Wicked Messenger

As the demonstrators assembled, they were entertained by a troupe of folksingers stationed at the foot of the Washington Monument. Joan Baez sang “Oh Freedom.” Odetta sang “I’m On My Way.” She was soon joined by Josh White, the smooth-voiced black folkie with a long history of left-wing connections (in the thirties, White had fronted a blues band called the Carolinians, one of whose members was march organizer Bayard Rustin).² Together, Odetta, White, Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”—the wistful anthem whose recording by the folk trio had surprised everyone by reaching number two in the pop charts earlier in the summer.

Then the twenty-two-year-old author of this unlikely hit single, tousled, slight, tense, took his turn at the microphone. He stood before the greatest mass mobilization of African-Americans ever seen and, without comment, sang two songs. Both were recent compositions, unfamiliar to his audience and even to his fellow folksingers. Both were perfectly in tune with the occasion, and at the same time decidedly different from anything sung by anyone else that day.³

The first was “When the Ship Comes In,” in which Dylan celebrates a great eruption (“the seas will split . . . the shoreline will be shaking”) that will usher in the day when “the sun will respect / Every face on the deck,” “the fishes will laugh” and even “the rocks on the sand / Will proudly stand.” In this jaunty vision of inclusive, unqualified liberation—unfolding as “the whole wide world is watchin’”—the “ship” may serve as a metaphor for many things, but there can’t be much doubt that on this day, and in this era, it symbolized that complex of insurgent social forces commonly dubbed, among participants, “the Movement.”

In its promise of an egalitarian future and its use of Biblical phraseology, the song shared ground with the “dream” that Martin Luther King expounded later that afternoon in the speech that came to epitomize the March on Washington and eventually an entire epoch of African-American politics and culture. However, Dylan’s new song also struck a note alien to King’s commitment to reconciliation and forgiveness, his belief that ultimately the civil rights movement would convert its enemies. The last two verses depict a different kind of triumph:

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands,
But we’ll shout from the bow, “your days are numbered.”
And like Pharaoh’s tribe,
They’ll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.

The spur for this joyously humane but also gleefully vindictive paean had been a petty snub. Weeks before the march, Dylan had been turned away by a hotel receptionist who had failed to recognize the scruffy, uncommunicative folksinger. After Baez showed up and straightened out the confusion, Dylan sat down in his room, remembered Brecht and Weill’s Pirate Jenny,^a and wrote “When the Ship Comes In,” turning petulance into poetry (not for the first or last time).

The spur for the next song he sang was also a recent one, but much graver—the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers on June 12 in Jackson, Mississippi, only hours after President Kennedy had announced his intention to seek new civil rights legislation. Where “When The Ship Comes In” skipped ethereally, “Only a Pawn in Their Game” marched with harsh and funereal determination. The focus of the song is not, in fact, Medgar Evers (though justice is done to the slain leader in the majestic line, “they laid him down like a king”) but the man who shot him, and above all the political system that generated the murder. With its rap-like rhyming and tautly measured explication, the song is driven forward by a contained rage. It insists that we feel the singer’s anger, but it demands more than that.

The summer of 1963 was the apogee of the folk-music craze. Dylan, Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary were its biggest names—but they still meant little to most of the marchers, whose response to the singers was merely polite. What really excited the crowd was the arrival in their midst of the movie stars (Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster) and the prospect of hearing gospel queen Mahalia Jackson sing later in the afternoon (in this Dylan seems to have agreed with them). After Dylan finished his two songs, he remained at the microphone to join the other folksingers in backing up his friend Len Chandler (one of the few black faces on the Greenwich Village scene) on “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” The whole troupe—Peter, Paul and Mary, Baez, Dylan, Odetta, Josh White, and the SNCC^b Freedom Singers—finished the midday entertainment with “We Shall Overcome,” the acknowledged anthem of the movement.

Meanwhile, in its exuberance, the crowd had disregarded the official marshals and surged ahead of schedule toward the Lincoln Memorial. To create the illusion for posterity that Martin Luther King and the heads of the major sponsoring organizations had led the way, the marshals waded in and wedged open a space for the designated leaders, who duly squeezed themselves in front of the enthusiastic multitude, locked arms and had their photographs taken.

Once safely backstage, the march leaders squabbled. At issue was the anguished, impatient rhetoric of the speech to be given by John Lewis on behalf SNCC, whose young black activists had been at the sharp end of the struggle in the South. Over the previous three and a half years, since the first sit-ins, their willingness to suffer and sacrifice had driven the movement forward. The march was a vindication of their heroism and a testament to an aroused people. But the question was: where next? The SNCC activists could not share the march’s official mood of optimism (a mood partly engendered by their own heroic actions) and specifically its uncritical approach to the Kennedy administration and the federal government. Many of the young militants, freshly scarred on the battlefields of the South, feared that the demonstration and the movement were being appropriated—by the Kennedy administration, by the middle-class black leadership, by the establishment media.

The draft of Lewis’s speech included not only barbed criticisms of the failures of the federal government and the inadequacies of JFK’s proposed legislation (“too little, too late”), but also what seemed to the elders an incendiary pledge: “We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—non-violently.” Walter Reuther, the UAW leader whose union had bankrolled the march, was furious. Officials at the Justice Department, who had somehow seen advance copies of the speech, proposed amendments. A Catholic archbishop threatened to walk off the platform. NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, who had offered SNCC activists in the field little support, shouted and waved his finger at Lewis, and Lewis reciprocated. King urged some changes in the speech’s style that, he assured Lewis, would not be changes in substance. Lewis agreed, and SNCC secretary James Forman, whom Dylan had met and admired in Mississippi earlier in the summer, hastily retyped the speech, deleting what he himself considered its deeper truths. For the moment, the desire to preserve movement unity prevailed.

Even in its censored form, Lewis’s speech went far beyond the con-sensual limits respected by other speakers. In its litany of arrests, bombings, beatings, and killings, its description of civil rights workers and black communities living “in constant fear of a police state” and its angry refrain “what did the federal government do?,” it emphasized that political institutions, and not merely “prejudice,” were the key obstacles to equality. On that day, Dylan was the only other voice to stress the reality of the state’s collaboration with racism as he sang: “The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid / And the marshals and cops get the same.” It was Lewis who spelled out what “Only a Pawn in Their Game” was hinting at:

My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. . . . Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on the streets of Birmingham?⁴

Dylan echoed Lewis’s speech in the lines addressed to James Forman in “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” written in September 1963, within weeks of the march, and published as the liner notes on his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’:

Jim, Jim
where is our party?
where is the party that’s one
where all members’re held equal
an’ vow t’infiltrate that thought
among the people it hopes t’serve
an’ sets a respected road
for all of those like me

In Washington, Lewis’s speech was well-received, but it was Mahalia Jackson’s singing “I Been Buked and I Been Scorned” that really roused the huge throng, and it was King’s climactic peroration that sent them home filled with hope and purpose. In fact, King at one point seemed to be losing his way as he read from his carefully prepared text. Behind him, Mahalia Jackson called, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Abandoning his script, King rose to the occasion with a vision of the society they were struggling and sacrificing to create. Behind the famous speech were many of the elements that had forged the folksingers’ repertoire and infused the new music of Bob Dylan: the imagery and rhythmic syntax of the King James Bible, the call-and-response traditions of the black church, the music created by the slaves and the field hands, the sense of a collective destiny that yet also demanded an individual moral choice, the search for an idiom that could reach and move masses of modern human beings. Like the singers of the spirituals, King fashioned a durable utopian vision out of the brutality of centuries of racism. He spun gold from the mire. And as he did so, Dylan watched and listened, along with hundreds of thousands in the mall and millions more via television (and not only in America).

The stirring sounds and images of the March on Washington helped place the African-American demand for legal equality at the center of American popular consciousness. But they were also the means by which the legacy of the movement came to be tamed. Today the march appears a distant and depoliticized phenomenon, an idealistic celebration of human brotherhood. Even on the day itself, the debate had begun: Was this an exercise in resistance or cooptation? Malcolm X sat contemptuously on the sidelines, mocking “the farce on Washington” and decrying the moderate leaders as the “puppets” of a white political system. Some of the young SNCC activists were almost ready to agree. In the face of an America that had, in their immediate experience, revealed ever-deeper layers of brutality, the potential America of brotherhood and freedom celebrated in folk song and in civil rights speeches was beginning to seem nothing but a cruel illusion. What was needed was much more than a few legislative reforms. At this stage, these sentiments were confined to a small minority, but there can be little doubt that Bob Dylan was among them, though as ever for his own reasons and in his own manner.

In August 1963, at the very moment the great civil rights coalition was redefining the national consensus, its constituent elements and impulses were coming into conflict; its underlying contradictions were beginning to surface. The rhetoric of love and unity was being challenged by a more militant, hard-edged analysis. The radicals were leaving the liberals behind, but where were they going?

