Music, politics, and utopia in the late 1950s and 1960s
This study investigates how music intersected with US liberation movements during the late 1950s and 1960s—chiefly the civil rights movement, Black Power, the counterculture, and the New Left. A range of popular musics became entangled with these social forces. The analysis weighs three persistent tensions: political commitment versus aesthetic autonomy, collective action versus individualism, and existing political realities versus the utopian possibilities art can project. The central claim is that even when popular musics leaned toward autonomy and individualism, they still voiced a socially critical, oppositional utopian vision. The argument unfolds through case studies of the Highlander Folk School, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, and Frank Zappa.
Methodology
The study draws on existing sociological models of political music—work by Serge Denisoff, Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, and John Street—alongside critical theory, especially the writings of Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse. This second body of thought matters for several reasons. First, theorists like Marcuse, Adorno, and Bloch greatly influenced the 1960s counterculture (Adorno and Bloch held more sway in Europe than in the US). Engaging with critical theory thus connects to the intellectual superstructure of the era itself. More crucially, critical theory can grasp the indirect links between aesthetics and politics better than straightforward empirical analyses can.
This is important because many of the most radical musicians of the 1950s and 1960s were not personally part of any movement—nor could their music be said to be about those movements in any obvious sense. A critical-theory lens helps reveal the political dimensions of music that does not wear its politics on its sleeve. Methodologically, the study is as historical and sociological in orientation as it is musicological, and context is central to both the subject matter and the approach.
Historical, political, and conceptual contexts
From an aesthetic standpoint this period stands out because of the burst of experimental, socially critical popular music: the late 50s and 60s saw a folk revival, the emergence of free jazz, and adventurous rock. Politically, these years were marked by instability as class, gender, race, sexuality, age, and ideology became flashpoints for mass protests and campaigns.
Though they occupied the same historical moment, the civil rights movement and the counterculture were often at odds. In the southern states, African Americans had endured centuries of systematic, often brutal discrimination and were routinely denied basic civil liberties. The counterculture, by contrast, consisted mainly of white, educated, middle-class youth who—despite relative privilege—came to reject mainstream American values. Unsurprisingly, these differences shaped the priorities of each movement. Civil rights activists campaigned for tangible improvements to existing reality: desegregation, voting rights, equal pay, employment quotas. The counterculture tilted more toward intellectual and spiritual fulfillment, searching for alternate ways of living and sometimes pulling back from conventional politics altogether. Superficially the two movements seemed to share little ground. Yet political tensions within the civil rights struggle often drove young Black activists into coalition with the more idealistic fringes of the counterculture. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the white-led Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panther Party worked together on precisely this basis. Similarly, the idealism of the counterculture could frustrate young activists who wanted concrete political change, pulling some elements of the counterculture into the civil rights movement's orbit.
The relationships among different musics of the period were just as conflicted. Because folk music—both Black and white—was seen as tied to community and collective identity, it became a political tool for both civil rights and the counterculture. The Highlander Folk School is especially relevant here, as it helped place Black folk spirituals at the heart of the struggle for civil rights. In the mid-1960s, however, folk music in the Guthrie-Seeger tradition—which had enjoyed a revival since the 1950s—converged with rock, an idiom with roots in African American blues. This fusion prompted mixed reactions, largely because rock carried associations with individualism. Around the same time, both jazz and rock began absorbing traits of the avant-garde, moving toward increased musical autonomy. These tendencies appear across many folk, rock, and jazz musicians of the era, with particularly revealing examples in Bob Dylan, who took folk material into rock; John Coltrane, who pushed jazz from bebop toward an avant-garde aesthetic; and Frank Zappa, who drew omnivorously on a vast range of styles and genres.
To explore what constitutes political music, this study first reviews existing sociological perspectives that connect music to protest and political engagement. But beyond those relatively direct understandings of music and politics, attention is paid to how radical popular musics of the period also pulled toward individualism and autonomy. Long-standing debates in critical theory about the tension between politically committed music and autonomous music are therefore brought into play. This approach reveals how apparently apolitical music can be understood as political through the socially and politically mediated character of both musical material and the artist working on that material.
