" (Garofalo 231).

             However, the Civil Rights movement really gained momentum in the mid-fifties when a black minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., began to form political alliances with secular organizations like the NAACP, CORE, and the SNCC. Almost concurrently, gospel music began to fuse with rhythm and blues and got the attention of the mass public.5 (Ibid.) And just as the regional civil rights struggle of the deep South began to evolve into a movement at the national level, rock 'n' roll music that had its roots in the R&B music of the deep South began to find a national audience. .

             It is also noticeable that the strategy of the early Civil Rights movement, led by King, was integrationist. Hence while the style, musical form, and tone of popular music in the US was changing dramatically to a genre called rock 'n' roll, the lyrics of the songs were not changing at the same pace. This is reflected in the songs of one of the first black rock 'n' roll artist, Chuck Berry. He sought to bring the black music to the white people without turning them off with lyrics about the racial inequality and the struggle of the black people against injustice. (Ibid. 234).

             The mantel of bringing civil rights issues into the lyrics of their songs would be taken up by the white folk singers in the sixties6.

             The Political Impact of Rock in the 1960s.

             The most famous of the "white folkies" was of course a young newcomer from a small town in Minnesota-the hugely talented but enigmatic Bob Dylan. His early output consisting mainly of protest songs such as "Oxford Town" (1962) and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" (1963), and despite Dylan's own reluctance to carry the burden of leadership, he was proclaimed as a "leader" of the Civil Rights Movement. At the historic Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963, Dylan performed his "Only a Pawn in Their Game," a song about the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.