Protest Music of the Vietnam War:
A Struggling Generation Moved to Action

Reprinted from Fresh Ink: Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar (2002), Ed. Eileen Donovan-Kranz and Lad Tobin. Used with permission from the author and the editors.

by Elizabeth A. Vassallo

Radio Host George Jellenik once said, "the history of a people is found in its songs" (qtd. in Pacific Northwest). Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Phil Ochs; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Joan Baez. No other era of musicians could have created a nation's history quite like this in America during the Vietnam War.

In 2001, almost four decades later, this same music of the 1960s is still proving its timelessness. Thanks to my dad and our family's frequent trips from Maryland to New York, I cannot remember a time when this music was unfamiliar to me. The New Jersey Turnpike at midnight, the tight quarters of a station wagon's backseat and the soft crooning of Bob Dylan coming from an aged tape deck – all key parts of our family trips. Little did I know then, as I watched the changing scenery through the window, that the songs which for me simply made the hours on the road go by more quickly meant the world to an entire generation who came before me.

The lyrics and influence of 1960s musicians were truly revolutionary in that they not only sold albums but also took a firm stance in the state of society itself. The protest music created during the struggle in Vietnam was much more than a soundtrack for an era of war.

It was a response to injustice, a protest against violence and ultimately a call to change that united Americans during the conflicts of a struggling generation.

The struggles all began with a war most citizens did not understand in a land unknown: Vietnam. The government's goal of U.S. involvement in Vietnam was to keep South Vietnam anticommunist. Achieving this goal meant finding and destroying Viet Cong and North Vietnam army units, and potentially killing thousands of innocent Vietnamese citizens and American soldiers in the process (Loss 75).

For the sake of the U.S. government's mission in Vietnam, more than two million men were drafted into the military by the U.S. Selective Service and even more enlisted in hopes of getting favorable assignments (Hillstrom and Hillstrom 112). My uncle was thirteen years old when the turbulence of the Vietnam War began and just eighteen when, in 1972, he was drafted into the army. Of the young American men drafted to fight, close to 58,000 died in battle and an additional 270,000 were wounded (101).

My dad was fourteen years old when the casualties of the Vietnam War began to accumulate. "The most striking memory," he says of wartime, "is not so much the progress of the war, but some of the pictures which looked cruel and ugly." Even today, my dad recalls a time when each news broadcast was ended with an update of how many Americans had been killed that day and to date. My uncle describes the same time period: "You would eat your dinner watching film footage of the war, seeing film footage of people dying."

It is no wonder, then, that as young people like my father grew up they began to protest the violence that for them symbolized the conflict in Vietnam, what my dad and his contemporaries viewed as "another country's civil war." Protests of the war grew also to concern the disproportionate amount of citizens from the lower classes of American society represented in the army. In seemed that, as Kevin Hillstrom puts it, "Vietnam was a place where the elite went as reporters, not as soldiers" (112). It is a known fact that many affluent young men were exempted from the draft because they had hopes of higher-level academic achievements in the future. Members of the lower socioeconomic classes were at an academic disadvantage and, as a result, ended up comprising a majority of the United States' drafted armed forces (112).

Youth disgust with the war and the way the government was dealing with it only grew with time. "Primarily, the War in Vietnam seemed unwinnable and poorly thought out," says Carol Petillo, history professor at Boston College and teacher of a course on the struggle in Vietnam. "Most college students," she continues, "did not want to die there along with the other 58,000 Americans who did. It [the war] became more and more unpopular as it went on."

Clearly, though, the Vietnam War, awful as it was, could not have been the first "unpopular" conflict to see U.S. involvement. What was it about the time and the circumstances of this war that made so many American citizens speak out during the 60s and 70s? Essentially, the young people of these decades could take a stand because their path of American protest had been paved long before the war even began. Years preceding the war, an era of change was sparked by former President John F. Kennedy's move to office as the youngest president ever elected. Kennedy's enthusiasm and willingness to question the traditional, combined with the mounting Civil Rights Movement, created a whole new era. In essence, "the complacency of the 1950s was over" (Denisoff 194).

Furthermore, the call for protest was beginning to foment society. "The assassination of a popular president; ghetto riots; an escalating war in South East Asia; freedom rides; all perplexed observers of American Society. College students were in the eye of the storm" (Denisoff 194). These college students, likely children of veterans of World War II, were raised during a period when society truly believed in principles of the U.S. government. When these same students grew up to see the government "not living up to those expectations," as Professor Petillo puts it, they spoke out and began questioning the very thing they had always been taught to trust without doubt.

