The 1960s saw a real flowering of popular music styles. Unlike the 1950s, in which the birth of rock and roll dominated the decade, jazz, pop, and folk music all gathered devoted listeners in the 1960s. Rock and roll continued to grow as a musical form, with a clear split between "hard," rebellious rock and lighter, "soft" rock—which sounded a lot like pop music.

Folk music was reborn in the 1960s thanks to several young performers who wanted to rescue the musical form from what they saw as its sad decline. Bob Dylan (1941–), Joan Baez (1941–), and the group Peter, Paul, and Mary adopted folk styles—simple musical arrangements played on acoustic instruments—but filled them with political commentary on contemporary issues. Their songs addressed the problems of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Vietnam War (1954–75) and helped them...