the United States of America in 1967, Byrd provided an arrangement and electronic music for "Crucifixion" on Phil Ochs' album Pleasures of the Harbor. The song was taken to be a comment on the assassination of President Kennedy, but the version on the album, according to Unterberger, set Ochs' vocal against "an eerie morass of loops, electric harpsichord, and washes of electronic distortion, arranged by Joseph Byrd... [This] made him sound for all the world like a lone voice drowning in an avant-garde thunderstorm, which in the eyes of many fans obscured the terrible beauty of the song." Another critic, Mark Brend, describes the track as "one of the great audacious gestures of 1960s rock". Byrd also arranged two tracks on the 1968 album by folk group The Limeliters, Time To Gather Seeds. In the early 1970s Byrd taught at California State University, Fullerton, where he introduced one of the first courses in American music (offered as part of the American Studies curriculum). He also researched the history of American popular music and, in 1974, founded the Yankee Doodle Society with Clare Spark, to research, promote and perform popular music of the mid-19th century American middle class. In 1975 Byrd was approached by Takoma Records to make a record of synthesized Christmas carols, A Christmas Yet to Come (Takoma C-1046), and in 1976, Yankee Transcendoodle (Takoma C-1051), an LP of synthesized patriotic music in conjunction with the United States Bicentennial. On the albums, Byrd worked with Don Buchla, and synthesisers again made by Tom Oberheim. The albums were followed by a third Takoma LP Sentimental Songs of the Mid-19th Century, by the American Music Consort (Joseph Byrd, Director - Takoma A-1048 - 1976), and the 6-sided LP set Popular Music In Jacksonian America (Musical Heritage Society MHS834651 - 1982). Byrd arranged and produced Ry Cooder's critically acclaimed 1978 album Jazz, on which Cooder "pays homage to some of the early tunes and masters of jazz, ranging from the late 1800s through the 'coon songs' of the early part of the next century, to the ragtime and 'Spanish' music of Jelly Roll Morton, and the sophistication of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke." He scored a number of films, including Agnès Varda's 1969 Lions Love, Bruce Clark's 1971 The Ski Bum with Charlotte Rampling and Zalman King, The Ghost Dance (1980) and Robert Altman's ill-fated H.E.A.L.T.H., which was originally shot in 1979, but had