"Simple Song of Freedom" - 1969 Tim Hardin & Bobby Darin
Fascinating read. Tim Hardin/Bobby Darin & Simple Song of Freedom
https://vancouversignaturesounds.com/hits/simple-song-freedom-tim-hardin/
SNIP
Numbers of other songs on the radio in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, like “Simple Song Of Freedom”, protested racial prejudice.
These include “Skip A Rope” by Henson Cargill, about children repeating racist ideas passed on by their parents while skipping rope.
One song by Bob Dylan was “The Ballad of Emmett Till.”
He sang it live on the radio in 1962, but it wasn’t recorded on the album Broadside Ballads, Volume 6, until 1972 under Dylan’s pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt.
The song concerned a 14-year-old African-American boy who moved from Chicago to Money, Mississippi, in 1955. He went to a grocery store and was alleged to have flirted with a white women who was at the check-out counter. For his indiscretion, Emmett Till was abducted, beat and mutilated by members the Ku Klux Klan before he was shot and his dead body was sunk into the Tallahatchie River. Gordon Lightfoot’s “Black Day In July” recounted the riots in Detroit in July 1967. And Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come“, became a Civil Rights anthem in 1965.
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While other songs, like “Simple Song Of Freedom,” protested militarism and the Vietnam War. Among these were “Brain Washed” by David Clayton-Thomas and The Bossmen. The song’s criticism of the Vietnam War got it banned from most of the airwaves in the USA.
Meanwhile, The Bells sang a song inviting a universal message of peace in “Fly Little White Dove Fly“. Gordon Lightfoot’s “Summer Side Of Life” explored the cost of a young man going off to war (“And if you saw him now/You’d wonder why he would cry/The whole day long”). “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival criticized wealthy sons being able to avoid the Draft. Among the bigger protest songs on the pop charts were “Eve Of Destruction” by Barry McGuire, “Blowin’ In The Wind” by Peter, Paul And Mary (and later Stevie Wonder), “Ohio,” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “For What It’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield, “Imagine” by John Lennon, “If I Had A Hammer” by Peter, Paul And Mary, “Crystal Blue Persuasion” and “Sweet Cherry Wine” both by Tommy James And The Shondells, “Universal Soldier” by Buffy Sainte-Marie and “Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds.
At the end of 1980 Hardin died from heroin overdose and was found in his Hollywood apartment. Since his death a dozen record compilations have featured original material from his first ten albums along with material not previously released.
