Dylan lyrics and protest movement
Jen Dylan
protest movement of the late 1960's...
Don't Tread On Me
His songs didn't reflect the protest movement, the protest movement
reflected his songs.
"Jen Dylan" <emik...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
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Greg Wallace
the best topical songwriter among a whole group of like-minded singers and
songwriters. The best way to approach the subject is to read the book
'Parting the Waters' about the civil rights movement. To a large degree
later protest evolves from that movement.
"Don't Tread On Me" <donttre...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
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Tricia J
you've got an assignment?)
one is called 'Gates of Eden' (can't remember the author!)
and the other is called '1968 in America', by Kaiser
frinjdwelr
and interesting read from a big Dylan fan. I talked to Kaiser a couple
times about his interview with Dylan. He was enthusiastic and understood
our common obsession.
Also would recommend "Generation in Motion."
"Tricia J" <tric...@aardvark.net.au> wrote in message
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Tricia J
wrote:
>Looking for some insight into the major Dylan songs reflecting the
>protest movement of the late 1960's...
I came across this article which may be of some use to you:
1963: A new civil war raging
(U.S. News & World Report)
The way we were; U.S. News & World Report 60th anniversary
How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be
free? How many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just
doesn'
t see? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind; the answer is
blowin' in the wind.
Robert Allan Zimmerman grew up during those placid years when America
liked Ike and dreamed of owning all the new household appliances the
boy's father, Abe, sold in Hibbing, Minn. But young Bobby was not
exactly cut out to be a refrigerator salesman: He moved to New York'
s Greenwich Village, slept in subways, played guitar in coffeehouses
and changed his name to Bob Dylan, after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
In his life and music, the young man symbolized the rebellious
vitality
of a generation that in 1963 was on the verge of creating a new
identity
and culture out of the rejected fragments of its parents' world. Dylan
was 22 that spring when he set his words to an old black spiritual,
creating a song that became an anthem, and an epitaph, for 1963.
That year was a hinge in U.S. history, connecting two very different
eras: the well-kept world of the late '50s, when a nice girl didn'
t have sex or a career and blacks didn't have an effective voice or
a guaranteed vote, and the discordant, disorienting period of the
late '60s, when angry streams of protest broke through the levees
of convention and flooded the nation's boardrooms, ballrooms and
bedrooms.
Dylan's words kept echoing in 1963. It was a protest song, sung at
the Lincoln Memorial in August, when more than 200,000 people rallied
against racial injustice. Yet its refrain also seemed to capture the
American people's pain and perplexity less than three months later
when they tried, and failed, to make sense of their young president'
s death. What if there were no answers blowin' in the wind? What then?
Perhaps the song spoke to another critical development: the intrusive,
even inescapable, role of television. Now, it would be much harder
for a man ``to turn his head'' from events marching through his living
room every night, narrated by Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley.
National networks expanded their nightly news to a half-hour just
as new satellites made it possible to transmit live events across
oceans. As a result, a series of images burned their way into the
national memory in 1963: John F. Kennedy speaking at the Berlin Wall;
police dogs turned on blacks in Birmingham, Ala.; Buddhist monks
immolating
themselves in Vietnam; four young mop-topped singers called the
Beatles
cavorting for England's queen mother.
But many of the year's pivotal developments took place away from the
camera's eye, where powerful forces that would alter the nation's
most basic values were gathering. Even leaders of these forces--much
less most Americans--were not always aware of the coming revolution.
Like Dylan, Betty Friedan was a Midwesterner, a 42-year-old
psychologist
and housewife who tried to write about women like her mother--and
herself--relegated to second-class status by '50s stereotypes. But
when magazines kept rejecting her work, she turned it into a book,
which she called The Feminine Mystique. The publisher risked printing
only 5,000 copies, and the New York Times did not even review it.
But through a process Friedan now calls a ``mystery'' and a ``miracle,
'' that book helped ignite a fire among women. ``I felt something
in my gut,'' Friedan says today, ``but nobody, including me, had any
idea what was going to happen.''
That same mystery of social change followed the publication of another
book in 1963: The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, an attack on
pesticide
use that helped to galvanize the concerns that coalesced into the
environmental movement. The year also saw the introduction of pop-
top cans--a plague that would eventually sprinkle the world with small
aluminum circles. But those cans contained early low-calorie soft
drinks, harbingers of the fitness rage.
Malted milks were still more popular than marijuana, and the Beach
Boys were still celebrating the sunny innocence of surfing safaris.
But like Friedan, many young people sensed in their guts that the
familiar world would not last. In some places, sex, drugs and rock-
and-roll were beginning to seethe with an energy that would change
how the young thought about their elders (and vice versa), their
bodies
and themselves. In 1963, a new brand of birth control pills, Ortho-
Novum, made the contraceptive safer and easier to use. Harvard
University
fired researcher Timothy Leary for giving drugs to undergraduates;
in a few years, Leary would advise the young to drop acid and drop
out. And while the Beach Boys were looking for waves, the first
discotheque,
Whiskey-a-Go-Go, prepared to open in Los Angeles--signaling the
sensual
direction pop music would take.