Applying critical theory to popular music raises methodological problems—not least Adorno’s well-known hostility to popular music—but figures such as Max Paddison argued that radical popular musics of the 1950s and 1960s, especially in jazz and rock, began to develop a critical relationship with their own material and to exhibit properties associated with the “work concept.” That is, they became artworks concerned primarily with internal processes, refusing any straightforward social function to the extent of resisting their own commodity status. According to David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, in this view “music achieves a certain aesthetic autonomy, the musical materials look to themselves (‘without looking outward’), but it is through this process that a resemblance to the real world reveals itself and not through any process of ‘imitating the world’.” The study adopts a broadly Marxian perspective that sees music—like the commodity—as the objectification of human labor, but one in which processes of fetishization conceal that human quality: “It [the commodity] is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”
Survey of the literature
Because this dissertation includes case studies on Dylan, Coltrane, and Zappa, a wide range of literature was consulted. Much of it is academic, supplemented by more journalistic sources that nonetheless raise significant questions. To situate the 1950s and 1960s within broader historical, political, and musical contexts, it was necessary to draw on various types of sources. The relevant literature falls into four categories: broad historical and political contexts of the period, work on music and politics, sources used to develop key concepts, and studies that treat the specific case studies.
For situating the 1950s and 1960s in their wider historical and cultural setting, Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 was invaluable. Its international scope was particularly helpful for framing the civil rights movement and counterculture within global anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles, as well as within the propaganda war between communist and capitalist powers—especially the US and the USSR. Since Hobsbawm focuses primarily on macro-forces, the study also draws on accounts that present history from the perspective of ordinary people. This matters because of the attention given to race and class as lived experiences. Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present also shaped this analysis. Their long historical sweep helps historicize twentieth-century issues and prevents categories such as race and class from becoming reified.
Understanding the political histories of civil rights and the counterculture requires some knowledge of nineteenth-century US history, especially the Transatlantic Slave Trade. African American political history is therefore central. Key studies include John W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, and George P. Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. These are particularly important because they were among the first to draw on the slave narratives collected by the 1930s Federal Writer’s Project, presenting enslavement from the perspective of those who endured it. Several works explicitly connect racial oppression in the nineteenth century to the oppression of the 1950s and 1960s. Vincent Harding’s The Other American Revolution and Manning Marable’s Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1982 both clarify the parallels and tensions between those two periods.
The history of the counterculture is considerably harder to trace because it lacked the shared identity forged by common racial oppression. To address this, the literature examines two divergent but related historical trajectories: the Old Left and its relationship with African American politics, and the history of American bohemianism, particularly as it centered on Greenwich Village. On the first trajectory, Philip S. Foner’s Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981 proved extremely useful because of its long scope and its weaving together of Black and white political histories. In the latter realm, John Strausbaugh’s The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues was consulted. Though more journalistic than academic, Strausbaugh’s book ranks among the more authoritative documents on the history of American bohemianism. Bernard Gendron’s Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde offers a more critical study of American bohemianism, especially regarding the countervailing tendencies of class and race.
The line between activists and academics was often blurred during the 1950s and 1960s: academics were frequently activists, and activists often published accounts that rivaled academic works in intellectual rigor. This creates both problems and opportunities for scholarship, because political commitments could take priority over academic integrity. Todd Gitlin—an activist in the 1960s who later became a sociology professor at Berkeley—is a particularly instructive example. In his widely-cited book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Gitlin frames the decade in terms of thoughtful activism that was eventually co-opted by mindless radicals—what Paul Buhle called the “good sixties, bad sixties” thesis.
A more reliable account of the 1960s appears in Maurice Isserman’s If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, which traces continuities and departures between 1960s radicalism and that of the American Communist Party. Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left also helps contextualize political developments of the late 1960s. The work of activists such as James Forman (The Making of Black Revolutionaries) and Max Elbaum (Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che) clarifies processes leading to the intensified radicalism at the end of the decade. Forman played a central role in SNCC and the formation of the Black Panther Party; Elbaum was a key figure in the New Communist Movement that emerged in the late 1960s.
