How Far Have We Come

Annotation — Peace, Protest, & Anti-War Songs

A collection of 12 anti-war songs (Crisis Records # LP-001) from 1967 written and performed by Bill Frederick aka Fred Stanton, from Philadelphia. The songs are strongly focused on attacking Lyndon B. Johnson. Frederick, well-known on the New York folk scene in the 1960s, had 12 songs published in Broadside magazine.1 The title song, "Hey, Hey LBJ", repeated the famous chant popular at anti-war demonstrations throughout the mid-1960s: "how many kids did you kill today?". Frederick went on to implicate several American companies that supplied the US government with materials used in Vietnam: "LBJ goes all the way with Dow, GM, and Boeing" - Dow refers to Dow Chemical, which produced napalm and agent orange. Sources1Index of Songs by Author 1-144, part 1↩

Annotation by Justin A. Brummer

Notes

Crisis Records, 1610 Wandering Drive, Monterey Park, Calif.; front cover titled "Hey, Hey... LBJ! and other Songs of the U.S. Antiwar Movement sung by Bill Frederick" over a photograph of a large antiwar march with banners reading "Bring the Troops Home" and "Jobs, Homes, Schools – War No More". The back cover, headed "Comes Along Bill Frederick Declaring Peace on War" ("This is a Sing-In! This is a Wry Eye on the Number One Guy"), carries two photographs of Frederick with guitar and sleeve notes signed Joyce Ann Miller with a short paragraph on each song: "Ship Ahoy" grew from a heckler's question at an anti-war demonstration; "Empty" is an interview with an individual Vietnamese citizen; "The Dean Rusk Song" quotes the New York Times of 26 January 1966; "Hitler Ain't Dead" arose from the Dominican crisis; "Just Another Day" from student demonstrations against germ-warfare research at…

About the artist

Folk singer prominent on the New York folk scene in the 1960s; performed at antiwar demonstrations and released the LP Hey, Hey... LBJ! And Other Songs of the U.S. Antiwar Movement (1967). [Source: Journal of Texas Music History (VWSP article); History Today; Discogs] The sleeve notes to his LP describe him as a twenty-four-year-old Philadelphian with a physics degree, working toward a Ph.D. in molecular biology and performing at teach-ins, rallies and coffee houses on the Eastern Seaboard.

Themes

Anti-War

In collections

Peace, Protest, & Anti-War Songs [War Years]