While the march itself received overwhelmingly favorable publicity (reading the reports now, one is struck by the patronizing note with which white reporters informed their readers that the Negro masses had behaved well), not everyone was impressed by the contribution of Dylan and the folkies. In the extensive New York Times coverage, Dylan was mentioned twenty-three paragraphs below a quote from waning teen idol Bobby Darin, who did not perform. “Bob Dylan, a young folksinger, rendered a lugubrious mountain song about ‘the day Medgar Evers was buried from a bullet that he caught.’ Mr. Lancaster, Mr. Belafonte and Mr. Heston found time dragging, stood up to stretch and chat.” A commentator in the Boston Herald Traveler mocked:

Though I am all for such civil rights as integrate white and colored, I am not yet convinced that white should be expected to put up with white—or rather with every other white. Fair is fair, but should anyone be made to go to school with such as, say, this Dylan? And would you want your sister to marry him? . . . Our colored brethren were actually implying that we are expected to give house room to fraudulent folk singers.⁵

As Dylan sang, Dick Gregory, the comedian-activist who had repeatedly exposed himself to arrest and beatings on visits to the South, covered his ears. “What was a white boy like Bob Dylan there for?” he asked. “Or—who else? Joan Baez? To support the cause? Wonderful—support the cause. March. Stand behind us—but not in front of us.” Harry Belafonte, whose commitment to the movement was regarded by activists as second to none, took a different view. “Joan and Bob demonstrated with their participation that freedom and justice are universal concerns of import to responsible people of all colors. . . . Were they taking advantage of the movement? Or was the movement taking advantage of them?”⁶

The role of the white and (relatively) famous in a mass movement for black rights was only one aspect of a broader dilemma that was to haunt the decade. Whose was the authentic voice of the movement? What was the relationship between the experience of oppression and the protest against it? Where was the line between selling the message and selling out? In this movement to end exploitation, who was exploiting whom? As the sixties wore on, the relationship between vanguards (or would-be vanguards) and the masses of people they claimed to speak for and aimed to mobilize, was to grow more acutely troubled—even as larger numbers were drawn into political action. No sooner did challenges from below thrust themselves into public view than their language, gestures, and cultural products were snapped up by a new mass media, packaged and sold to a new mass market. These political and cultural tensions were dramatized in Dylan’s music and the public response to it. Throughout the decade, they drove his art forward at breakneck pace.

America was still very “straight,” “postwar” and sort of into a gray-flannelled suit thing. McCarthy, commies, puritanical, very claustrophobic and whatever was happening of real value was happening away from that and sort of hidden from view and it would be years before the media would be able to recognize it and choke-hold it and reduce it to silliness.

Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village in February 1961, still only nineteen, with a head full of songs—pop, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, blues, country, folk. The product of a small-town, middle-class, Jewish upbringing in northern Minnesota, he had already renamed himself and remodeled himself as a latter-day Woody Guthrie, a veteran of hard times and the open road. With his strangled singing, mumbling nervous manner, tall tales of sitting at the feet of ancient bluesmen and his ersatz Okie accent, he struck not a few as affected and preposterous. Nonetheless, he quickly won the admiration of a small coterie of dedicated folk artists and fans. The Irish singer Liam Clancy recalled the chain-smoking cherub who insinuated himself so rapidly into the hothouse Village scene: “The only thing I can compare him with is blotting paper. He soaked everything up. He had this immense curiosity; he was totally blank, and ready to suck up everything that was within his range.”⁸ Famously, Dylan soaked up songs—poring over his friends’ record collections and raiding the repertoire of every singer in town. But along with the songs there was much more to soak up “within his range”—a living heritage of political, cultural, and personal dissent.

Greenwich Village had first become America’s bohemian capital in the years before World War I, when intellectuals and artists had been drawn to the neighborhood by its cheap rents and immigrant community, which, as in so many cities and eras, offered a protective bolt-hole for dissidents and eccentrics. John Reed celebrated the joys of “living at 42 Washington Square” in a poem published in 1913: “But nobody questions your morals, / And nobody asks for the rent / There’s no one to pry if we’re tight, you and I / Or demand how our evenings are spent.” Reed shared this Village demimonde with political activists like Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Margaret Sanger, artists like John Sloan and Eugene O’Neill, and intellectuals like Max Eastman. Many contributed to The Masses, fountainhead of America’s alternative press, which advertised itself as “a revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases, and conciliate nobody, not even its readers.”

The prewar Masses-Village milieu “contained two types of revolt,” Malcolm Cowley recalled, “the individual and the social—or the aesthetic and the political, or the revolt against puritanism and the revolt against capitalism—we might tag the two of them briefly as bohemianism and radicalism. In those prewar days, however, the two currents were hard to distinguish. Bohemians read Marx and all the radicals had a touch of the Bohemian. Socialism, free love, anarchism, syndicalism, free verse—all these creeds were lumped together by the public and all were physically dangerous to practice.”⁹

World War I fractured these commingling currents, but they were to remain, in varying admixtures, part and parcel of the Greenwich Village scene as it mutated over the following decades. The legacy of that sometimes fruitful, sometimes frustrating search for a synthesis between individual creativity and collective political action, between vanguard modernism and popular radicalism—what might be called the evanescent Masses moment—is the launch point for Dylan’s extraordinary journey through the sixties.

I could see men of all colors bouncing in the boxcar. The first line of Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography, sets the theme and tone for the book, a picaresque account of the adventures of a democratic-minded individual among an interracial people on the move. Dylan read a friend’s copy of the first edition in Minneapolis in 1960. The impact was immediate and decisive. “I went though it from cover to cover like a hurricane,” he recalled. “Totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guthrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped out on the sounds of the words alone.” He adopted his Woody Guthrie persona and set about mastering Woody’s songbook. He even copied Woody’s vernacular orthography, scattering apostrophes across the page, using phonetic renderings like wuz and sez.

Guthrie’s book exalted the working class in all its colors, accents, and moods; it raged against cops and security guards; it flashed with contempt for the rich and their stooges. It was also peppered with vivid evocations of a vast, changing landscape and a cheerfully unmoralistic approach to drink, gambling, lovemaking, and crime. Importantly for the young Dylan, it told the story of Guthrie’s vocation as a maker of songs for ordinary people. The teenage Guthrie had felt a need to express himself. “Things was starting to stack up in my head and I just felt like I was going out of my wits if I didn’t find some way of saying what I was thinking.” After trying oil painting, he turned to the guitar. He was soon playing at square dances—and making up new words for old tunes. “There on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about.”¹⁰

The music that stirred him came from working people: “no Hollywood put-on, no fake wiggling” but songs that “say something about our hard traveling, something about our hard luck, our hard get-by.” But singing such songs didn’t make it easy to earn a living. He told a passing girlfriend: “Most radio stations, they won’t let ya sing th’ real songs. They want ya ta sing pure ol’ bull manure an’ nothin’ else.”¹¹ Nonetheless, Guthrie’s brilliance as an entertainer did earn him commercial opportunities. In Bound for Glory, he sums up his response to these in a tale of his audition at the Rainbow Room, the elite watering hole on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center in mid-Manhattan “where the shrimps are boiled in Standard Oil.” As he approaches the microphone, he reviews the varied venues he’s sung at in recent months—from the apricot orchards of California and the “tough joints around th’ battery park” to CBS studios and a huge union meeting in Madison Square Garden. At the last moment, he decides to sing a song called “New York Town,” with new words: “the Rainbow Room is up so high / that John D’s^c spirit comes a driftin’ by.”

I took the tune to church, took it holy roller, shot in a few split notes, oozed in a fake one, come down barrel house, hit off a good old cross-country lonesome note or two, trying to get that old guitar to help me, to talk with me, talk for me, and say what I was thinking, just this one time:

Well this Rainbow Room’s a funny place ta play It’s a long way’s from here to th’USA

Delighted, the Rainbow Room bosses offer him a job. But they decide he should wear makeup (he looks too pale under the lights) and, worse yet, a costume. A gushing rich woman suggests he dress in French peasant garb, or as a Louisiana swamp dweller, or as a clownlike Pierrot figure, something to evoke “quaint simplicity.” Meanwhile, Woody looks out the window at the city below, and the innumerable New Yorkers “standing up living and breathing and cussing and laughing down yonder.” Telling his would-be patrons that he is going to the rest room, he hops in the elevator and says to the operator: “Quickest way down’s too slow.” As he walks into the polished marble foyer, he sings and strums his guitar as loud as he can: “Old John Dee he ain’t no friend of mine,” then wanders through the teeming city. “Thank the good Lord, everybody, everything ain’t all slicked up, and starched and imitation.”¹²

This hunger for authenticity was to be handed down to Guthrie’s sixties disciples. Not only in his public image, but in his own mind, Woody was of the people for whom he sang. Any distinction in status between himself and his audience troubled him. “Somehow or another the best singing just naturally comes from under the leakingest roof.” When he was appearing on a Los Angeles radio station in the late thirties, he used to mail out a mimeographed songbook to listeners. It included this note:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.¹³

Woody was an unashamed political partisan, a self-styled “full blooded Marxican” and enthusiastic class warrior. His hatred for the rich was unwavering and his contempt for private property bracing. He wrote a weekly “Woody Sez” column for the People’s World, the Communist Party’s West Coast newspaper, and later contributed regularly to the Daily Worker in New York. His guitar was emblazoned with the motto, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” He composed hundreds of songs commenting directly on the issues of the day. He celebrated Jesus as a “socialist outlaw”—“the bankers and the preachers, they nailed him on a cross.” In “Pretty Boy Floyd,” he unmasked the real criminals—those who profit from an unjust system:

Well, as through the world I’ve rambled, I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some rob you with a sixgun, some with a fountain pen

In the late 1930s he produced his trove of Dust Bowl Ballads, tales of migrants fleeing poverty and ecological disaster, seeking work and self-respect and suffering persecution. In their evocation of uprooted-ness and displacement, of a collective destiny experienced as personal isolation, these songs foretell the twenty-first-century experience of globalized capital, with its vast army of migrant labor trekking from continent to continent. Later, he penned the hauntingly eloquent ‘Deportees’: “Some of us are illegal and others not wanted./ Our work contract’s out and we have to move on. . . . They chase us like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves . . .”

Guthrie was hailed by the Left as a true folk poet, a people’s Steinbeck, a socialist Will Rogers. He was authentic because he came from and sang of and for the oppressed. He fulfilled the Left’s dreams of an indigenous radicalism, Marxist politics couched in the language of the people. Guthrie certainly had the popular touch, but he was also intellectually acute and politically sophisticated. And his artistry was always more than the sum of his public commitments. He wrote playful songs for children and unsentimental odes about VD (Dylan showed a keen interest in both^d). Alongside the naturalism and political idealism there was a streak of wild fantasy and morbid wit. Here’s a Dylanesque verse from “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You,” Guthrie’s macabre vision of an all-engulfing Midwest dust storm:

Now, the telephone rang, an’ it jumped off the wall,
That was the preacher, a-makin’ his call.
He said, “Kind friend, this may be the end;
An’ you got your last chance of salvation of sin!”
So long it’s been good to know you . . .

