During the 1960s, country musicians opted for a new, sophisticated approach to the vocal presentation and instrumental arrangement of country music.

During the second half of the 1960s, the popular music favored by many young Americans took on a harder-edged, more emphatic tone.

African American soul musicians reemphasized the gritty, down-to-earth side of rhythm & blues and made its political dimensions more explicit.

A new generation of musicians—raised on a diet of blues, R&B, urban folk music, and rock ’n’ roll—helped create rock, the loud, unruly, and increasingly profitable child of the music pioneered by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and others in the 1950s.