Songs of America by Jon Meacham & Tim McGraw

Author:Jon Meacham & Tim McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

“The Ballad of the Green Berets” was the No. 1 song in America in 1966.

* * *

—

RESTORATION AND REDEMPTION would take more than Joe DiMaggio, who was name-checked in Simon and Garfunkel’s hit. “I look over this campus, and I don’t see many black faces,” Robert Kennedy told students in Omaha during the intense RFK presidential campaign that ended when Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. “What you want is for the poor boy to fight this war, the boy whose parents haven’t the money to send him to college…I don’t think that’s acceptable.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival wrote a song, “Fortunate Son,” which lamented what Kennedy had been talking about: the ability of the rich and the well connected to elude military service. The song was “a confrontation between me and Richard Nixon,” CCR’s John Fogerty recalled. “The haves, the people who have it all…During the Vietnam War, these were the people who didn’t have to go to war. I was thinking about David Eisenhower, the grandson of Dwight, who married Julie Nixon.”

Pete Seeger was even more direct in “Bring Them Home,” and, in 1967, he’d released the anti-war “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which implicitly took on President Johnson’s leadership. In the lyrics, Seeger evoked 1942 and a “big fool” of a commanding officer who insists, stupidly, that a platoon cross an uncrossable river—and the commander refuses to recognize reality no matter how bad things get. “It got the most explosive approval of any song I have ever sung,” Seeger recalled, and CBS cut it from a taped appearance of Seeger on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. (The network later caved and allowed the song to be broadcast; only the CBS affiliate in Detroit refused to air it altogether.)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.