Guthrie’s songs could be scabrous and profane, or reflectively melancholy. He was a master in the concise use of concrete detail and could deploy a deceptively simple phrase to open up vistas of injustice and hypocrisy. And he was a champion of the language of the people, however coarse:

The honest and hungry prophets raving and snorting and ripping into the bellies of the rich and powerful rulers and lying priests who beat their people into slavery and dope them with superstitions and false ceremonies and dictate to them what to do, where to go, what to read, who to love, what to eat, what to drink, what to wear, when to work, when to rest and where to bring your money. . . . [They] cussed and they raved plenty. Because they was out there in the hills and hollers yelling and echoing the real voice of the real people, the poor working class and the farmers and the down and out.¹⁴

In Guthrie, the economic migrant blended with the bohemian wanderer. He was painfully aware that his own personality was more complex than the legend that grew up around it: “There ain’t no one little certain self that is you. I’m not some certain self. I’m a lot of selfs. A lot of minds and changes of minds. Moods by the wagon loads and changes of moods.” His indifference to hierarchy of any kind troubled some of his Communist Party allies, and it’s said that when he applied for party membership in 1943 he was rejected because of what was seen as his personal unreliability.¹⁵ Irwin Silber recalled that “the puritanical, near-sighted left . . . didn’t quite know what to make of this strange, bemused poet who drank and bummed and chased after women and spoke in syllables dreadful strange . . . they never really accepted the man himself.”¹⁶ In the late forties Guthrie jotted in a notebook:

Lenin: Where three balalaika players meet, the
fourth one ought to be a communist.
Me: Where three communists meet, the fourth
one ought to be a guitar player.

Dylan took more from Woody than an image and an accent. In Guthrie’s work, Dylan found a creative fusion of humor and rage, a wanderlust that was both individualist and populist, and, most important, an alternative to the conventions of the entertainment industry, a folksinging model of honesty and commitment. Guthrie offered an identity that was more genuinely Dylan’s own than the one his society had saddled him with. Ultimately, however, neither the model nor the identity were to prove unproblematic.

Soon after his arrival in New York, Dylan made a pilgrimage to Guthrie’s bedside at state mental hospital in New Jersey, a place he recalled as “an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind. Wailing could be heard in the hallways . . . the experience was sobering and psychologically draining.” How much communication actually transpired between the severely disabled older man and his young acolyte is a matter of debate. The importance of the meeting for Dylan is not. Within months, he made Guthrie the subject of his first serious effort at songwriting, “Song to Woody”:

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along,
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn,
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ never been born.

In launching his career with a tribute to a stricken forebear, Dylan evinces a telling awareness of being a latecomer to a venerable tradition, of walking in others’ tracks. In the final verse, the apprentice songwriter speaks tentatively. He seems uneasy comparing his limited experience to the older generation’s.

For Dylan, the New York folk scene was a living connection with the left-wing luminaries of the “first folk revival.” He met a number of Guthrie’s old comrades—notably his one-time singing partner Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, who had made Guthrie’s first studio recordings. (Lomax’s secretary was Carla Rotolo, the sister of Dylan’s girlfriend Suze—the woman on the Freewheelin’ cover.) In 1940, Lomax had published Guthrie’s songs in his anthology, Our Singing Country, where he praised “the dust bowl balladeer” as “familiar with microphones and typewriters, familiar too with jails and freight trains.” Lomax placed Guthrie chief among the new school of folk artists:

The people have begun to examine their problems self-consciously and comment on them with an objective vigor and irony that reach deeper than a Robert Frost and are more honest and succinct than a T.S. Eliot.¹⁷

As a teenager in the early thirties, Lomax had assisted his father, John (who published one of the first collections of cowboy ballads), on field trips through the rural South to the hidden sanctuaries of American folk music. On one of these, they encountered Huddie Ledbetter—better known as Leadbelly—in a Lousiana state prison. The Lomaxes brought him to the North, where he sang for left-wing intellectuals and union benefits.

The early folk music collectors were antiquarians, searching for specimens of a lost or dying way of life. In contrast, Alan Lomax saw folk music as a living organism, dynamic and diverse—stretching from work songs and spirituals to protest ballads and commercial hillbilly and race recordings. He believed recorded music had transformed our access to authentic folk song. “A piece of folklore is a living, growing and changing thing, and a folk song printed, words and tune, only symbolizes in very static fashion a myriad-voiced reality of individual songs.” What we could now hear were “the songs as they actually exist on the lips of the folk singers.”¹⁸

As the decade wore on, the energetic folklorist acquired a deepening political commitment. In 1937, at the age of twenty-one, he was appointed director of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In Washington he forged connections across the New Deal administration, stretching even into the White House. He also worked closely with the leftists Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Both were classically trained composers and musicologists; like other intellectuals shaped by the modernist movement, they had abandoned the avant-garde for the study of folk music under the impact of the economic disaster of the thirties. It was through Lomax that Charles’s son, Pete, was later to meet Guthrie and accompany him on the road.

Even as he promoted folk as an ever-evolving genre, Lomax insisted at the same time on the goal of authenticity. In performance style, that meant the painstaking mastery of the skills displayed by the little-known geniuses on his Library of Congress recordings. But it also implied a level of commitment, an emotional investment. He liked to quote Leadbelly: “It take a man that have the blues to sing the blues.” For Lomax, the blues remained “a negro music, and no one else can sing it with the same authority. It is a direct reaction to the harsh experiences of their lives.”

Where previous explorers of America’s folk heritage had seen in it a spirit of fatalistic passivity, Lomax discerned an unfinished narrative of “tragedy and protest.” These were the songs of a democracy struggling with and seeking to transform a hostile environment. Their proper fate was not to be preserved in museum-like isolation, but to become part of something larger. “The folklorist’s job,” Lomax believed, was “to link the people who were voiceless and who had no way to tell their story with the big mainstream of world culture.”¹⁹ For all his scrupulous concern for the authentic, Lomax was also a tireless and adventurous popularizer. Through radio, recordings, books, articles, and concerts—not least his own sweat-drenched performance at the White House—he proselytized for the living reality of folk music and for his own vision of the American democratic heritage.

Folk as Dylan received it in the early sixties had been shaped by this earlier political moment. His work starts from the cultural residue of the popular front, launched in the mid-thirties. During this period, the dominant organization on the American Left, the Communist Party, had courted allies to its right, played down its revolutionary rhetoric, and sought to establish itself as a homegrown people’s movement for social justice, not a sect of a European proletarian revolution. The slogan of the era was “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”

All this was in keeping with the prevailing winds from Moscow, but it was much more. In emphasizing their national credentials, the Communists were part of a wider movement. The New Deal encouraged interest in American history and culture and a new regionalism in the arts. It sponsored large-scale narrative paintings in public spaces and a wide array of folkloric activities. At a time of severe social crisis and potential political polarization, various forces sought to mobilize American identity for various purposes, sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting. What was at stake was national self-definition, a powerful political asset. The popular front bid for this asset found its epitome in “This Land Is Your Land.”

Guthrie wrote the song on February 23, 1940, in response, he said, to Kate Smith’s bellicose rendition of “God Bless America,” which was then blasting the airwaves. The song combines a sense of longing with a sense of belonging, and has been cursed with the soubriquet of “the alternative national anthem.” But in its original form—written during the Hitler-Stalin pact—there are two verses that give the song a different cast, and which were dropped from the version popularized in the fifties and sixties. One described “a big high wall there that tried to stop me / A sign was painted said: Private Property.” The other distinctly qualified the confidence of the reclamation declared throughout the song.

With or without the class-struggle verses, “This Land Is Your Land” remains a concise and stirring expression of the popular front’s claim on the nation. But that claim was always problematic. Some of its limitations were starkly exposed in John Lee Hooker’s sixties riposte, “This Land is Nobody’s Land”:

This land, this land is no man’s land
This land is your buryin’ ground
I wonder why you’re fightin’ over this land.²¹

Even during his heyday as a performer, Woody was being turned into an American exemplar: “He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people,” said John Steinbeck. Guthrie himself saw his mission, partly, as a preservation of the true national culture: “The union hall is the salvation of real honest-to-god American culture.” ²² And he celebrated the Grand Coulee Dam as a national triumph: “Now the world holds seven wonders that the travelers always tell / Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well / But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land / It’s the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.”

