Heh. Kate calls me out here, in the thread linking to the “Take me back to the Sixties” thread - and the link was indeed amusing. Then again, I was born in 1967 (summer of love!), so I don’t remember the sixties.

But I’ve obviously got a fondness for the music of the era, anyway, and I’m fascinated by the history - not necesssarily the small consumer stuff (Corvairs!) but by the fact that American society was nearly torn apart during the ’60s - and we’re still fighting those culture wars now.

A decade of protest, opening with the Civil Rights movement, ending with Vietnam. I’m still amazed when I watch those old Civil Rights videos - there used to be a great PBS series called “Eyes of the Prize” which was a tremendous overview of the era but for various reasons it never came out on DVD. I remember sitting and watching every episode, though, and wondering how Americans could have sat in their living rooms and watched - permitted - those Birmingham cops to loose their police dogs, their fire hoses, on those peaceful protestors. The beat-downs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge - we know now that these were the things that actually brought about change in this country. But I can’t watch them now without becoming enraged.

But of course, not all the changes in American society were as noble as this. We’re still debating aspects of the sexual revolution, for instance. You can make a case that the rise of divorce has had a devastating effect on American families. Nostalgists want to look back at this era - or the era before this era - and think of it as some sort of golden time, when all was well in the world. But of course that’s nonsense too. The people then thought things were coming apart, just as we do now; the concerns were different, but the concerns are always there. Kids in the ’50s wore their “dungarees” and you worried about “juvenile delinquency.” Every decade has its version of this. Some - as in the sixties - are more colorful than others.

So let’s make it Sixties Saturday - and kick off something I heard in the car today, and this was actually the title of a book about the era, written a while back. Innocent like we think we were before the culture wars took hold. The optimistic take on the sixties, if you will - and a whole lot of fun to play on the acoustic guitar, to boot.