Tracing the historical context for music in these movements has required a long view. For the civil rights movement, Freedom Songs are especially important. The analysis draws heavily on literature on slave spirituals: Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War and Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. To understand how slave spirituals functioned in the 1950s and 1960s, Joe Street’s The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement and William G. Roy’s Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States were also consulted.
Taken together, these different historical orientations help clarify both important differences and possible continuities between the periods. Much of this literature informs the understanding of the Highlander Folk School’s activities. Music of the 1960s has also been considered through its roots in the Old Left, especially via the folk legacy of Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. Central to any account of US folk music is the idea of folk authenticity, and debates about whether so-called “folk music”—used politically by the Left—was authentic.
The question of whether such "folk music" genuinely belongs to the people—or merely represents an idealist abstraction—remains contested. Much of this sociological writing draws on Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of Musicking, which frames music as an activity people do rather than a static object.
Regarding the counterculture, William G. Roy’s Reds, Whites, and Blues—a study contrasting participatory and performer-audience social relations—is central to this dissertation because of the weight it gives to the often-alienating effects of technological mediation. Beyond literature on "folk" ideas, I also consider radical popular musics of this period within existing frameworks of art and critical aesthetics. In doing so, I take cues from studies that view the 1960s as a time when popular music adopted certain critical functions traditionally associated with art, especially by evolving toward forms of aesthetic autonomy. Chief among these is Max Paddison’s (2010) essay "Postmodernism and the Survival of the Avant-Garde."
In examining the link between music and politics, this dissertation draws primarily on sociology and critical theory, supplemented by sources of a more popular character. Sociological studies, I argue, can be usefully grouped into three categories. The first concerns protest song; Serge Denisoff’s (1968) "Protest Movements: Class Consciousness and the Propaganda Song" is especially valuable. Because Denisoff also focuses on the 1960s, his work is relevant to this study in multiple respects. The second category deals more broadly with politically engaged music. Representative studies include Mark Mattern’s (1998) Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action and more popular works like Robin Denselow’s (1989) When the Music’s Over: The Story of Political Pop. Finally, there are studies arguing that all music is political simply by existing in a social context. This view appears in John Street’s (2011) Music and Politics, where he contends that "if musical pleasure and choice are purely private matters of personal consequence, they are not political."
Alongside these sociological approaches, I also draw on aesthetic studies that seek to restore a degree of "musical specificity" to the art object. In this I follow Lee Marshall’s (2011) essay "The Sociology of Popular Music, Interdisciplinarity and Aesthetic Autonomy," where he argues for a "materialist sociology of music." Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970), as well as Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1977), this study explores how music can be understood as political through the socially and politically mediated character of its material.
Conceptually, then, this dissertation builds on a mix of sociological and critical-theoretical understandings of music and politics, particularly through the tension between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy.
The arguments unfold across four case studies, each with its own literature (some obvious overlaps included). The Highlander chapter is examined through key historical works like John M. Glen’s (2014) Highlander: No Ordinary School 1932-1962. Fortunately, musical practices at Highlander have been well documented by movement activists, such as Guy and Candie Carawan’s (2007) Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Its Songs and Bernice Johnson Reagon’s (1975) doctoral dissertation "Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965: A Study in Culture History." The literature on Bob Dylan is considerably larger than that on Highlander, requiring very selective focus. Rather than relying on Dylan’s own autobiographies—prone to distortion—I draw on authoritative biographies such as Anthony Scaduto’s (1972) Bob Dylan and Paul Williams’s (1994) Bob Dylan, 1960-1973: Performing Artist (the first in a multivolume series). The main literature I engage with places Dylan’s rejection of collective political projects in the mid-1960s: Denisoff’s 1968 study and Mike Marqusee’s (2003) Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art are key.