Even as the counterculture was forming, a new wave of sterile
technology
began to emerge, eventually provoking the anguished adage: Do not
fold, spindle or mutilate. Nothing symbolized that trend more than
the 1963 introduction of the ZIP code, a target of much dismay. In
the comic strip ``Peanuts,'' a friend told Charlie Brown that his
new name was 555, ``but everyone calls me 5 for short.''
The Kennedy assassination on November 22 remains a shadow and a symbol
of 1963. As Americans grieved together around their TV sets, they
did not know they were mourning not just a man but an era--the last
time Americans viewed their national leaders with enduring confidence
and enthusiasm. According to a University of Michigan survey, 76
percent
of Americans trusted their government at least most of the time 30
years ago. Today the figure is down to 21 percent.
The nation never saw Jack Kennedy grow old or bitter, but many
problems
that soured Americans on his successors were becoming visible the
day he died. The most searing was Vietnam. Throughout 1963, a series
of pictures--from burning monks to burning villages--filtered out
of Southeast Asia, foreshadowing the horror to come. By year's end,
nearly 14,000 U.S. advisers were there; America had plunged more
deeply into the quagmire than hardly anyone realized.
America's current fiscal problems emerged in 1963 as well, mainly
because Lyndon Johnson inherited two Kennedy legacies: Vietnam and
a $10 billion tax cut. Johnson's decision to pay for the war and
expand
domestic social programs without reversing Kennedy's tax policy helped
trigger the spiraling of the national debt from $306 billion to $4.3
trillion in 30 years.
One force for change broke clearly into the limelight that year. On
April 2, when Martin Luther King Jr. began desegregation efforts in
Birmingham, his movement was still struggling for recognition. But
the vicious police reaction shattered public apathy and set the stage,
a few months later, for King's ``I Have a Dream'' speech at the March
on Washington, a speech that transformed the crusade into an
irreversible
cause. Still, in the end, it was the anonymous foot soldiers, not
the generals, who shaped the outcome of the racial wars--people like
Aileen Parham of Birmingham, who said: ``If I'm going to spend my
money in the stores, I think I should have the right to sit down and
eat a sandwich in them.''
Racial progress came with a price. The civil rights movement was
already
splintering, as Malcolm X, a onetime pimp turned Muslim preacher,
was starting to spread his black separatist gospel. Alabama's Gov.
George Wallace, who tried vainly to block integration of his state'
s universities, was by now plotting a run for the presidency, based
on resentment of black protests. Ominous signs appeared for the
Democratic
Party. In Chicago and Philadelphia, Democratic mayors barely won re-
election, as working-class whites--known later as the ``silent
majority'
' or ``Reagan Democrats''--were starting to desert the party of their
birth.
It was, ironically, the hard work of the silent majority that made
possible the coming tumult. After its decades of privations, struggles
and achievements, that group's children were secure enough to pursue
their own ideals and pleasures. How to resolve this generation gap,
like many other answers blowin' in the wind, was not so easy to
discern
at the time. The year was dominated by the ideals of one man, Martin
Luther King Jr., and the death of another, John F. Kennedy. But the
most enduring changes took place inside the hearts and minds of
individual
Americans: old and young, blacks and women, ecologists and hipsters,
drug takers and music makers. They had a profound impact, and created
a backlash that dominated American politics for the next generation.
The way we were
The Making of a Legend
John Kennedy's presidency wasn't called ``Camelot''--for the Broadway
musical about King Arthur--until his widow used it in her first
interview
after his assassination. The aura endured. Another John Kennedy, a
stockroom foreman, was elected Massachusetts treasurer. Real Kennedy
relatives elected to office: four.
War on Poverty
Lyndon Johnson proposed spending $962 million--a sum dwarfed by the
New Deal Works Progress Administration's $11 billion outlay--to combat
poverty. But the underclass grew more discontented, particularly over
racial issues. Between 1964 and 1967, 58 cities exploded in riots,
leaving 141 people dead--42 in Detroit alone.
Forever Young
The '60s youth culture changed swiftly, going from tame fun like the
twist to increased drug use (some 7.8 million Americans first tried
marijuana) to San Francisco's 1967 Summer of Love. Vietnam created
new tensions: 200,000 citizens were accused of draft offenses; the
1968 Chicago Democratic Convention saw open warfare between protesters
and police. The 1969 Woodstock festival was a crowning moment.
Death in the Streets
John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy--all
were felled by assassins. America grew more grisly as violent crime
increased 156 percent over the decade. College students at the end
of the '60s who said violence was sometimes justified to change U.S.
society: 44 percent; general public that said so: 14 percent.
A Giant Leap
Americans in 1949 who believed humans would cure cancer by 1999: 88
percent; who believed humans would land on the moon: 15 percent.
Twenty
years later, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr. landed on the moon
as Michael Collins circled overhead. Armstrong and Aldrin took a 141-
minute historic stroll. People who watched the moonwalk: 500 million.
Copyright © 1996, by U.S. News & World Report, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.Steven V. Roberts, 1963: A new civil war raging. , U.S. News
& World Report, 10-25-1993, pp 60 Ann. 36.
Maya Allison
to read again with my morning coffee tomorrow.