Across Europe, the recovery of folk tradition had been part of secular nation-building, and for both conservatives and radicals, the music of the folk was the authentic music of the nation. Lomax was aware of the reactionary uses to which folk could be put—he could see them in Nazi Germany. But he believed that there was a democratic pulse at the heart of American folk music that could be harnessed by the Left:

The idea implicit in this great rhymed history of the American pioneer worker can be summed up in the key lines of one of the noblest of the songs: “John Henry told his captain, A man ain’t nothing but a man.”²³

The desire to “Americanize” a seemingly alien movement (Marxism, socialism) was one of the missions of the popular front. Like Dylan in the early sixties, the old leftists fretted that their ethnic roots were showing, and these roots betrayed a heritage that was less than authentically American. That’s one reason they had so heartily welcomed Seeger, scion of a Yankee academic, Guthrie, the dust bowl migrant, and Ledbetter, the southern black ex-con. But in adopting the rhetoric of Americanism, the Left conceded dangerous ground, not so much to backward-looking nativism as to the American empire that would spread its wings after World War II. Lomax invites his readers to admire a tall tale from the old frontier:

“The boundaries of the United States, sir?” replied the Kentuckian. “Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the aurora borealis, on the east by the rising sun, on the south by the procession of the equinoxes and on the west by the day of judgment.”²⁴

In 1940, Lomax supported Seeger, Guthrie, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, and others in forming the Almanac Singers, the first urban ensemble to mix traditional and topical songs and take the package out of the concert hall. It was an inauspicious moment for the venture. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the broad alliance of the popular front had come under severe strain. The antifascist emphasis of the previous years was replaced by a renewed antimilitarism and a stronger dose of class politics. The Almanacs’ first LP, Songs for John Doe, was ferociously anti-FDR and antiwar (“It wouldn’t be much thrill / to die for Dupont in Brazil”).²⁵

The Almanac Singers were a collective of some dozen performers, most of whom lived communally in a succession of downtown Manhattan apartments. They wore denim and jeans and their performance demeanor was casual in the extreme. What drew them together was a love of folk music and a commitment to turning that music to political ends. Lee Hays explained the group’s name: “If you want to know what the weather is going to be, you have to look in your almanac. . . .”²⁶ (A quarter of a century later, Dylan repudiated that nostrum in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”) The Almanacs flourished, initially, because they were taken up by the Left. They played union benefits and fund-raisers. It was during this time that Seeger introduced the word hootenanny—a long-forgotten specimen of American slang meaning something like thingamajig—as a label for informal (but publicly promoted) folksinging get-togethers. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, new opportunities opened up for the Almanac Singers. They were now urging on the working class in the crusade against Germany and Japan. It was at this moment that the audition at the Rainbow Room took place—only in reality it was an audition not for Woody alone but for the Almanac Singers as a group.

Despite the claims of red-hunters and some Dylan fans, the Almanacs were not part of a conspiracy to subjugate the variegated American folk tradition to a program dictated by the Communist Party. Some of the Almanacs and their coterie were members of the party. Most were sympathizers. Very few were active in or had contact with party structures, and the party itself evinced little interest in the musicians or the music. These people did follow the changing party line—from the people’s front through the Hitler-Stalin pact through the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union through Pearl Harbor and after—but they did not do so simply because they were told to. They were all strong-willed, independent-minded people; they followed the party line because, on balance and in context, it made sense to them. “Which side are you on?” the old song had asked, and under the circumstances of the day, they thought the answer was clear. They were not without a degree of ironic self-awareness. When the wartime “no strike” pledge rendered a great deal of the Almanac Singers’ repertoire redundant, Guthrie improvised a verse:

I started out to sing a song
To the entire population
But I ain’t a doing a thing tonight
On account of this “new situation.”²⁷

After World War II, many of those involved in the Almanacs took part in People’s Songs, a more organized attempt to promote the left-wing politics of folk as it had been refined through the years of the popular front. The board of directors included Guthrie, Seeger, Lomax, and John Hammond. In the midst of the great strike wave of 1946, the organization declared, “The people are on the march and must have songs to sing” and announced that it intended to circumvent “the music monopoly of Broadway and Hollywood.” But even as Lomax insisted that “the whole American folk tradition is a progressive people’s tradition,” the Cold War began to freeze American public life and the House Un-American Activities Committee began to strut the stage. In 1948, Lomax served as the musical director of Henry Wallace’s third-party presidential bid, and insisted that a folksinger appear on every platform. Seeger himself accompanied Wallace on an embattled tour of the South. It was the last hurrah of the popular front.

As the anticommunist witch-hunt intensified, all the protestations of Americanism were for nought. People’s Songs and the artists associated with it were excluded from the CIO unions. By 1950, Lomax had left for Europe and Guthrie had been crippled by Huntingdon’s chorea, a degenerative disease of the nervous system inherited from his mother. Josh White and Burl Ives^e gave the witch-hunters what they required—I WAS A SUCKER FOR THE COMMUNISTS ran a headline after White’s HUAC testimony.

Even after its demise, People’s Songs had a long-range impact on the folk revival that was to produce Bob Dylan. In May 1950 a new magazine, Sing Out!, was launched, taking its title from “The Hammer Song,” written by Seeger and Hays the previous year: “I’d sing out danger! I’d sing out a warning!” The song crept into the pop world during the next decade, and, miraculously, Sing Out! was to survive and to thrive during the second folk revival.

Meanwhile, four Almanac veterans—including Seeger and Lee Hays—decided to try a more commercial route. They formed the Weavers (named after a play about the peasants’ revolt of 1381), spruced up their appearance, tempered their presentation, and enjoyed a succession of hit records, most notably the chart-topping “Goodnight, Irene,” a Leadbelly song, and Guthrie’s “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You.” However, the belated commercial success of the first folk revival proved brief-lived. After finding themselves on every blacklist in the industry, the Weavers disbanded in 1952. Folk music became politically tainted, a rich hunting ground for the inquisitors. Country star Tex Ritter observed: “It got to the point where it was very difficult to tell where folk music ended and communism began. So that’s when I quit calling myself a folksinger. It was the sting of death if you were trying to make a living.”²⁸

John Hammond’s track record as a talent spotter was legendary long before he signed the twenty-year-old Bob Dylan to Columbia Records in 1961. In the thirties he had recorded Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, promoted Benny Goodman and Count Basie, and fought a stubborn battle against racial segregation in the music industry. Hammond was a rich white kid turned on by the “race” records of the late twenties. In blues and jazz he found a spontaneity and energy absent from the concert hall music preferred by his parents. As a critic, as well as a producer and promoter, Hammond championed both rhythmic drive and individual improvisation. From the beginning, he aimed to distinguish the authentic in jazz from its commercial dilution.

Like Alan Lomax, and many in the decades to come, Hammond found his way to politics through music. Jazz and blues alerted him to the brutalities of racial oppression. He became increasingly aware of the material conditions in which the music he loved was produced. In 1931, he took an active role in the defense campaign for the Scottsboro Boys, and soon joined the national board of the NAACP.

In 1938, Hammond staged the historic From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, hitherto a bastion of concert music propriety. The event was sponsored by New Masses, a CP-controlled magazine markedly different in tone and style from its Greenwich Village predecessor. For New Masses, the concert was a welcome popular front initiative in which the Left appeared as the champion of an authentic, multiracial American culture. The magazine promised the audience “the true, untainted, entirely original works that the American negro has created. We mean spirituals sung in their primitive majesty.”²⁹ What Hammond presented that night was not, however, a menagerie of musical primitives but a succession of accomplished and sophisticated performers, a number of whom were far from “untainted” by modern American culture. The boogie-woogie piano of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis was followed by the gospel singing of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the harmonica antics of Sonny Terry, the New Orleans finesse of Sidney Bechet, the wry blues of Big Bill Broonzy, and a climactic swinging set from Basie and his band.

“Forget you’re in Carnegie Hall,” Hammond told the audience, urging them to create the sort of “informal atmosphere” that would bring out the best in the musicians. But simply by importing these musicians into this august venue, Hammond was making a powerful statement. This wasn’t just popular entertainment; it was great art and deserved recognition as such. The program, as devised and presented by Hammond, was a narrative summary of the African-American musical tradition. It staked a claim for that tradition’s rightful place at the heart of a modern democracy. In tracing the black genealogy that lay behind swing—then a huge craze among white American youth and a money-spinner for the industry—Hammond proclaimed and exposed the black roots of America’s contemporary culture. As a teenager in Hibbing, Dylan listened to the recorded version of the concert on old 78s.

As later critics have noted, Hammond’s package could be construed as a white appropriation of a black narrative. It was he who determined what was and was not authentic, and he was often uneasy when the musicians he patronized ventured outside the niches he had created for them. Hammond was a finicky populist. He demanded virtuosity and sophistication, but he scolded Duke Ellington for daring to write symphonic works and he had little time for the bebop vanguardists of the post-World War II era: “instead of expanding the form, they contracted it, made it their private language.” He praised rock ’n’ roll for “getting America’s youth dancing again.”

“Hammond was no bullshitter,” recalled Dylan. “There were maybe a thousand kings in the world and he was one of them.” The veteran producer’s ability to spot Dylan’s talent was a remarkable leap across musical generations and genres. (When Dylan’s first album proved a commercial flop, the boy singer was dubbed “Hammond’s folly.”) In a sense, through his earlier efforts to redefine musical boundaries—between black and white, between traditional and popular and classical—Hammond exercised far more influence over Dylan before they had met than he did during their brief time together in the studio. As a producer, Hammond’s method was stark and straightforward. In his view the job was to capture a live performance, not create an aural artifact. That suited Dylan, but Hammond was soon elbowed out of the young singer’s career by his new manager, Albert Grossman, a hungrier and altogether less austere figure than the patrician Hammond.

In 1952, at the height of the Cold War clampdown, Folkways quietly issued its canon-shaping Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection destined to exercise a profound influence on Dylan and his folksinging contemporaries. Folkways was a small business run by Moe Asch, a nonaffiliated leftist (and son of writer Sholem Asch) who had already been involved in recording Guthrie, Seeger, and Leadbelly, and who had made it his mission to preserve and publish a wide range of vernacular music. The anthology itself was compiled and edited by a younger man, Harry Smith, whose worldview seemed eccentric in the extreme to the popular front veterans.³⁰

Smith was an avant-garde filmmaker and painter, an amateur anthropologist who had studied Native American chants (and taken part in a peyote ritual), a marijuana-smoking bohemian with a fascination for the occult. After visiting Berkeley in 1944 to hear a Woody Guthrie concert, he was drawn into the Bay Area’s experimental arts scene, and became associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Smith was also a compulsive collector of old 78s. Out of this collection, he selected his anthology, eighty-four songs on six LPs. There were no field recordings and no art-form renditions by classically trained performers. Instead, these were “race” and “hillbilly” records, released on commercial labels, and recorded between 1927, when new technology boosted the quality of musical reproduction, and 1932, when the depression finished off the regional markets. The performers were anything but anonymous members of a folk tribe; they included a host of distinctive stylists—Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton (disguised as the Masked Marvel), the Carter Family, Mississippi John Hurt, Dock Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson. Neither Folkways nor Smith bothered to license the recordings from the original labels or the performers (many of whom were still alive and working). They treated this hoard of song as a common treasure.

