Don't Stop Thinking About the Music by Schoening Benjamin S.;Kasper Eric T.; & Eric T. Kasper

Author:Schoening, Benjamin S.;Kasper, Eric T.; & Eric T. Kasper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739172995
Publisher: Lexington Books

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Campaign Music Transitions to the Pop Era (1972-1984)

This chapter explains how presidential campaign music underwent a transformation, largely in the 1970s and early 1980s.Prior to this era, almost all music used by campaigns fit neatly into two different categories.First, there existed music that was sung at campaign events which was written for the candidates by popular songwriters and other composers.These songs were crafted specifically with the candidates in mind, and their lyrics referred to the candidates and their issues.Second, there were songs used on radio and television.In the 1950s and early 1960s, these songs were similar to the music written for the campaign trail, but by the late 1960s, music on these mediums began evolving into instrumental background pieces.In the 1970s and 1980s, use of music on the campaign trail would change as well.The emerging trend was to simply adopt, word-for-word and lyric-for-lyric, entire pop songs for use on the campaign.By 1984, this transition was complete, with the use of pop songs being the dominant method of campaign music use.

The movement of campaign music to the uses we are accustomed to seeing in the modern election cycles was underway long before the elections of the 1970s and early 1980s, however.To varying degrees, popular music has been used in presidential campaigns since George Washington through the use of the parody song.Recall chapter one, which discussed “God Save Great Washington,” a song set to the tune of “God Save the King.” This song was certainly known at the time, but considering the recently fought Revolutionary War, one could argue just how popular the song actually was at the time.These parodied songs, which set new text to popular or well-known tunes of the day, were sung over and over again throughout both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in presidential campaigns.This raises an interesting question: what transitional force moved candidates from using these parodied songs to simply using the popular song itself as the campaign music?Like many things, this transition did not occur over night.Instead, it slowly began as a trickle with elections earlier in the twentieth century, eventually progressing into the flood of popular music we see in U.S. presidential campaigns from the 1980s to the present.

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