This is the first of a multi part exploration of protest music in America during the late 1960s, beginning with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio, written to mourn the killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio, in May 1970. By the late 1960s, the pressure of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement had led to a progressive radicalisation of the new left and also a reactionary backlash from America’s lower middle classes, who flocked to Nixon in 1968 and his promise to restore order to a seemingly anarchic country.

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