Protest songs in the United States Tom Paxton ("Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" - about the escalation of the war in Vietnam, "Jimmy Newman" – the story of a dying soldier, and "My Son John" – about a soldier who returns from war unable to describe what he's been through), among others. The first protest song to reach number one in the United States was P.F. Sloan's "Eve Of Destruction", performed by Barry McGuire in 1965. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s often used Negro spirituals as a source of protest, changing the religious lyrics to suit the political mood of the time.
Protest song War" (which contains the lines "I hope that you die / And your death'll come soon") and "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, in "Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Tradition in the Twentieth Century" (1998), take issue with what they consider Denisoff's reductive approach to the history and function of song (and particularly traditional song) in social movements. They point out that Denisoff had paid little attention to the song tunes of protest music, considered them strictly subordinate to the texts, a means to the message. It is true that in the highly text-oriented western