Thus, the anti-Vietnam War movement found its roots and soon after found life in the music of American folk singers. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs helped to make protest music a key part of the antiwar movement of the Vietnam Era. Rooted in slave songs and union ballads, the protest song quickly became a revolutionary form of "artistic journalism," thanks very much to the work of singer, songwriter, and poet, Bob Dylan.

Dylan, with his 1962 album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is credited by many for having single-handedly founded music's antiwar movement. The songs on this album, and many of Dylan's songs to follow, allowed him to take his place as a "spokesman of his generation." Former President Bill Clinton credits Bob Dylan with "providing those who protested the Vietnam War with a moral compass as accessible as the nearest radio" (qtd. in "Voice of America"). Clearly, though, Bob Dylan did not speak out for his generation on his own, but rather was aided by many other musicians who also decided that it was time to truly speak up to their contemporaries and to the world.

Musicians all over began to take a stand. John Lennon asked society in a simple but powerful way to "give peace a chance," while others made more direct attacks on the government and on the conflict itself. "Be the first on your block to come home in a box," sing Country Joe and the Fish in their wartime hit of 1967, the "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." In Credence Clearwater's 1969 single, "Fortunate Son," John Fogerty makes a statement on the injustice of a war fought by the American middle classes (Hillstrom and Hillstrom 112). "Some folks are born silver spoon in hand…Some folks inherit star spangled eyes," sings Fogerty. "They send you down to war and when you ask them, how much should we give, Ooh, they only answer, more, more, more" (qtd. in Armstrong).

In a time of emotionally explosive issues in American, "contemporary popular music," says Les Cleveland, "[became] related directly to the passions and anxieties of an entire generation of people to the point where, in the hands of the peace movement, it became a political tool (qtd. in Walsh). The music made society ask "why?" and as protests of the Vietnam War grew, "songwriters seized the moment," as Les Cleveland puts it, "to express the anxiety of the day and mobilized the troops on college campuses across the land" (qtd. in Walsh).

Students for a Democratic Society, founded in 1962, was one of the most influential organizations in rallying American college and university students in support of the antiwar movement. Its major goal of turning the United States to its "original ideals of participatory democracy" sparked many young Americans to action (Loss 76). When the powerful public protesting began, my dad was one student at Columbia University in New York City who actively took part in the protest,

marching down Broadway with hundreds of other students for the sake of the cause. He recalled a time when students went as far as taking over the college's administrative buildings. These Columbia students proceeded to close down the school.

For students like these across the United States it was contemporary protest music that proved to be what my dad calls "another medium for the message of social awareness to be spread." The music became the uniting force behind many protest groups and demonstrations. John Fogerty once said, "I think music, my concept of what music is supposed to be…should unite, as corny as that is" (qtd. in Hillstrom and Hillstrom 116). And unite the music did. American citizens from California to New York were coming together with the help of antiwar music.

Even Americans fighting overseas in Vietnam felt the influence of that same music of the time. Songs like the Animals' "We Gotta Get out of this Place" became extremely popular among soldiers because the lyrics touched them personally as citizens who were sacrificing for a cause so many simply could not believe in. Many protest songs became "anthems" for soldiers everywhere because, heard from the jungles of Vietnam, they "reflected their feelings of disillusionment, homesickness, anger, and pain." The music was one source of media that the military had difficulty controlling. It became a key link between the young people fighting the war and the young people supporting them back home in the United States (Hillstrom and Hillstrom 292).

The influence of the music during this period on civilians and soliders alike is undeniable. But did the musicians behind the music always intend to "change the world" with their lyrics, or were they just selling albums to naïve teens? Neither. It is easy to forget that musicians like Jimi Hendrix, David Crosby, Neil Young and John Lennon are not just symbols but members of the generation that survived the Vietnam War. David Crosby says in Johnny Rogan's biography, Neil Young, "I don't think musicians should go and seek stands out. But when something slaps you in the face personally, you have to respond to it" (qtd. in Hillstrom and Hillstrom 214). Musicians were men and women who were living through and responding to their world in the best way they knew how.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's famous song "Ohio" is a testimony to the very fact that the musicians were living the struggle along with the rest of society. In his autobiography Long Time Gone, David Crosby describes the night Neil Young wrote the song "Ohio," following the shootings at Kent State University. Crosby recalled watching Young read a magazine article about the shootings and then simply look up "as if to ask ‘Why?'" Young then sat down and, in silence, wrote the song that would soon be heard across the nation. "It was a true life reaction of one young person to the world he was living in, a time of great controversy and conflict," says Crosby (qtd. in Hillstrom and Hillstrom 214).

