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CHAPTER
18
I
f a single factor may be said to dominate the ethos of the 1960s in the United
States, that would be the challenge—from African Americans and from a
younger generation, among others—to fi gures of authority: political fi gures,
business leaders, the military, the clerg y, teachers, parents, and the institutions
they represented. The civil rights struggle of the 1950s continued into the new
decade, winning a major victory with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended
segregation in the public schools and outlawed discrimination on the basis of
race or gender. But the growing confl ict in Southeast Asia and the U.S. govern-
ment’s decision to fi ght a war in Vietnam meant an increased military draft
that changed the lives of a whole generation of younger people, prompting an
upheaval within society. Familiar values of the Western world also came under
attack, triggering the exploration of non-Western ideas and musical styles.
The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and
Robert Kennedy also contributed to the sense that the world was being turned
upside down. These developments intensifi ed the “generation gap” that fueled
not only the growing youth culture but also many of the musical currents of the
1960s and beyond.
Music in the 1960s refl ected the era’s social upheavals. Common to all three
musical spheres—classical, popular, and traditional—was a sense that the author-
ity of established boundaries was eroding. Since around 1960, in fact, the com-
monalities among the musical spheres have sometimes seemed to outweigh their
differences. For that reason, we have chosen from this point in our narrative to
proceed on a more or less decade-by-decade basis, tracing trends that are often
shared by classical, popular, and folk music. A s this chapter shows, jazz, classical,
rock, country, and soul music in the 1960s, as different as they may sound, all
refl ect in one way or another the tumultuous society in which they fl ourished.America’s Music in the 1960s
QUESTIONING
AUTHORIT Y
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