This dissertation represents an effort to discover and explain relationships between American-British popular song and the rhetoric of social conflict during a recent historical period. Its purpose was to investigate the use of rock songs to communicate messages of social criticism and protest. The tools employed in the investigation were those of historical research--chiefly the methods of biography and political history--and those of rhetorical theory and criticism. Part One contains a history of rock from its traditional beginnings to the recent past, focusing primarily on songs and social conflict rhetoric between 1965 and 1970. In Part Two, attention is turned toward traditional and contemporary theories of rhetoric in a critical effort to explain the discursive and suasory aspects of song during the period. Since literally hundreds of songs and singers addressed issues which engendered social conflict, the scope of the study was necessarily selective. A close historical link was found between the rhetoric of social movements which protested racial inequality and American military intervention in Vietnam and the songs of such artists as Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, and many others. Artists and songs commonly went beyond the traditional place of popular music as primarily an entertainment medium into the realm of advocacy concerning social issues and policy. The application in Part Two of rhetorical theories and criticism to the social conflict songs of the sixties revealed several interesting aspects of song rhetoric. Songs advocating social change have been recognized as potential threats to established social order at least since Plato's time. However, the stunning growth of mass communication media has greatly increased the abilities of singers to reach national and international audiences. Songs about social conflict appear in all of the three traditional rhetorical contexts--the judicial, the legislative, and the ceremonial. According to classical and modern definitions and theories, from Aristotle to the present, it is clear that songs can and do function as persuasive forms of communication. Songs are an important means of building unity and identification between singer and audience with regard to whatever issues, facts, policies, and values an artist chooses to address in song. Among the most important rhetorical images used by both singers and agitators to express discontent is their common identification with heroic outlaws in the tradition of Robin Hood and Jesse James. Songs in praise of outlaws as champions of the poor and oppressed symbolize the essential impulse to revolution. Moreover, the betrayed outlaw as victim and martyr to the cause of social justice serves as a metaphor that illuminates one fundamental process of social conflict and change--that is, the redemption and rebirth of society as the result of a ritual sacrifice of symbolic victims. This rhetoric of heroic outlawry, of self-sacrifice aimed at overthrowing the tyrannical authority of an unjust order, often appeared in the songs of the late sixties. As a rhetoric of protest, such songs conform to theories of social relations and symbolic action advanced by Kenneth Burke and Hugh Duncan. Social conflict rhetoric generated apocalyptic visions of death and renewal; song rhetoric in the late sixties gave expressive, artistic form to such visions in a unique and potent way.