Most of these songs are quite topical on current events and wind up being rather ephemeral. Recall if you will how Vaughn Meader’s career wound up in the toilet after 22 November 1963.

In their hey-day, Peter, Paul, and Mary were reviled and despised by the ‘establishment’ and even made Nixon’s enemy list. Their works were certainly not ‘in your face’ protest songs. The messages were far more subtle, but clearly there to anyone who cared to think for a moment. Their major ‘crime’ was that their songs became popular enough to make the charts, get air play, and (Oh my God!) be sung by schoolchildren during music class.

Despite all of the controversy over them back in the 1960s, now some people’s grandparents can’t wait for one of their PBS specials to be aired again during pledge week.

While it might be a polarizing controversy now, in ten years this song will be looked at as a ‘cultural reflection of current of events of the day.” Woody Guthrie’s “This Land” was originally written as a protest song during the depression in the 1930s. Somehow it has morphed into something that now gets labelled as ‘Patriotic Songs.’ It then got another new life by the jibjab.com flap during the 2004 US Elections.

Strange things can happen over the years. If you’d told someone in 1985 that Arnold Schwartzenegger would be Governor of California someday, they probably would have wet their pants laughing.

–WRU