It also attacked South Vietnam’s Catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem for his one family rule and suppression of the majority Buddhist population: ‘families that slay together, stay together’. ‘Talkin Vietnam’ by Phil Ochs criticised the government for ‘training a million Vietnamese, to fight for the wrong government, and the American way’. One of the earliest notable protest songs of the JFK-era was published in the New York folk magazine Broadside on 20 September 1963, two months before Kennedy’s assassination. Playlists of the songs mentioned in each section are placed throughout the article. Fewer than 80 American deaths were recorded between 19, compared to over 16,000 in 1968 alone. Kennedy’, with an unambiguous message to the president: ‘I don’t want to go’. In 1962, the Californian folk duo Goldcoast Singers released ‘Please Mr. Most Vietnam songs released during Kennedy’s presidency articulated a reluctance to be drafted. In the war’s early stages, protest songs voiced the concerns of a minority movement. With the US divided between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, music became a powerful communication tool for both sides. Fifty years on, more than 5,000 songs have been recorded about the war, forming an international conversation about a conflict that tore apart the fabric of politics, society and culture. As the magazine revealed, well over 100 Vietnam records had been released since that January alone. But, as Billboard magazine reported on 4 June 1966, ‘few conflicts have evoked such a spate of musical production’. Vietnam has been called ‘the First Television War’. By the end of the 1960s, this enigmatic country would become the most controversial issue facing the US, dividing society, debated in Congress, demonstrated for and against on the streets – and documented in song. Kennedy, the US had 3,205 military personnel stationed in Vietnam. Where is Viet-Nam’. In the song, Lil Gary Dee, a ‘little boy not yet four years old’, asks:īy December 1961, under President John F. In the early 1970s, an obscure Louisiana-based country singer called Bob Necaise released ‘Mr.
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