Woodstock

During the 1950s, Top Twenty music hits shifted from the romantic crooning ballads of Pat Boone and Paul Anka to the sometimes controversial rock-and-roll contortions of the Memphis native Elvis Presley. The 1960s saw further significant changes. The change took place in 1964 and 1965, when baseball stadiums were packed with near-hysterical, mostly teenaged audiences cheering on a totally different type of musical ensemble in the form of a British musical invasion, headed up by the pop rock sounds of the boyish Beatles and the pounding, appealingly unwholesome hard rock of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. When The Ed Sullivan Show shared the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan with a vast coast-to-coast television audience, there was a palpable reorientation of youth values and what young people sought in music. Millions of young Americans wanted new heroes, who and dressed and thought and behaved in totally new ways.