The Cowsills In Magazines





Music of May 4th
Spring/Summer 2020
Kent State Magazine


Among the many programs that were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic was "The Music of May 4th," which was to have been presented by two professors at Kent State University at Ashtabula (KSUA).

Bradley Keefer, BA '80, MA '84, PhD '06, associate professor of history, is one of seven members of the Kent State community who received a Public Education and Awareness Award in 2018 from the Ohio History Connection's State Historic Preservation Office for their efforts to preserve the history and site of May 4.

David Perusek, BGS '75, MA '89, PhD, associate professor of anthropology, is chair of the Kent State Ashtabula Campus May 4th Commemoration Committee. He also was part of a group of people from which the May 4th Task Force emerged in 1975, was involved in the gym annex protests in 1977, and has served on the board of the Kent May 4th Center since shortly after its inception in 1989.

For his part of the music presentation, Keefer says, "my task was to ask whether what we remember about the music of the counterculture actually fit with the music most people were listening to. I assembled examples of the types of music - bubble-gum pop, psychedelic/acid rock, flower power, jam bands, party/drug, and message tunes - and artists who were popular at the time, whether they were involved in the protest movement or not.

"It is fascinating to me that a 50s tribute band like Sha Na Na, an outspoken rock act like Jefferson Airplane, a soul/funk band like Sly and the Family Stone, and a pure blues diva like Janis Joplin could all play at Woodstock [in 1969], yet only Jefferson Airplane could claim any real activist credibility. Thus, my playlist was less focused than Dave's."

Perusek focused his presentation on the American tradition of protest songs. "Phil Ochs, a contemporary of Bob Dylan who wrote and performed with a sharper political edge and was, therefore, viewed as less marketable than Dylan, once observed that, 'A protest song is a song that's so specific that you cannot mistake it for BS,' " notes Perusek.

"And Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., commenting on protest songs of the civil rights movement, observed that those freedom songs as they were known, 'invigorate' and 'give unity to the movement in a most significant way.' That is also true of the songs on [my] playlist."

We asked them both to share their playlists with Kent State Magazine readers. Amy Thomas, director of the KSUA library and assistant professor of library science, and Dylan Tyler, senior library associate at the KSUA library, helped track down the names of albums in which the songs appeared, album covers, recording and release dates, and record labels.

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POPULAR SONGS (compiled by Bradley Keefer, PhD)

Cowsills

"Hair"
The Cowsills In Concert
Recorded: Not Available
LP Released: May 3, 1969, MGM



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