VERY INTERESTING: SOME OF THE SONGS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

SOME OF THE SONGS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

1953: Crazy Man, Crazy – Bill Haley & His Comets

Rock and roll had been fermenting underneath the culture for twenty years, and even some of the mainstream big bands of the Forties dipped their toes into the music but rock and roll was still considered outrageous and dangerous to mainstream America in the early 1950s. You have probably been convinced that Rock Around the Clock was the first ‘official’ rock and roll song but Crazy Man, Crazy predated that song by almost two years. Rock Around the Clock was the first rock and roll song to be featured in a movie (1955’s Blackboard Jungle), but this is the one that started it all.

1962: Blowin’ In the Wind – Bob Dylan

Was it a protest song? A philosophical exercise in rhetoric? An anti-Vietnam War song? The anthem of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement? Here’s Dylan’s own words on the song: 

There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind – and it’s blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that. 

I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some. But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know . . . and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many. You people over 21, you’re older and smarter. 

This song has been copied in its theme so many times that without we would have had to find another song to inspire anthems of protest and disillusionment. 

1964: A Change Is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke

A Change Is Gonna Come has been covered countless times since its original release after Cooke’s death in 1964. A beautiful song about personal and cultural struggle, the song became the de facto anthem of the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1960s and is still a call to hope and decency today. A stark departure from Cooke’s previous pop-music musings, it was written after a series of events in Cooke’s life culminating in his entourage being turned away from a motel in Louisiana because of their race. Cooke also stated that he was inspired to write A Change Is Gonna Come after hearing Dylan’s Blowin’ In the Wind.

1964: I Wanna Hold Your Hand – The Beatles

In 1964 America, stuck in the doldrums of corporate bubble-gum rock and roll, recovering from Kennedy’s assassination, reeling from the dystopian future the Cold War was raining down on the baby Boom generation, and something had to give. A harbinger of the most disruptive musical force in history, this performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 changed everything – the culture, the music, the politics of the 1960s and every single decade that followed – literally overnight. Other songs may have had a greater impact but no one would have likely heard them without I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

1966: For What It’s Worth – Buffalo Springfield

Before the counter-culture took hold of the actual culture in 1967, Stephen Stills wrote this song about the Sunset Strip riots in 1966 that pitted the burgeoning teenaged counter-culturists against the police over what was basically the city cracking down on late night traffic and noise from the local music clubs. Stills could not have imagined when he wrote it that it would become an anti-war, anti-‘Man’ anthem from the Summer of Love onward.