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Music 262: Rock Music, History and Social Analysis, Folk Rock

[Music Playing on Piano]

[Brian Ward]: Folk rock is created from Dylan’s electric period and a lot of bands follow suit. It

creates this genre for these bands to be successful in. One of these bands was The Byrds. Now

The Byrds were really a great band of great musicians that came together. They had a distinctive

sound. What they would do is that they would synthesize the music of Bob Dylan and The

Beatles and they put those two things together and it was a very successful formula. They also

had a distinctive sound in the use of a 12-string guitar. Now 12 string guitar, most guitars have 6

strings. A 12-string guitar what it does is double each of those strings. You have the same note

doubled. It creates this chorus-ey kind of sound. It’s a real distinctive sound for rock n’ roll.

The Byrds really popularized the 12-string guitar sound in rock n’ roll music. All of these

members of the band come from a background of folk music except for one, the drummer. They

took Dylan’s composition, Mr. Tambourine Man in 1965 and made a big hit out of it. They

made their own version of it. It was more up-tempo and really fit the rock-radio folk rock

market. This is probably considered to be the first folk rock hit in the history of rock n’ roll. It

really solidified this 12-string guitar sound as a real thing and became a trademark sound of rock,

especially The Byrds. If you listen to the song, it’s got kind of the feel of Ticket to Ride so

here’s where you have this Ticket to Ride from The Beatles feeling of the song added with the

folk rock element of Bob Dylan’s lyrics and that’s where you get the music of The Byrds.

We also have another band that comes out of there and this is Buffalo Springfield. Now Buffalo

Springfield was represented by one of the great voices of folk rock, Stephen Stills. They had one

of the most representative sounds of the 1960s. So if you are watching about the Vietnam War

and you see the helicopters landing in the jungle and what you are going to hear is probably the

song, For What it’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield. Now this song was written by Stephen Stills

in the aftermath of the Sunset Riots in 1966 and 67. This song put Buffalo Springfield on the

map. This song is commonly labeled as a protest song. But what it really is is a song that’s

really in this folk tradition of singing the news. In folk music in America you have this tradition

of songs that really just kind of convey what is happening. Orally they spread the news about

current events through the countryside. This song takes on that form of singing the news type of

song. It’s really not a protest song. That label is pretty limited if you try to apply it to the song.

It’s viewed that way by most people. It’s built around this understated bluesy kind of acoustic

guitar riff. It has a real memorable chorus. The lyrics kind of don’t beat the listener over the

head. So it makes it so that the song became real popular among a lot of different people. In

fact, Public Enemy the hip hop group sampled Springfield’s version of the 1998 hit, He Got

Game.