Smith saw the 1927-32 interval as unique. During those years, “American music still retained some of the regional qualities evident in the days before the phonograph, radio and talking picture had tended to integrate local types.” But it was also a period in which, for the first time, commercially distributed records made “available to each other the rhythmically and verbally specialized musics of groups living in mutual social and cultural isolation.”³¹ It was the beginning of a long-running process, consciously stimulated by Smith’s own anthology, of interchange among musical modes, a process that created rock ’n’ roll in general and specifically the work of Bob Dylan, not to mention reggae and punk and Afro-beat and the myriad varieties of drum-and-bass and acid house.

Enclosed with the LPs were Smith’s extraordinary notes. For each song, he provided what he called a “condensation of lyrics”—truncated summaries of the stories in the songs, presented with a deadpan irony and an alertness to the mundane surrealism of many of the narratives. He traced the lyrics back to their roots in a common stock, and at the same time emphasized the actual historical events that often gave rise to them. Smith’s idiosyncratic selection of American music was a bold and sensitive collage, an avant-garde transformation of a vernacular idiom.

The anthology was filled with what seemed to listeners in the fifties and still seems to us today a mélange of archaic, other-worldly sounds; voices and instruments tuned to scales and deploying textures left behind by or excluded from the commercial musical mainstream. The past inscribed on these LPs was only a quarter of a century gone, but it felt much more remote. Like Guthrie’s book, the anthology alerted Dylan to the existence of other American traditions—ones he could make use of in inventing and expressing himself.

Smith saw his Anthology, as he did his experimental artworks, as an instrument of social enlightenment, not an antiquarian retreat. When he was presented with a Grammy shortly before his death in 1996, he said, “I’m glad to say that my dream’s come true. I saw America changed by music.” By which he meant, said his longtime acquaintance, Allen Ginsberg, “the whole rock ’n’ roll, Bob Dylan, Beatnik, post-Beatnik youth culture . . . he’d lived long enough to see the philosophy of the homeless and the Negro and the minorities and the impoverished—of which he was one, starving in the Bowery—alter the consciousness of America sufficiently to affect the politics.”³²

For Dylan, the anthology was not only a link to the lost art of the late twenties, but also, through Harry Smith’s sensibility, to the bohemian avant-garde of the fifties. As Dylan said, “I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the beat scene, the bohemian, be-bop crowd; it was pretty much connected.” Dylan relished the Beats’ shock tactics and was intrigued by their candor about drugs and sexuality. Beat prosody entered his songwriting armory as surely as the methods of Guthrie and the discoveries of the Anthology. In promoting a renewed interest in publicly performed poetry, the Beats also stimulated the coffeehouse scene in which the second folk revival gestated. This was a do-it-yourself poetry to complement a do-it-yourself music.

But in the mid-fifties, this small group of social pioneers found themselves in near total isolation. The gulf between their beliefs, cultural practices, personal habits, and those recognized by official America seemed unbridgeable. Unlike the political activists, they gloried in their isolation, in their apparent irrelevance, and in the freedom it gave them. Rejecting the Puritanism shared by the American mainstream and the old Left, they plunged into subcultures: criminal, musical, racial, drug-and sex-related. They kept their ears peeled for a new demotic—and through their encounter with bebop-era black jazz they fashioned a jargon that, by the end of the decade, would be parodied across the country. This jargon was to prove one of the major sources for Dylan’s extraordinary speech—it was not long after he arrived in the Village that he began layering the hillbilly with the hipster.

Ginsberg hailed from an immigrant Jewish family immersed in Communist Party activity. He was always both a rebellious and affectionate son of the old Left. He inherited from his reading of Whitman and his upbringing in the popular front years an interest in American national identity, but he gave it a new twist. In 1956, in San Francisco, he wrote “America,” a long-lined, rhythmically seductive, joke-filled address to his native land that adopts a tone neither Whitman nor Guthrie ever essayed: “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” As well as praising marijuana and homosexuality and satirizing Cold War paranoia (“them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen”), the poem invokes the then largely hidden history of the American Left: Tom Mooney, Scottsboro, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Wobblies, America’s “one million Trotskyites.”

Through sheer bardic energy, Ginsberg sought to transform his isolation into its opposite. Though the poem ends on a note of cheerful resolve (“America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”), it places Ginsberg, at the outset of his career, in an embattled but somehow symbiotic relationship with “America”:

Your machinery is too much for me
It made me want to be a saint³³

The Beats are also a reminder that the spirit of the pre-World War I Masses still flourished in hidden corners of America, preeminently in Greenwich Village, which had long been home to a variety of leftist traditions, many of them fiercely anti-Stalinist. The World War II years had been the heyday for the CP-linked popular front artists, but they were dog days for pacifists, anarchists, and Trotskyists. However, the crisis of Stalinism in the fifties created a vacuum on the Left that other tendencies began to fill. Anarcho-pacifists and cultural critics—Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth, Dave Dellinger—began to get a hearing among a select few. The new American peace movement of the late fifties was dominated by neither the Communist Party nor the liberal Democrats; its revolt against the Cold War was infused with the “plague on both your houses” spirit of the Beat poets and organizations like the Catholic Worker, edited by that survivor of the first Village generation, Dorothy Day, and the radical pacifists of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Activists from this tradition were also responsible for founding Pacifica Radio, whose New York City arm, WBAI, began broadcasting in 1960, providing an in-house forum for the latest avatar of the Village tradition.

After nearly a decade in Europe, Alan Lomax returned to the United States in 1958. The man who had done so much to create the first folk revival was now on hand for the flowering of the second. “The modern American folk-song revival began back in the thirties as a cultural movement, with overtones of social reform,” he wrote in Sing Out! “In the last ten years, our gigantic entertainment industry, even though it is as yet only mildly interested in folk music, has turned this cultural movement into a small boom.”³⁴

In the late fifties, the Kingston Trio and the New Christy Minstrels had enjoyed commercial success with easy-listening arrangements of old folk tunes. They were followed by a posse of imitators, but, at the same time, a less commercial side of folk music was also flourishing. Sing Out!, under Irwin Silber’s editorship, no longer looking to Moscow but still defiantly of the Left, reached a circulation of 15,000. Izzy Young, an anarchist from the Bronx, had opened his Folklore Center on Macdougal Street in 1957, and in 1961 it was the subject of an impromptu Dylan verse:

I came down to New York town,
Got out and started walking around,
I’s up around 62nd Street,
All of a sudden comes a cop on his beat;
Said my hair was too long,
Said my boots were too dirty,
Said my hat was un-American,
Said he’d throw me in jail.
On MacDougal Street I saw a cubby hole,
I went in to get out of the cold . . .

For the fresh-faced Dylan, the subway ride from uptown to downtown was a voyage from alienation and rejection to acceptance and community. The folk revival offered something unavailable in commercial youth culture as he’d known it:

The thing about rock ’n’ roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough. Tutti Frutti and Blue Suede Shoes were great catchphrases and driving pulse rhythms and you could get high on the energy but they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings . . . life is full of complexities and rock ’n’ roll didn’t reflect that.³⁶

When Dylan arrived in the Village, the folk scene was still a ghetto whose appeal was limited to a few. It was already, however, a counterculture in miniature—a self-defined minority with a uniform dress and a common frame of reference. But unlike the mass counterculture of the late sixties that it helped to breed, the folk revival was characterized by earnestness and restraint. It was self-consciously opposed to the glitzy superficiality and addled consumerism it associated with America’s prevalent youth culture. In its place it offered something untainted by packaging, by commerce, something that was part of a greater and more enduring whole, something with a mission. The spectacle of white middle-class kids setting themselves apart from and in opposition to the society that had granted them privileges their parents hardly dreamed of puzzled and irritated many commentators (then as now). But what was clear from the beginning was that the critique of commercialism, the rejection of the manufactured pabulum of corporate America, wasn’t merely ideological. Young people came to the folk revival looking for a personal experience of a type they felt was denied to them elsewhere. They came looking for the authentic.

What the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno called “the jargon of authenticity” had been present in the first folk revival, but it was elevated to a higher and wider status during the second. It was applied to musical performance, artistic purpose, personal style; it coursed through the shared understanding of history, tradition, politics, the “folk” and the “people,” and it levied existential demands: honesty was the touchtone. In manner and dress, unadorned plainness was preferred. Anything standardized or mass manufactured was despised (except, of course, acoustic guitars, folk magazines, and sheet music). When it came to musical subject matter, teenage melodrama was discarded in favor of venerable sagas of work and physical hardship and early death; these songs crystallized the struggles of past generations; they were seen as rooted in real experience, tinged with hard-earned wisdom. Not surprisingly, for white, middle-class folksingers who had grown up in the fifties, and were singing the songs of the thirties and forties, the demand for authenticity was, from the beginning, a paradoxical one.

The word derives from the Greek autos (“self”) plus hentos (“to make”). In common use it means something original, genuine, not a copy or simulation, something that is what it professes to be. But ever since the rise of industrial production, the spread of market relations and the congregation of humanity in vast anonymous cities, the authentic has carried additional connotations that make it both less precise and more potent. The world was no longer experienced as “self-made” but as an aggregate of products and conditions produced by remote forces. There was an emotional absence, difficult to define, but widely felt, a sense that there was something artificial in the mass culture of industrial society. During the nineteenth century, it became commonplace to counterpose the organic to the mechanical, the rooted to the cosmopolitan. Thus the idea of the authentic emerged both in opposition to and out of the heart of capitalist society. In the conditions of mid-twentieth-century America, its appeal was powerfully reinforced.

