POPULAR SONG ASSIGNMENT
SONG FILE/LINK AND PARAGRAPH DUE: APRIL 26
For this assignment, you will need to select a song performed and recorded between January 1, 1960 and December 31, 1972. The term "popular song" does not refer to amount of sales or place on the Billboard charts but to the type of song. The dictionary defines it as "appealing to the popular taste, including rock and pop and also soul, country, reggae, rap, and dance music."
The term excludes what is usually called "classicar music. So, do not worry about whether the song you choose made it to the Top 100 on the Billboard charts and such.
The song you choose must relate to the history we have been studying in this course. You will write a one-paragraph answer to this question:
How does the song you have chosen reflect the ideas, opinions, and writings of people involved in the movements we have been studying?
These are the civil rights, black power, anti-Vietnam War, counterculture, and feminist movements. Your paragraph should start with a topic sentence that summarizes your judgment about how the song reflects one or more of these movements. The rest of the paragraph needs to discuss specific words or ideas in the song's lyrics that relate to one or more of the movements. In this assignment, you may include quotations, but they must come from the song only. Commonly historians only quote sources when they want to discuss the words or phrases that an author uses, so it is appropriate for this assignment to quote from the song. Otherwise, you are to write the rest of the paragraph entirely in your own words. Your paragraph must be at least five sentences in length, including the topic sentence. Please remember to:
• Put your name at the top of your paper
• Type your paper double-spaced
• Mention the title of the song and the performer (an individual or a group) in a title at the top of the paper or in the body of the paragraph.