Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War This concept of intimate involvement reached new heights in May 1968 when the "Composers and Musicians for Peace" concert was staged in New York. As the war continued, and with the new media coverage, the movement snowballed and popular music reflected this. As early as the summer of 1965, music-based protest against the American involvement in Southeast Asia began with works like P. F. Sloan's folk rock song "Eve of Destruction", recorded by Barry McGuire as one of the earliest musical protests against the Vietnam War. A key figure on the rock end of the antiwar spectrum was Jimi Hendrix
Protest songs in the United States they in fact pre-date. For example, "Masters of War" (1963) which protests against governments who orchestrate war, is sometimes misconstrued as dealing directly with the Vietnam War. However, the song was written at the beginning of 1963, when only a few hundred Green Berets were stationed in South Vietnam and came to be re-appropriated as a comment on Vietnam in 1965, when US planes bombed North Vietnam for the first time, with lines such as "you that build the death planes" seeming particularly prophetic. In contrast to other topical singers of the day, Dylan never mentioned Vietnam by name in