Ever since it began to be named, collected and catalogued in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, folk music (and folk dances and customs) had been seen as a carrier of authenticity—organic, rooted and therefore somehow an antidote to the sense of alienation that was the curse of modern society. A revived folk culture promised to heal the historic breach between production and consumption, performer and audience. It promised community and continuity—both of which were felt to be achingly absent from consumer culture that emerged in the fifties.

Adorno argued that the jargon of authenticity was an illusory, self-indulgent, and futile attempt to evade the dissatisfactions of capitalist society. “While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates.” In a passage that could easily be applied to the folk revival (and the later counterculture) “the stereotypes of the jargon . . . seem to guarantee that one is not doing what in fact one is doing—bleating with the crowd.”³⁷ Or as Dylan put it, “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”

The folk revival notion of what constituted authentic folk music was itself an artificial construct, strongly influenced by the work of Lomax, Smith, and others. Two great folk artists, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, had been exploring the expressive capacity of the electric guitar for years, but they unplugged for the folk boom and reinvented themselves, briefly, as acoustic troubadours. Dylan arrived on the scene wearing his Woody Guthrie mask—a mask of authenticity. As early as 1960, the Village’s bohemian heritage was being packaged for tourists; Dylan himself made a few dollars posing as a “beatnik” for souvenir photographs.

Visiting Guthrie, he met Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, recently returned from five years in Europe. Dylan already knew and admired his recordings. Elliott had a vast repertoire of cowboy songs and had made himself the major living interpreter of Guthrie’s works, though he showed little interest in the politics that fired his hero. But Elliott didn’t just sing the songs, he lived them. In his vocal delivery and his demeanor both on and off stage, he seemed the authentic embodiment of hard traveling individualism. But Ramblin’ Jack, it turned out, much to Dylan’s amazed amusement, had been born Elliott Adnopoz, the Brooklyn-reared son of a Jewish doctor. Did this make him a phony? Dylan never thought so. In fact, Rambin Jack’s example helped liberate him. From his teenage years, Jack had hit the road and immersed himself in the world he’d learned about from the songs. He surrendered himself to the tradition and made the tradition his own. He might be an invention, but he was a self-invention; he had paid his dues, and his stage presence was charged with a frisson of authenticity that performers with more authentic pedigrees sometimes lacked.

Dylan was alert to the perils of authenticity—and conjured some of his best songs out of its conundrums. Today, “authenticity therapy” is offered on the Web; ready-faded, “stone-washed” jeans are a commonplace; cars, colas, and microwave meals are flogged to us as “authentic.” For the critic Jean Baudrillard, the invocation of the authentic is the signal that we are in the realm of the fake-authentic. But the postmodern permutation of off-the-peg identities, without regard to the demands of authenticity, has in turn bred its own dissatisfactions. The desire to reclaim the self from an inhuman social reality, to find meaning in something bigger, other, truer, older, is more powerful than ever—because more than ever the world is experienced as anything but self-made. These are longings that corporate branding cannot satisfy.

For some in the folk revival, authenticity consisted in truth-to-history. Arrangements and instrumentation were dutifully researched and the results shared with audiences. Dylan belonged to a different school. He was never the kind of folksinger who sought to disappear from the song and present it as an artifact. His approach, from the beginning, was with the blues singers for whom adding yourself to the tradition was what the tradition was all about.

Dylan’s understanding of that tradition was enhanced by the release in 1961 of King of the Delta Blues Singers, a collection of recordings made by Robert Johnson in the mid-thirties. While he was preparing his From Spirituals to Swing concert, John Hammond had stumbled across Johnson’s discs in the Columbia storeroom and was startled by their power. He hoped to bring Johnson north to join his Carnegie Hall company, but the young bluesman had vanished from sight. Hammond shared his latest enthusiasm with Alan Lomax, who went hunting for Johnson on his next Mississippi field trip, only to learn from his mother that the prodigy had died in mysterious circumstances.³⁸ For two decades Johnson’s work lay in the vaults until Hammond persuaded Columbia to issue the 1961 compilation, which was to influence young musicians on both sides of the Atlantic.

Hammond introduced Dylan to the album, which appears amid other in-group totems on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. “The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window,” Dylan said, years later. “Johnson’s words made my nerves quiver . . . big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction.” There was an anguished complexity in Johnson’s art that struck listeners of Dylan’s generation as distinctly modern. This was a man about whom next to nothing was known, yet who was there in full on the record, in every nuance, in every drawl, in every bent guitar note. For Dylan and his friends, Johnson became an icon of the kind of authenticity they were seeking, an authenticity in which the individual and the music formed a seamless whole. After listening to the Columbia reissue, Dylan added Johnson’s “Ramblin on My Mind” and “Kindhearted Woman” to his set. He told Izzy Young he was writing a song called “The Death of Robert Johnson.”³⁹ He later inserted lyrics from Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway” into “Corrina, Corrina” (“I got a bird that whistles . . .”). In many ways, Johnson embodied Dylan’s emerging aesthetic. In the free-verse liner notes he wrote for a Joan Baez album, he ruminated on why it was that he had been so resistant to “Joanie’s” voice and its pure, sweet tone:

The only beauty’s ugly, man
The crackin’ shakin’ breakin’ sounds’re
The only beauty I understand

In those early days in the Village Dylan was befriended by Dave Van Ronk, only five years his senior but with a wealth of experience Dylan could only envy. Growing up in an Irish working-class environment in Brooklyn, he sought refuge from a regimented Catholic education in music—jazz and especially trad jazz, New Orleans style, the purist’s choice. From there he moved on to the blues, fashioned a growling vocal style and plumbed the mysteries of the acoustic guitar. He was happily passing his time in the merchant marine when Odetta convinced him he could make a living as a folksinger. Van Ronk became one of the first white, city-based musicians of his era to emulate the expressive vocal and finger-picking styles of the old records. He felt no shame in being a white man singing the blues, since he held himself to the same high standards as the original blues masters. “Van Ronk’s voice was like rusted shrapnel and he could get a lot of subtle ramification out of it,” Dylan recalled, “delicate, gentle, rough, explosive, sometimes all within the same song.” But it was the man’s personality even more than his music that awed Dylan. “No puppet strings on him ever. He was big, sky high, and I looked up to him. He came from the land of giants.”

Unlike some of Dylan’s Village cohorts, Van Ronk never begrudged the younger man his later success. He remembered him as an enthralling performer, even before he wrote any of his own songs, with “a gung-ho, unrelenting quality, a take-no-prisoners approach that was really very effective.” Dylan learned from Van Ronk’s repertoire and technique and soaked up what he needed from Van Ronk’s knowledge of poetry and history. Somewhere along the way Van Ronk had become a socialist with a decidedly anti-Stalinist bent (in the mid-sixties he was a member of the Trotskyist Workers League).⁴⁰ In 1959, he had collaborated with an anarchist printer named Dick Ellington to produce The Bosses’ Songbook—Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent, which included the “Ballad of a Party Folk Singer”:⁴¹

Their material is corny, but their motives are the purest

And their spirits will never be broke

And they go right on with their noble crusade

Of teaching folk songs to the folk

Van Ronk was skeptical about the politics of the folk revival, not least its romance with America. “There is this social patriotism running though all of them, but really less in Dylan. It makes me sick, because I’m an internationalist myself. I don’t think the American people are any special repository of goodness and duty, nor are they a special repository of evil.” Van Ronk’s little anti-Stalinist songbook included a revision of Woody Guthrie’s anthem surprisingly close in sprit to the two excised verses of the original 1940 composition:

This land is their land, it is not our land

From their rich apartments to their Cadillac carland

From their Wall Street office to their Hollywood Starland

This land is not for you and me.

The “America” of the popular front had resurfaced in the folk revival of the late fifties and early sixties. But superimposed over its legacy was the ubiquitous Cold War liberal narrative of social progress, of the rational superiority and inexorable spread of “American values.” What was assumed by this narrative was assumed by the young people entering the folk revival. It was their starting point. This liberal faith in “American ideals” had a more directly formative impact on these young people’s consciousness than the heritage of the thirties and forties, which they had to seek out (to the disaffected minority, it was the seeking out that made it attractive). For them the search for an alternative America was less politically programmatic than it was for Seeger or Lomax, and owed much to the rising discontents of the new consumer society. Smothered beneath the vapidly smiling billboards and the cornucopia of household goods and televisions sets there must be, they believed—prompted simultaneously by faith in and disaffection with their native land—another America, a truer and more admirable America. Talking to Izzy Young in October 1961, the still unknown Dylan claimed, “I can offer songs that tell something of this America. No foreign songs. The songs of the land that aren’t offered over TV or radio and very few records. . . .”⁴²

What Van Ronk identified as “the social patriotism” of the folk revival could be heard in its routine appeals to American values and traditions, its dogged attempts to construct an idealized American “people” free of their rulers’ sins. In the broader political discourse of the era it wore many guises: the notion that America is the embodiment of an idea, universal and cleansed of ethnicity, the belief that America enjoys a special destiny among nations, the assumption that America is somehow the theater of the human soul, in which all human traits and capacities stand naked. It was a package that weighed heavily on the activists and the folksingers, including Dylan, as they began their journey through the sixties.

Asked to explain the rise of the folk revival, Van Ronk said “it was all part and parcel of the big left turn middle-class college students were making. . . . So we all owe it to Rosa Parks.”⁴³ More precisely, they owed it all to the student sit-in movement launched by four young African-Americans at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. Within weeks the movement had spread to other cities, notably Nashville, and at a conference of the new activists held in Raleigh in April, SNCC was formed, committed to smashing Jim Crow through nonviolent direct action. In its early years it was saturated in an ethic of personal moral witness and defined its mission in quasi-religious terms. It was also, from the outset, more militant than the other civil rights groups and more immersed in the grass roots. “We did go out and live and suffer with the everyday people,” John Lewis recalled.⁴⁴ The black students brought together by SNCC were new and unexpected agents of social transformation. In the beginning, they had no institutional base and no support or recognition from the media. Nonetheless, their initiatives immutably altered the political landscape. They redrew the boundaries of the possible. They tore the veil from American society and revealed the power of mass action. Everything that happened subsequently in America in the sixties emanates from their movement. Dylan, the folk revival, and the youth culture in general were all transformed by its emergence, and their evolution was profoundly tied to its subsequent fate.

