People are still talking about the legacy of the 1960s. For some, this was a golden age, the greatest decade in living memory, a time of political people-power, free expression, and free love; for others it was a pit of ill discipline and moral degradation. One thing is sure: ripples of the era’s influence continue to this day. Equally certainly, however one views the ’60s, everyone agrees that music played a major role in encoding and transmitting its cultural message. Using close readings, along with musical and video examples, this module will explore the music at the ‘sharp end’ of ’60s culture: the music that embodied its various messages and, for better or worse, immortalized them. On that account the emphasis is inevitably on folk and popular music, though we will also address concert music and jazz. By the end we will all at least have carefully considered, if not perhaps answered, the question as to whether there is such a thing as quintessentially ‘sixties music,’ and what, if anything, binds together its various manifestations.