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.
Eve of Destruction (song) for inventing nicknames for sports figures, and often bringing song titles into the play on words, dubbed slugger Mark McGwire as "Mark 'Eve of Destruction' McGwire". The indie rock group Bishop Allen performs a version of "Eve of Destruction" borrowing heavily from the original, but with an even more sharply apocalyptic theme. It includes the lyrics "And if this moment is gone in a flash/And my hand in yours becomes ash in ash", followed in the next verse by an imagining of rejection from Heaven: "Then we'll have a dance, yeah a dance, on the head of a pin/Then God