Protest music helps people realize they aren’t alone. Many folk musicians wrote about their disapproval to America’s involvement during the Vietnam War. A highly influential folk musician was Bob Dylan. He wrote the song “The Times They Are A-Changin.” In this song, he says “there’s a battle outside, and it’s ragin’, it’ll soon shake your windows, rattle your walls.” One can argue that these lyrics were an obvious reference to the Vietnam War.
“Edwin Starr’s Motown anthem “War” convinced many listeners of the complex horrors of the Vietnam War through an instantly-recognizable melody. The song, written in 1969, is perhaps the most direct anti-war protest song ever recorded” (Hopkins, 2012). Hopkins and many other musicians from the era made music to attract audiences against …show more content…
“The soldiers made the music a language of the war. To them, ‘rock and roll’ meant an M-16 on full automatic” (Fink, p.184). The soldiers learned to make a language of their own of the protest music. “It was more common to set new lyrics to the already existing folk, country, or popular tunes. Most of the songs, however, were actually a part of the traditional military folklore of earlier wars: World War I and II, the Korean War, and even RAF and British Army songs” (Fink, p.184). The musicians took original songs and added lyrics, took out lyrics, and changed things around so the songs could be original. Although it was common to make the music from already existing songs, some of the folk songs from the era were created especially for Vietnam and the words and music was all original. There were traditional themes of the military folk songs: “praise of the great leader, celebration of heroic deeds, laments for the deaths of comrades, and complaints about incompetent officers” (Fink, p. 184). However, civilians that served in Vietnam made their own