But then one day my Uncle Sam

Said, (three knocks) here I am.

Uncle Sam need you, boy--

I'm gonna cut your hair off.

Take this rifle, Gimme that guitar.

But the singers of the country realize that success means more than prestige and crass material gains. They catch the intellectual rewards of education and the higher things of life with an apotheosis of the Academic, a song which is titled after the symbolic intellectual of today's campuses, "Charlie Brown." It begins,

Fie, fie, fy, fy, fo, fo, fum.

I smell smoke in the auditorium.

Set contrapuntally against this is the inner lament of the thinker, persecuted because of his mental superiority: "Why is everybody always pickin' on me?" Even the intellectual, while inwardly tortured, must maintain a stoic facade, however; and the song offers an austere ethic:

Walks in the classroom, cool and slow;

Who calls the English teacher Daddy-o?

Of course, the American is chiefly concerned in his search with resolving the tension between the imperious demands of his body and the restrictions of society. As in all true epics the goal of the quest is right love, and the Rock 'n' Roller searches for this highest of human expressions. Jimmy Reed shows the semi-existential predicament:

Well my fingers start 'o bopping

And my knees started knockin.'

I'm gonna find my baby