Chris Connelly remembers watching an hourlong Up with People special on TV when he was a grade schooler in the mid-1960s.
His family bought the record.
All these years later, the former MTV reporter who currently works as a journalist for ABC and ESPN can still recite the lyrics that served as a sort of moral compass for young America.
"You can't live crooked and think straight. ...
Clean up the nation before it's too late."
"And that tells you what Up with People was at that juncture," Connelly says. "They were this heavily corporate-backed singing group that was terrified of rock and roll, that was terrified of the counterculture, the burgeoning counterculture of the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
"So they tried to use what looked like folk music in the manner of the Kingston Trio or something like that to send very different messages into popular culture."
Up with People was an offshoot of Moral Re-Armament, an international ideology focused on the tenets of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. In the 1940s, MRA and its followers were believed to be effective in fighting off communism, and later were considered a counter to the hippies, offering a squeaky-clean, Christian conservative view that was perceived by some as fascism.
J. Blanton Belk founded Up with People in 1965. His daughter, Jenny Belk, was part of the 1986 halftime show. She acknowledges that the earlier iteration carried a cultlike stigma. But she says Up with People actually was formed by something very Dylanesque: a hootenanny.
In the summer of 1965, college students throughout the country were concerned about the Vietnam War and what was happening throughout the world.
"So they had a conference in Michigan and they said, 'Come with your ideas. What do you want to say?'" Belk says. "You know, non-violence is the best way to protest.
"They came together, they sang songs, one of which was 'Up with People.' And there were songs about peace and racial equality and all that stuff that is so important today."
Belk says her father, who turns 101 this month, felt as if Moral Re-Armament had become stuck in its ways, and was judgmental and "stuffy." J. Blanton Belk wanted a younger and more positive view of the world. In 1968, Up with People became a 501(c) nonprofit organization.
Large groups of young people between age 18 and 25 traveled the world performing musical shows and doing community service. Up with People members met with world leaders and popes and traveled to China and Berlin. They paid tuition for the yearlong experience and stayed with host families.
They headlined their first Super Bowl halftime in 1976, celebrating America's bicentennial.