named Moe," which highlights the career of Louis Jordan, tells about one of the most popular rhythm combos of the day. Nat King Cole also had a small jazz combo that had popular success, before he became a Sinatra-style pop ballad singer in the '50's. Then there was Country & Western--especially what was called "Texas Swing," of which Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys was the king. Hank Williams Sr. was another important singer/songwriter of that era and genre. Over in Memphis there was Sam Phillips and his Sun Studios, where rockabilly and Elvis Presley were born. Besides Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison all began their recording careers at Sun Studios. Two other sources of modern rock'n'roll, absolutely essential to the sound we think of as 60's rock, were, first, the Blues. Blues began as the music of black sharecroppers in the poor cotton-farming region of the Mississippi Delta, and traveled north to Chicago with the sharecroppers as thousands of them moved north in search of a better life. It was in Chicago that the blues went from acoustic solo guitar music to electric guitar-electric bass-drums combos. Muddy Waters, Little Milton, B.B. King, and Howlin' Wolf were just a few of these important Chicago blues artists. Late in the evening of September 30, 1919, black sharecroppers were holding a union meeting in a church in Hoop Spur outside of Elaine, Arkansas. Tensions were high and they had posted guards at the door. When two deputized white men and a black trustee pulled into view, shots rang out. Who fired first is still debated, likely unknowable, and perhaps not that important. What is important is what transpired afterwards. One of the white men was killed, the other wounded. The black trustee raced back to Helena, the county seat of Phillips County, and alerted officials. A posse was dispatched and within a few hours hundreds of white men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb the area for blacks they believed were launching an insurrection. In the end, five white men and over a hundred African Americans were killed. Some estimates of the black death toll range in the hundreds. Allegations surfaced that the white posse and even U.S. soldiers who were brought in to put down the so called "rebellion" had massacred defenseless black men, women and children. Nearly a hundred blacks were arrested, and in sham trials that lasted no more than a few minutes each, sixty-something black men were sentenced to prison, and twelve were slated for execution. A massive effort on the part of the NAACP and others, including a prominent black attorney in Little Rock, ensued, and by 1925 all the men were free. But planters had established that blacks had best not organize, even within the law, for racism would bring whites of different classes together to put them down.

Conclusion of a war: A North Vietnamese Army T-54 tank breaking into the grounds of the Presidential Palace, April 30, 1975. The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the American War, occurred from 1959 to April 30, 1975. The term Vietnam Conflict is often used to refer to events which took place between 1959 and April 30, 1975. The war was fought between the Communist-supported Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States supported Republic of Vietnam. It concluded with the defeat and failure of the United States foreign policy in Vietnam. Over 1.4 million military personnel were killed in the war (only 6% were members of the United States armed forces), while estimates of civilian fatalities range from 2 to 5.1 million. On April 30, 1975, the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon fell to the communist forces of North Vietnam, effectively ending the Vietnam War. The Soviet Union and the United States were involved in the space race. This led to an increase in spending on science and technology during this period. The space race heated up when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth and President Kennedy announced Project Apollo in 1961. The Soviets and Americans were then involved in a race to put a man on the Moon before the decade was over. America won the race when it placed the first men on the Moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, in July 1969. Popular American movies of the 1960s include Psycho, Breakfast at Tiffany's, To Kill a Mockingbird, My Fair Lady, The Pink Panther, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; The Sound of Music; Doctor Zhivago, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Bonnie and Clyde; Cool Hand Luke; The Graduate; Rosemary's Baby; Midnight Cowboy; Head; Medium Cool; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Easy Rider. In Europe, Art Cinema gains wider distribution and sees movements like la Nouvelle Vague (The French New Wave); Cinéma Vérité documentary movement in Canada, France and the United States; and the high-point of Italian filmmaking with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Pier Paulo Pasolini making some of their most known films during this period. Notable films from this period include: 8½; L'avventura; La notte; Blowup; Satyricon; Accattone; The Gospel According to St. Matthew; Theorem; Breathless;Vivre sa vie; Contempt; Bande à part; Alphaville; Pierrot le fou; Week End; Shoot the Piano Player; Jules and Jim; Fahrenheit 451;Last Year at Marienbad;Dont Look Back; Chronique d'un été; Titicut Follies; High School; Salesman; La Jetée; Warrendale The sixties were about experimentation. With the explosion of light-weight and affordable cameras, the underground avant-garde film movement thrived. Canada's Michael Snow, Americans Kenneth Anger. Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and Jack Smith. Notable films in this genre are: Dog Star Man; Scorpio Rising; Wavelength; Chelsea Girls;Blow Job; Vinyl; Flaming Creatures. The marriage of music and movies keeps the spirit of the sixties alive today. Movies about the era are incredibly popular. The Vietnam War is the topic most often considered, with movies like Apocalypse Now; Platoon; and Born on the Fourth of July. The influence of the counterculture and Civil Rights is common as well, as seen in movies like Across the Universe; Forrest Gump; and Malcolm X. The subject material of sixties movies is coupled with, and improved by, the music of the era. The integration of the music into a movie makes it seem more realistic and true to the time period. Motown Record Corporation founded in 1960. It's first Top Ten hit was "Shop Around" by the Miracles in 1960. "Shop Around" peaked at number-two on the Billboard Hot 100, and was Motown's first million-selling record. The Marvelettes scored Motown Record Corporation's first US #1 pop hit, "Please Mr. Postman" in 1961. Motown would score 110 Billboard Top-Ten hits between 1961 and 1971. The Beatles went to America in 1964, spearheading the start of the British Invasion. Bob Dylan goes electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The Beach Boys release Pet Sounds in 1966, ushering in the era of album orientated rock. Bob Dylan is called "Judas" by an audience member during the legendary Manchester Free Trade Hall concert, the start of the Bootleg recording industry follows, with recordings of this concert circulating for 30 years wrongly labeled as The Royal Albert Hall Concert before a legitimate release in 1998 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert. The history of computing hardware starting at 1960 is marked by the conversion from vacuum tube to solid state devices such as the transistor and later the integrated circuit. By 1959 discrete transistors were considered sufficiently reliable and economical that they made further vacuum tube computers uncompetitive. Computer main memory slowly moved away from magnetic core memory devices to solid-state static and dynamic semiconductor memory, which greatly reduced the cost, size and power consumption of computer devices. Eventually the cost of integrated circuit devices became low enough that home computers and personal computers became widespread. As the late fifties gave way to the early sixties, the rockabilly stars of the previous decade (the Everlys, Elvis, Roy Orbison) were still having hits, but the older pop-music stars were fading away as they struggled to find material that would click with this new and energetic generation of kids. Pop music gradually became controlled by new young "vocal"-groups, taking their power from a combination of the performer's charisma along with the songwriting talents of the production team, who operated behind the scenes. Eventually rock artists came to be expected to write and even produce their own songs, becoming responsible for everything about how their records sounded--but that would have to wait for Marvin Gaye, Brian Wilson and Lennon & McCartney. In general there were four main pockets of early 60's pop: the East Coast DooWop and girl groups were singers and groups whose origins are in the streetcorner a cappella groups found in many urban centers. With very rare exceptions, these groups did not write their own songs, but relied on their handlers to set up the recording sessions, pick the material, and produce the records. In fact, many of these behind-the-scenes people eventually became stars in their own right in the seventies. The R&B and Soul scene included many talented people who often didn't receive the popularity of less-talented white groups, because of barriers and prejudices against buying "race" records. Later in the decade, after the British groups acknowledged their debt to soul music, and as the civil rights movement inspired black pride, the general American public rediscovered these performers. the California scene was first dominated by instrumental surf groups like the Surfaris, the Crossfires, and Dick Dale & the Del-tones. Dale, the "King of Surf Guitar," in particular helped define how modern rock guitar solos would sound. Then the Beach Boys added vocal harmonies to the surf sound. This surf-&-drag, fun-in-the-sun sound was so popular that the style showed up all over the place, even in tv theme songs such as the Munsters and Hawaii Five-O. But the real important stuff was happening in the recording studios, where young studio wizards like Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and the team of Sloan & Barri began turning the studio itself into their instrument, looking for new sounds in a quest not for records but for productions. There were studio svengalis back east, too, including Bob Crewe and the team of Burt Bacharach & Hal David. Modern artists like Prince, Lindsey Buckingham, and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis who use synths and samplings, are rather like the spiritual descendants of those white suburban teenagers, taking their distinctive sound with them regardless of the particular artist they happen to be working with. Troll dolls, originally known as Leprocauns and also known as Dam dolls, Gonks, Wishniks, Treasure Trolls, and Norfins, became one of America's biggest toy fads beginning in the autumn of 1963, and lasting throughout 1965. With their brightly colored hair and cute faces, they were featured in both Life Magazine and Time magazine in articles which commented on the "good luck" they would bring to their owners. The troll doll is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a Kewpie doll. Trolls became fads again in brief periods throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with as many as ten different manufacturers (such as Russ Berrie, Jakks Pacific, Applause, Hasbro, Mattel, Nyform, Trollkins and Ace Novelty) creating them. In 2003, the Toy Industry Association named Troll dolls to its Century of Toys List, a roll call commemorating the 100 most memorable and most creative toys of the 20th century.

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