For all the efforts of Lomax, Hammond, and the Almanac Singers, music was rarely more than an occasional accompaniment to the social movements of the thirties and forties. But in the southern United States in the early sixties, song came into its own. It was no longer an intermission in the serious politics; it was a motivator, an explainer, and as much a binding force as ideology or program. Above all, it was a weapon in the ceaseless battle against white terror that had to be waged town by town throughout the South. “The fear down here is tremendous,” SNCC field secretary Phyllis Martin explained. “I didn’t know whether I’d be shot at or stoned or what. But when the singing started I forgot all that.”⁴⁵

Song took on a special importance in the civil rights movement because of the African-American musical tradition, with its wealth of collective expressions of suffering and celebration, as well as the conscious efforts of political activists, black and white, to place music at the service of the movement. The insurgents adopted left-wing standards—“The Hammer Song,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Which Side Are You On?”—as well as fitting familiar R&B and pop tunes with new topical lyrics. Ray Charles’s “I’m Movin’ On” became “Jim Crow ’s Movin’ On;” Little Willie John’s “Leave My Kitten Alone” became “Leave Segregation Alone.” But most of all, they plundered the gospel tradition.⁴⁶

“We Shall Overcome” was derived from Charles Tindley’s gospel song “I’ll Overcome Some Day” (1900), whose melody has the same nineteenth-century spiritual base as “No More Auction Block” (a critical song for Dylan), and harks back to the work songs of the southern plantations. Pete Seeger tells the story of the song’s evolution:

In 1946, several hundred employees of the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, South Carolina were on strike. They sang on the picket line to keep up their spirits. Lucille Simmons started singing the song on the picket line and changed one important word from I to we. Zilphia Horton learned it when a group of strikers visited the Highlander Folk School, the Labor Education Center in Tennessee. She taught it to me and we published it as “We Shall Overcome” in our songletter, People’s Songs Bulletin, in 1952. I taught it to Guy Carawan. . . . Guy introduced the song to the founding convention of SNCC in North Carolina [in 1960]. It swept the country.⁴⁷

The Highlander Folk Center, founded by radical Christians in the thirties, functioned as a training ground, retreat, and political workshop for the labor and civil rights movements. It was one of the few places in the South where blacks and whites were encouraged to meet and organize together. As a result, it was under constant attack. Billboards went up around the south displaying a picture of Martin Luther King at Highlander with the caption Communist Training School. The House Un-American Activities Committee held a series of hearings into Highlander’s alleged role in subverting the American way.⁴⁸

Patient, undaunted, and far-seeing, Highlander launched an early outreach project teaching literacy skills to blacks who wanted to pass the voter registration tests. One of its first schools was organized in the Sea Islands off the coast of Charleston. (The islands were home to many of the tobacco workers who had adapted “I’ll Overcome.”) In 1956, at a class on John’s Island, Guy Carawan, a white folksinger and activist, sang an old spiritual already favored in the labor movement: “Keep Your Hand on the Plow, Hold On.” A local woman, Alice Wine, told him that she knew a different chorus—“Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” In the coming years, the song was reworked by many hands, and emerged as one of the major anthems of the movement. ⁴⁹

This lyric transition from spiritual to secular, individual to collective, passivity to activism was, in part, the work of particular individuals engaged in concrete social struggles. It was a transition involving personal and political interaction between the Sea Islands, Highlander, and the sit-ins and freedom rides.

The new anthems from the front lines of the civil rights struggle in the South quickly received a hearing in New York. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC published volumes of them. In late 1960, Folkways released a Nashville Sit-In album compiled by Guy Carawan and the Highlander people, featuring the refashioned “We Shall Overcome,” and followed it up with 1961: We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins. Folkways may have been a small, specialist label, but even so, never before had the music of resistance been recorded and disseminated so instantaneously. Both of these records would have been known to Dylan, who in any case had heard the songs at hootenannies and benefits.

During the winter of 1961-62, the city of Albany, in southwest Georgia, witnessed one of the most bitter and costly battles of the early civil rights years. Wave after wave of protest action resulted in nearly a thousand blacks jailed, but no tangible victories. However, in this struggle, large numbers of older blacks joined the students, and singing acquired a new centrality. “The harmonies and intensities of naked voices became a trademark of the Albany movement,” wrote historian Taylor Branch. Among the songs that sustained the Albany community in its trials were “Oh Freedom,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and the defiant “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.” All were featured on an LP, Freedom in the Air—Albany, Georgia, produced by Alan Lomax and Guy Carawan for Vanguard in 1962.

Out of the Albany campaign emerged the SNCC Freedom Singers—among them, the nineteen-year-old Bernice Johnson, who was studying music at the local state college. As a result of her role in the protests, Johnson was expelled from college and fired from her job. She plunged full-time into the movement and married SNCC organizer Cordell Reagon, also a member of the Freedom Singers. (As Bernice Johnson Reagon, she later founded the female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.) Looking back on the Albany experience, she recalled the stylistic changes the freedom songs underwent as they were taken up by a genuine mass movement:

A lot of the older people in the Albany movement were entrenched in older black cultural tradition and not as much into the black culture you’ll find in the colleges—rhythm and blues and arranged spirituals. A lot of the sit-in songs were out of the rhythm and blues idiom or the arranged spiritual idiom. Those songs, as they went through Albany, Georgia, got brought back to the root level of black choral traditional music.⁵⁰

From Albany, the Freedom Singers carried the message far and wide. They sang in halls and churches and streets and jails. They also sang on northern college campuses, where they became, in Julian Bond’s words, SNCC’s “public face.” They used the songs to explain the movement to an audience bred, for the most part, in relative comfort and at a safe distance from the cruelties of Jim Crow. They provided, in Johnson Reagon’s phrase, “a singing newspaper,” simultaneously raising funds and consciousness. Dylan met them during their visits to New York in 1962. Johnson Reagon sang at the Carnegie Hall hootenanny at which Dylan premiered “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

The freedom songs, more even than the example of Guthrie, inspired Dylan to adapt traditional material to new ends, specifically the ends of political intervention. It was the great participatory drama of the civil rights movement that infused Dylan, and others, with the desire, confidence, and capacity to make the old traditions anew, as Alan Lomax had demanded. It also stirred deeper longings. “Singing voiced the basic position of the movement, of taking action on your life,” said Johnson Reagon. That mingling of the movement, the songs and the lure of self-fulfilment unleashed the creative energies of the folk revival and its major artist.

In their attempts to exercise their basic rights in a peaceful and dignified manner, the black youth of the South were met by violent reaction, often supported by state agencies. Vincent Harding wrote of the inner cost of this experience: “Every time they smashed away some obstacle to black freedom, and equality, another larger, newly perceived hindrance loomed before them, challenging the last ounce of their strength and their spirit.” This dynamic of aspiration and frustration, hope and anger informs Dylan’s music throughout the protest period, and haunts it for years after.

The Congress of Racial Equality had been founded in 1942 by a small group of Gandhian socialists, among them A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin. In 1947, the group launched the Journey of Reconciliation, an early attempt to desegregate interstate public transport by nonviolent direct action. Nearly extinguished in the fifties, CORE chapters in the northern cities reemerged in the wake of the sit-ins in the South. In late 1961 the organization relaunched the journey of reconciliation as the freedom rides, which met with well-publicized violence as they made their way south. Along with SNCC (based mainly in the South), CORE was the organization for people who wanted to do something at the grass roots, who wanted to participate directly in social change. Unburdened by Stalinism and Cold War liberalism, self-consciously interracial, it drew in increasing numbers of young activists, both black and white.

One of them was Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend, who booked the unknown singer into a CORE benefit gig to be held in February 1962. Dylan decided to write something for the occasion. The result was “The Death of Emmett Till,” his first protest song. Dropping by the Folklore Center, he boasted to Izzy Young that it was “the best thing I’ve ever written” (not saying much at the time). Two weeks later, he sang it on WBAI, to an enthusiastic response from program host Cynthia Gooding. Dylan never released the song and soon dismissed it as “bullshit.”⁵¹ It is certainly heavy-handed and sappy (its final verse is an excruciating example of the social patriotism Van Ronk decried). But the choice of subject was an interesting one. In 1956, at the age of fourteen, the Chicago-based Till had been brutally murdered by racists while on a visit to Mississippi. Dylan was born in the same year as Till, as was Muhammad Ali, who often cited the Till murder as a critical moment in the formation of his own racial consciousness. It was also pivotal in the life of Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi who investigated the case and watched in helpless horror as the perpetrators walked free.

From the beginning, Dylan had little interest in dreams of interracial harmony or paeans to patiently born suffering. What spurs his writing is racist violence, the brutality and madness of the white backlash. In 1961, Dylan regularly performed a version of Lord Buckley’s satirical rant, “Black Cross,” about an intelligent black man murdered by idiot whites. He followed “Emmett Till” with “The Ballad of Donald White,” the life story of a black man speaking from death row. “They killed him because he couldn’t find no room in life,” Dylan explained. “They killed him and when they did I lost some of my room in my life. When are some people gonna wake up and see that sometimes people aren’t really their enemies, but their victims?”⁵²

In the two years following “Emmett Till,” some 200 original compositions poured from Dylan’s pen, including the protest songs that made his name. He dealt with race, war, class, and social change itself. He wrote about poverty, violence, outcasts, prisoners, friendship, and love. Because Dylan so decisively and rapidly repudiated his protest songs, critics and biographers have been tempted to dismiss them as simplistic and derivative, somehow not the “real Dylan.” But these songs are not only an immense achievement in their own right, they are the foundation of Dylan’s subsequent evolution. And they are as personal—as deeply felt, as much an expression of the artist’s personality—as anything else he wrote. That’s one reason they still carry a powerful charge.