The literature on John Coltrane differs substantially from the other case studies, heavily relying on primary sources that, while not academically reliable, provide rich insight into 1950s and 1960s race relations in the music industry. Interviews and articles from Downbeat, Jazz Hot, Jazz Magazine, and Melody Maker are cited, along with Chris DeVito’s (2010) compendium Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews. These debates often generated their own theoretical works, variously justifying or undermining conditions in the jazz industry. Frank Kofsky’s two books—Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz (1998) and John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s—are highly polemical and thus revealing of the political tensions of the era. Like Dylan, Zappa’s musical career extended well beyond the civil rights and counterculture period. This study confines itself to his 1960s musical activities. Unusually for a musician, Zappa discussed the technical aspects of his music at length; thus this study draws on his own critical reflections in The Real Frank Zappa Book (1990) as well as secondary sources. Important among the latter are James Borders’s (2001) "Form and the Concept Album: Aspects of Modernism in Frank Zappa’s Early Releases" and David Wragg’s (2001) "‘Or Any Art at All?’: Frank Zappa Meets Critical Theory."
Structure of Dissertation
This dissertation comprises five chapters and a short concluding section. Chapter 1 clarifies the concepts used throughout, examining literature on protest and politically engaged music. While situating itself within this work, the thesis goes beyond simple definition to address issues of social critique and critical reflection in music. I argue that existing studies tend to view music as political only when deployed in political contexts. Instead, this chapter proposes a materialist understanding of music—seeing it as an objective repository for human activity and thus political in its own right. In this light, even seemingly apolitical music can be understood as political. Following Adorno, Bloch, and Marcuse, I examine ideas of autonomy and utopia in music, arguing that by resisting subordination to political reality, critical musics negatively encode the possibility of happiness.
The second chapter serves as the first case study: the Highlander Folk School. It investigates the role of individual critique in constructing a collective musical material. Examining how Highlander activists refashioned Black historical music into a force for positive change in the civil rights movement, I argue that their success in placing collective musical material at the movement’s service came only by superficially overcoming important differences. Much of this chapter, therefore, focuses on how the Freedom Songs became repositories for reflexively critiquing tensions within the movement even as they suggested resolution. Taking an organization—not an individual—as its object of study, this chapter departs substantially from later ones. This choice reflects that Highlander activists deliberately downplayed the role of individuals in music production; that individual expression nonetheless became central to the songs makes it all the more significant.
The third chapter examines Dylan’s relationship with the counterculture. Like Highlander, Dylan’s music was perceived as powerfully political—but often against his own wishes. Central here is the way Dylan’s rejection of collective political projects coincided with a surge in his popularity. I argue that Dylan’s ability to draw on a stock of cultural images—both individualist in content and part of the collective American imagination—accounts for this apparent contradiction, a problem intimately tied to the loss of real individuality.
The fourth chapter turns to John Coltrane, an artist often associated with the Black Power movement who did not use his music for explicitly political statements. Drawing on jazz—historically a highly collective music—a technically demanding form (bebop) emerged during the 1940s. Coltrane developed this musical material, which on the surface was completely disengaged politically. Even amid the political conflicts of the 1960s, Coltrane continued immersing himself in the material. His music is examined as a form of autonomous art whose politics lie in its refusal to be subordinated to existing political realities. This chapter is thus committed to understanding the politics of apparently apolitical music, arguing that by mediating subjectivity within a collectively formed musical material, Coltrane’s work offers images of a critical utopia.
Chapter five explores the critical aesthetics of Frank Zappa. Although often understood within the context of 1960s psychedelia, Zappa’s music resists easy categorization due to its broad range of influences. Unlike Coltrane, Zappa was not only concerned with developing musical material but also with reconstituting the relationship between his music (as an aesthetic object) and his audience.
In discussing this, I draw on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, especially his critique of constitutive subjectivity. I argue that the locus of Zappa’s critical aesthetics lies in his rearrangement of the hierarchical subject-object relationship, one considered in relation to countercultural tendencies toward extremes of constitutive subjectivity and conformity.
This dissertation concludes with a short closing section. Although existing sociological literature reveals much about the relationship between music and politics, its tendency to dismiss the objective aesthetic features of music means the politics of some of the most radically individual works remain largely unaddressed—or addressed only when they are deployed in a political context. By contrast, I argue that even the most individualistic works of art should be considered political in themselves because of the socially mediated nature of musical material. This is especially important in the context of the 1950s and 1960s United States, where radical popular musics coincided with numerous liberation movements.