CREDIT: Associated Press/Ray Stubblebine
WHENEVER HOLLYWOOD movies, documentaries, or TV news programs try to evoke the spirit of the 1960s, they typically show clips of long-haired hippies dancing at a festival, marchers at an antiwar rally, or students sitting in at a lunch counter, with one of two songs by Bob Dylan—“Blowin’ in the Wind” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’”—playing in the background. Journalists and historians often treat Dylan’s songs as emblematic of the era and Dylan himself as the quintessential “protest” singer, an image frozen in time.
Dylan emerged as a public figure in 1961, playing in Greenwich Village coffee-houses after the folk music revival was already under way. In less than three years, Dylan wrote about two dozen politically oriented songs whose creative lyrics and imagery reflected the changing mood of the postwar baby-boom generation and the urgency of the civil rights and antiwar movements.
At a time when the chill of McCarthyism was still in the air, Dylan showed that songs with leftist political messages could also be commercially successful. Unwittingly, he laid the groundwork for other folk musicians and performers of the era, some of whom were more committed to the two major movements that were challenging America’s status quo, and helped them reach wider audiences. But in 1964 Dylan told friends and some reporters that he was no longer interested in politics. Broadside magazine asked folksinger Phil Ochs if he thought that Dylan would like to see his protest songs “buried.” Ochs replied insightfully, “I don’t think he can succeed in burying them. They’re too good. And they’re out of his hands.”
He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman and raised in Hibbing, a mining town in northern Minnesota, in a middle-class Jewish family. As a teen he admired Elvis Presley, Johnnie Ray, Hank Williams, and Little Richard, and he taught himself guitar. In 1959 he attended the University of Minnesota but soon dropped out. He stayed in the Twin Cities to absorb its budding folk music and bohemian scene and began playing in local coffeehouses. A friend loaned Dylan his Woody Guthrie records and back copies of Sing Out! magazines that had the music and lyrics to lots of folk songs. He read Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, and learned to play many of Guthrie’s songs.
By then Zimmerman had changed his name (apparently calling himself after Welsh poet Dylan Thomas) and had adopted some of Guthrie’s persona. He mumbled when he talked and when he sang, spoke with a twang, wore workmen’s clothes, including a corduroy cap, and took on what he believed to be Guthrie’s mannerisms. At first Dylan seemed to identify more with Guthrie the loner and bohemian than with Guthrie the radical and activist.
Soon after the nineteen-year-old Dylan arrived in New York, he visited Guthrie, then suffering from Huntington’s chorea, in his New Jersey hospital room. Dylan began weaving myths about his past, constantly reinventing himself, as he would continue to do throughout his life.
Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the folk music revival and of a growing political consciousness, and (along with San Francisco) it was the hub of the beatnik and bohemian culture of jazz, poetry, and drugs. Dylan made the rounds of the folk clubs and made a big impression. His singing and guitar playing were awkward, but he had a little-boy charm and charisma that disarmed audiences. Dylan’s initial repertoire consisted mostly of Guthrie songs, blues, and traditional songs.
Dylan got a huge break when music reporter Robert Shelton wrote a flattering review of his performance at Gerde’s Folk City. In the New York Times on September 29, 1961, under the headline “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist,” Shelton said that Dylan seemed like a “cross between a beatnik and a choir boy.” The review put Dylan on the map and landed him a record contract, although his first album, Bob Dylan, had no songs that could be considered political, protest, or topical.
In July 1961 Dylan met and soon moved in with seventeen-year-old Suze Rotolo, the daughter of communists and a leftist herself. She introduced Dylan to the works of writers and poets (especially Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud) that expanded his own horizons. She also raised his political awareness. She was working as a secretary at the Congress of Racial Equality’s office and each night gave Dylan the latest scoop about the civil rights movement.
In January 1962 Dylan wrote his first protest song, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” about a fourteen-year-old African American who was beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Within a year, he had written “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” (poking fun at that right-wing organization), “I Will Not Go Down Under the Ground” (a critique of the Cold War hysteria that led Americans to build bomb shelters), “Oxford Town” (about the riots in Oxford, Mississippi, when James Meredith became the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi), “Paths of Victory” (about the civil rights marches), and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (about the fear of nuclear war; he premiered the song at a Carnegie Hall concert a month before the Cuban missile crisis made that fear more tangible).
In April Dylan wrote what would become his most famous song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He took the tune from “No More Auction Block,” an antislavery Negro spiritual. Unlike “Emmett Till,” and “John Birch Society Blues,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” was not about a specific incident or public controversy. The lyrics reflected a mood of concern about the country’s overall direction, including the beating of civil rights demonstrators and the escalating nuclear arms race.