Maybe it was the fact that the music did embody "true life reactions" to the conflicts of society that made the music of this period so powerful. Or maybe it was merely the circumstances under which the music was created and heard. But, for whatever reason, the protest music of the Vietnam War had a powerful influence that outlived the struggle itself. The protest song did not go away after the war, but instead "adapted, changed to suit the time" (Walsh). Though in many senses, antiwar music of today is less unified, without a lone cause, the music continues nevertheless and remains pertinent and applicable to the conflicts of today's society. During the Persian Gulf War, for example, modern musicians such as Lenny Kravitz, L.L. Cool J., Tom Petty and Sean Lennon came together to rework and then perform John Lennon's historic "Give Peace a Chance" at the United Nations (Sullivan).

While many other songs of the Vietnam era are redone, new socially-conscious songs of the modern era are also being created. U2, for example, protests the conflicts of Northern Ireland in "Sunday Bloody Sunday," the Clash criticizes American interventionism in "Washington Bullets" and Jackson Brown mourns the fates of Nicaragua and El Salvador in "Lives in the Balance." Singers like ex-Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters and Randy Newman also continue to create music pertaining to the struggles of our modern world. Bruce Springsteen is another figure who has done the same through his 1995 hit, "Born in the U.S.A." (Sullivan).

Since I was ten years old, I have know the words to songs like Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." and Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." I would sit in that back seat of our station wagon, with its fake wood peeling off the outsides and coffees stains embedded in the seats, and sing along for hours. "How many road must a man walk down?

...Dad can you turn it up please?" I would yell. And he would laugh as he probably thought back to the first time he heard the song. Such different worlds the two of us lived in when I was very young. The times are always changing, though, and they change more quickly than one might think.

Today, at eighteen, I find myself in a similar position to the one my dad must have been in just under thirty years ago. Both smart, young kids on the brink of our college experiences; both thrown into a world that is often far from the ideal; both trying to figure out where we fit into the big picture, my dad and I do not seem so different anymore. Whether the struggles we face are those of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War or those of radical terrorism and the anthrax virus, the same questions apply.

Bob Dylan asks, "How many times can cannonballs fly, before they're forever banned? …How many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?" (bobdylan.com). No matter what era we live in, the same music that united an entire generation of Americans during the Vietnam War can be applied as we face and are changed by the struggles we live through. Some things might simply never change, and maybe the answers to those timeless questions of justice and peace asked by Bob Dylan and so many others will forever be "blowing in the wind."

Works Cited

Armstrong, Muriah. "Fortunate Son (J.C. Fogerty)." 12 Nov. 2001. http://clps.k12.mi.us/stwork/history/muriahly.html.

Bobdylan.com. 15 Nov. 2001. http://bobdylan.com/songs/blowin.html

Denisoff, R. Serge. " ˜You Know Something's Happening, But You Don't Know What It is Do You Mister Jones?'" Sing a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. 190-8.

Hillstrom, Kevin and Laurie Collier Hillstrom. The Vietnam Experience, A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Lonergan, William. Telephone Interview. 10 Nov. 2001.

Loss, Archie. Pop Dreams. “ Music, Movies and the Media in the 1960s. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.

Pacific Northwest, Blues in the Schools. 7 Nov. 2001. http://bluesintheschools.org/history.html.

Petillo, Carol. Telephone Interview. 13 Nov. 2001.

Sullivan, Jim and Steve Morse. "Hell no, peace songs wont' go away." Editorial. Boston Globe (25 Jan. 1991): 43.

Vassallo, Joseph Anthony. Telephone Interview. 6 Nov. 2001.

"Voice of America; At 60, Bob Dylan is still his generation's troubadour." Editorial. Pittsburgh-Post Gazette (23 May 2001): A-24.

Walsh, Jim. "Vietnam gave birth to protest song." Times Albany (Albany, New York) (29 Apr. 2000): D7.