Folk Rock from Silent Spring to the First Earth Day: A Year-by-Year Breakdown of the Top 40 Environmental Songs of the Sixties
A Timeline of Green Songs of the Sixties — And What it Reveals about Just When and How Fast the Times Were A-Changin’
(Part 15 of an eighteen-part series on Sixties folk rock and the rise of the modern environmental movement.)
What follows here is a year-by-year listing of my selected top 40 Earth-friendly folk rock songs at the dawn of the modern environmental movement — all the songs reviewed in parts 6–14 of this series. Specifically, my focus has been on songs that appeared from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. Tracking the songs year by year like this reveals the growing interest in environmental issues through the 1960s. The green and greenish songs were few in number at first. One 1962 song not included here — because it probably appeared early enough in the year that it would not likely reveal any influence from Silent Spring — is Malvina Reynolds’s “What Have They Done to the Rain?” From there, aside from a couple of songs from Bob Dylan, there is not much action until mid-decade. As was so often the case in matters regarding music of the Sixties, Dylan appeared to be on the leading edge of the move towards environmental consciousness. Again, in this regard, too, he was ahead of the curve, a harbinger of things to come.
In the mid-decade years, 1965–1967, evidence of environmental concerns making their way into the musical discourse begins to surface, with two to three songs per year. Then in 1968 and ’69, the interest is clearly accelerating, with six and eight songs appearing. Nineteen-seventy was something of an annus mirabilis when it comes to environmental songs, indicative of the energy that would lead to the nationwide “environmental teach-in” of the first Earth Day in April of that year. Almost half of the songs on my list, a nice round 20, come from 1970. (Again, there are actually 43 songs listed in all because of my weaselly four-way tie for #40.) I’ll leave it to another essay to sort out whether the songs followed the cultural milieu in giving environmentalism its due, or whether the songs played a formative role in the rise of the modern environmental movement — but without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that it’s a bit of both.
As you might expect, interest in environmentalism only increased after the first Earth Day, and there is a mighty impressive list of earthy songs that appeared in the year or two following. But that too will be fodder for another essay to come!
Here is the year-by-year breakdown:
1962 (1):
Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall”
1963 (1):
Dylan, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”
1964 (0)
1965 (2):
Mimi Baez and Richard Farina, “Swallow Song”
Tom Lehrer, “Pollution”
1966 (3):
Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going”
Fred Neil, “The Dolphins”
Pete Seeger, “My Dirty Stream”
1967 (3):
Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”
Gordon Lightfoot, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”
The Yardbirds, “Shape of Things”
1968 (6):
The Beatles, “Mother Nature’s Son”
Canned Heat, “Going Up the County”
Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”
The Incredible String Band, “Log Cabin Home in the Sky”
The Kinks, “Village Green Preservation Society”
Otis Redding, “Dock of the Bay”
1969 (8):
The Band, “King Harvest Has Surely Come”
The Beatles, “Here Comes the Sun”
Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Bad Moon Rising”
Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Green River”
Crosby Stills, Kanter, “Wooden Ships”
Nick Drake, “River Man”
Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), “Where Do the Children Play?”
Zager and Evans, “In the Year 2525”
1970 (20):
The Byrds, “Chestnut Mare” (written by Roger McGuinn and Jacques Levy)
The Byrds, “Hungry Planet”
Judy Collins, “Farewell to Tarwathie”
The Doors, “Ship of Fools”
George Harrison, “Beware of Darkness”
Iron Butterfly, “Slower than Guns”
The Kinks, “Apeman”
Don McLean, “Tapestry”
Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”
Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”
Van Morrison, “And It Stoned Me”
Tom Paxton, “Whose Garden Was This?”
Quicksilver Messenger Service, “Fresh Air”
Quicksilver Messenger Service, “What About Me?”
Spirit, “Nature’s Way”
Bill Steele, “Garbage”
James Taylor, “Sweet Baby James”
Three Dog Night, “Out in the Country” (written by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols)
Traffic, “John Barleycorn Must Die” (traditional)
Neil Young, “After the Gold Rush”
If the songs are any guide, then, you can see that “the ecology movement,” as it was then called, was gathering steam throughout the decade. It started out slow, but then we see a steady progression, culminating in a crescendo of environmental concern in 1970.
It’s not that there was no environmental movement before the Sixties. Aldo Leopold, hailed as the father of wildlife ecology and a key figure in wilderness conservation, had published A Sand County Almanac in 1949 (it actually came out a year after his death). Books like Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World, and Sigurd Olson’s The Singing Wilderness came out in the 1950s, and the first congressional acts addressing air and water pollution were passed in that decade. Environmental groups like the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the Sierra Club were growing in numbers and influence. But it was in the 1960s, after Carson’s Silent Spring, that the environmental movement became a topic of conversation and concern among the general public. Folk rock was both reflecting and driving those concerns, contributing to the conservation conversation and bringing it to the ears of everyone who was listening.