By avoiding specifics, Dylan’s three verses contain a universal quality that allowed listeners to read their own concerns into the lyrics. “How many times must the cannon balls fly before they’re forever banned?” and “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” are clearly about war, but not any particular war. One could hear the words “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” and relate it to the civil rights movement and the recent Freedom Rides. “How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see?” could refer to the nation’s unwillingness to face its own racism or other forms of ignorance. The song reflects a combination of alienation and outrage. Listeners have long debated what Dylan meant by “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the answer so obvious that it is right in front of us? Or is it elusive and beyond our reach? This ambiguity is one reason for the song’s broad appeal.
Of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan said, “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs.” What Dylan said did not matter. The song caught the wind of protest in the country and took flight.
Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963, but it was the version released a few weeks later by the trio Peter, Paul, and Mary that turned the song into a nationwide phenomenon. On July 13, 1963, it reached number 2 on the Billboard pop chart, with over a million copies sold. The song’s popularity turned the twenty-two-year-old Dylan into a celebrity and confirmed his image as a protest singer who voiced the spirit of his generation. Dylan cemented that impression when, on July 5, he and Pete Seeger performed at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Dylan sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the assassination, just the previous month, of Medgar Evers, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Mississippi.
At the August 1963 March on Washington, Dylan sang several topical songs he had recently written, including “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “When the Ship Comes In” (a song with biblical overtones about a coming apocalypse). A month or two after the march, Dylan penned “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which became his second-most-famous song, an angry anthem that challenged the political establishment on behalf of Dylan’s generation. The finger-pointing song is addressed to “senators, congressmen” and “mothers and fathers,” telling them that “there’s a battle outside ragin’” and warning them, “don’t criticize what you don’t understand.” The line “For the loser now will be later to win” sounds much like the biblical declaration that the meek shall inherit the earth, or it may mean that America’s black and poor people will win their struggle for justice. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” became an anthem, a warning, angry yet hopeful. It came to symbolize the generation gap, making Dylan a reluctant spokesman for the youth revolt.
Dylan’s third album, called The Times They Are A-Changin’, recorded between August and October 1963, included the title song plus several other topical and protest songs, “With God on Our Side,” “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “North Country Blues.” The last song draws on Dylan’s Minnesota upbringing and describes the suffering caused by the closing of the mines in the state’s Iron Range, turning mining areas into jobless ghost towns—a theme that Bruce Springsteen would reprise years later. Remarkable, too, is the fact that Dylan tells the tale from the point of view of a woman.
Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the label “protest” singer. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour for an entire generation. “The stuff you’re writing is bullshit, because politics is bullshit,” Dylan told Phil Ochs, who continued to write and perform topical songs and identify with progressive protest movements. “You’re wasting your time.”
By his fourth album, the aptly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he had decided to look at “another side”—both inward for his inspiration and outward at other kinds of music. He began to explore more personal and abstract themes in his music and in his poetry. He also got more involved with drugs and alcohol. His songs began to focus on his love life, his alienation, and his growing sense of the absurd. In subsequent decades, with occasional exceptions, he abandoned acoustic music for rock and roll, country, blues, and gospel. His hit “Like a Rolling Stone” from the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited revealed his talent as a rock musician.
Even after 1964, however, Dylan showed that he had not lost his touch for composing political songs. His absurdist 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” alludes to the violence inflicted on civil rights protesters by cops wielding fire hoses (“Better stay away from those / That carry around a fire hose”) but also reflects his growing cynicism (“Don’t follow leaders / Watch the parkin’ meters”). The extremist wing of Students for a Democratic Society took its name—Weatherman—from another line in that song (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”). Other songs, such as “I Shall Be Released” (1967), the Guthrie-esque “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” (1968), “George Jackson” (1971), “Hurricane” (1975), “License to Kill” (1983), and “Clean Cut Kid” (1984), indicate that Dylan still had the capacity for political outrage.
On election night in 2008, Dylan was playing a concert at the University of Minnesota. As Barack Obama’s victory was announced, Dylan said, “I was born in 1941. That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in darkness ever since. It looks like things are going to change now.” Then, deviating from his usual live encore of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan played “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Dylan’s off-and-on engagement with politics is intriguing. But his peace and justice songs have had a life of their own. “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” in particular, will forever be linked to the progressive movements of the 1960s and used to rally people to protest for a better world.