There was nothing new in setting topical lyrics to familiar or traditional tunes. Black soldiers in the Civil War did it with “John Brown’s Body.” In the 1880s, miners rewrote “The Vacant Chair” (about the Lincoln assassination) as “The Miners’ Lifeguard”; the IWW turned “Just Before the Battle Mother” (a Civil War ballad) into “I’m Too Old to Be a Scab.” Joe Hill, the master of the art—he remade “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” as “The Preacher and the Slave”—explained his thinking:

A song is learned by heart and repeated over and over, and if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.⁵³

An echo of that patronizing populism can be heard in the Almanac Singers’ advice to “sing the truth as simply as you can and repeat it as many times as it has to be repeated.” Dylan’s approach was different. He wasn’t out to educate or agitate, but to participate and to express himself. As he explained in the Newport Folk Festival program of 1963:

I can’t sing “John Johanna”^f cause it’s his story an’ his people’s story—

I gotta sing “With God on My Side” cause it’s my story an’ my people’s story—

Dylan arrived as a political actor with knowledge and ideas gleaned largely from records. The songs led him to the politics and the politics unlocked his songwriting gifts. The struggles over equality and peace unfolding around him provided an objective correlative for the feelings coursing through him. In his study of the Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus criticizes the protest songs on the grounds that there are “no individuals in them,” only social types. Not so: they are filled with the nascent individuality of Dylan himself. Remember that he was composing his bittersweet, love-hate songs—“Don’t Think Twice,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “One Too Many Mornings”—at the same time and in much the same artistic vein as his “finger pointin’” songs: moodily aggrieved and tenderly utopian at the same time.

Later, Dylan liked to claim that he was only “jumping into the scene to be heard” and irritated Joan Baez by telling her he wrote “Masters of War” for the money. Biographers who take this claim seriously underestimate Dylan’s impish perversity—and misjudge the context. In the years during which Dylan wrote his protest songs, the overwhelming majority of white American youth subscribed to opinions that ranged only within the narrow band between deeply conservative and cautiously liberal. The politics he embraced in these songs were fashionable only among a small minority. That minority, however, was linked to a movement on the rise. This movement gave Dylan a stance from which to view a confusing world, a musical outlet for his inchoate emotions, and an appreciative audience. In these plainspoken democratic songs, Dylan was writing for and taking his place within a vanguard. There were easier ways to get attention or make a buck.

These topical songs have proved surprisingly durable. That they served in the first instance as instruments of self-expression for a particular young individual makes them no less authentic as expressions of a collective experience. On the contrary, Dylan’s songs live inside the historical moment in a way that more programmatic efforts do not. As a result, they live beyond that moment. They rise out of their era and speak to ours, not least because of Dylan’s hard-edged, increasingly radical political perspective.

As a teenager in Hibbing, Bob Dylan had been struck by the surreally inhuman logic of the fallout shelter boom—and in this he was not alone. In the late fifties, a small but significant section of American youth was getting worried about the bomb. In 1959, a Student Peace Union was formed, based on a rejection of both superpower blocs. Within a year it had chapters on one hundred campuses and boasted 3,000 national members. In the spring of 1960, to the surprise of the media and veterans of the Left alike, 1,000 New Yorkers—mostly college students—publicly defied the city’s annual civil defense drill, which they found both farcical and horrifying. Their anxieties were not assuaged when the new president, elected on a pledge to close a fictitious “missile gap” with the Soviets, boosted military spending and in April 1961 authorized the CIA-organized invasion of Cuba. In early 1962, a student march against nuclear testing drew five thousand to Washington—the biggest protest march in the capital since the thirties, and a harbinger of much that was to come. ⁵⁴

Around the same time, shortly after he completed “Emmett Till,” Dylan told Izzy Young that he wanted to write “something about fallout and bomb testing.” But he “didn’t want it to be a slogan song. Too many of the protest songs are bad music. . . . The bomb songs, especially, are usually awkward and with bad music.” On February 22, Young wrote in his notebook: “Bob Dylan just rolled in and wants to sing a new song about fallout shelters [called] ‘Let Me Die in My Footsteps.’ . . .”^g

The song is a marvelously determined, fresh-faced refusal to take part in the fraud of civil defense and the larger insanity of the nuclear weapons race. More than that, it uses a visceral reaction to a perverse social policy to make an argument that is both wider in political scope and more intimately personal. It sounds themes that reappear in Dylan’s work over many years and in many guises. The bomb shelters are symptoms of a life-fearing mentality: “some people thinkin’ that the end is close by / ’Stead of learnin’ to live they are learning to die.” The nuclear threat was part of the strategy through which we are ruled: “There’s always been people that have to cause fear / They’ve been talking of the war now for many long years.” And it was also the ultimate expression of a profoundly wrong turn in human development:

In February 1962, Pete Seeger took Dylan to meet Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, who were in the midst of launching their new “topical song magazine,” Broadside. Cunningham and Friesen were products of the labor battles of the thirties, had been involved with the Almanac Singers, and had preserved their political commitments through the isolation and calumny of the McCarthy years. Dylan played them a new composition, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a satire on anticommunist paranoia—which duly appeared in print in the new magazine’s first issue. Some have seen this episode as an example of the ever-cunning Dylan ingratiating himself with potential patrons. The boy was on the make in the Village and he wanted the veteran leftists’ support. Whatever truth there may be in that speculation, what is certain is that at this time defying and deriding anticommunism—not only a right-wing shibboleth but also one of the foundation stones of liberal support for the Cold War—would have been regarded by most as a serious career risk. And all Sis and Gordon had to offer was publication in a new, noncommercial, small circulation magazine. For the next year, Dylan attended the monthly Broadside songwriters’ meetings and contributed twenty-nine original “topical” songs to the magazine, which also published new work by Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Len Chandler, and Peter La Farge (whom Dylan considered the most skillful of the pack).⁵⁵

“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” sizzles with comic disbelief at the delusional antics of the red-hunters. Dylan had lessons in the stifling absurdities of McCarthyism close to hand, in the fate of Woody Guthrie’s associates. Seeger himself had been indicted in 1956 for contempt of Congress—in refusing to answer questions, he cited the First and not the Fifth Amendment—and in 1961 had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; he was technically out on appeal when he took Dylan to meet the Broadside founders. His case was finally dismissed by the courts later that year. Nonetheless, Seeger was blacklisted by Hootenanny, ABC’s attempt to cash in on the folk revival. As a result, Baez, Dylan, and others refused to appear on the program. In 1963, when Dylan turned up at a CBS studio to rehearse for his first national network TV appearance—on The Ed Sullivan Show—he played the John Birch satire. He was asked to play something else. He refused. His appearance was canceled.⁵⁶

At the time, both the peace and civil rights movements were racked by debates about relations with Communists or people alleged to be Communists. Martin Luther King was cajoled into dissociating himself from some of his closest advisers because of their alleged links with the Communist Party, past or present. The Student Peace Union was under internal and external pressure (the latter in the form of media-hungry Congressional committees) to repudiate not only “communism,” but also any individual with ties to any form of organized Marxism. But the radical youth who formed the cadre of SNCC, and others who would soon form the cadre of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were increasingly convinced that McCarthyism was a far greater danger to freedom than any Communist conspiracy. To them, the search for reds under the bed had become ludicrous—and Dylan gave expression to that nascent contempt in his talking blues. Already, in 1960, students had disrupted a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in San Francisco. Later in the decade, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and others debunked the proceedings through parody and pantomime. In place of the deliberately sober and solemn approach of the leftists who had faced the inquisition in the forties and fifties, Dylan and his contemporaries dismissed the entire witch-hunting enterprise with caustic mockery. In so doing, they shook off a crippling political inhibition, and embarked on a journey toward a more all-embracing critique of their country and its role in the world.

Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” somewhere in the Village—backstage at Gerde’s or in a café opposite the Gaslight—at the beginning of April 1962. He introduced an early performance with the caveat: “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. . . . I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.”⁵⁷ Though it was to be more than a year before recordings of the song were released, it spread rapidly through the folk set. In May, Dylan sang it on WBAI accompanied by Pete Seeger and Sis Cunningham. Weeks later, the lyrics were plastered across the cover of the sixth issue of Broadside. By word of mouth, it soon acquired the status of underground sing-along standard.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” slipped easily into the folk revival repertoire: its musical formula and lyrical style were already familiar. The melody, as Seeger was the first to spot and as Dylan has acknowledged, is in part a reworking of “No More Auction Block (Many Thousands Gone)”—a song first sung by escaped slaves in Canada before the Civil War. Paul Robeson performed and recorded it; Odetta picked it up from him and Dylan picked it up from her. When he sang “Auction Block” in the Village in 1962, he gave it a fierce, haunted quality not found in the stately lamentations of Robeson or Odetta.

In retrospect, “Blowin’ in the Wind” seems timeless, abstract, naive. But in context its glancing references to the great social challenges of the day—racism and war—carried a powerful topical punch. Listeners had no doubt what Dylan was referring to when he asked when the “cannon balls” would be “forever banned” or how long it would be before “some people . . . are allowed to be free.” The song is delicately poised between hope and impatience. It is filled with a sense that a long-awaited transformation is both imminent and frustratingly out of reach. The ambiguous refrain—“the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind”—gropes for the unnameable. In this it touches a mood explored in Dylan’s work through the rest of the decade. The “answer” is here, and not here; it exists, a force felt all around us, but remains elusive.

When Peter, Paul and Mary’s smooth and earnest cover version was released in June 1963, it sold 300,000 copies in two weeks, making it the fastest selling single in Warner Brothers’ history. This unexpected intrusion of social consciousness into the pop charts^h took pundits by surprise, and the media ruminated over the significance of the latest youth phenomenon and its unkempt troubadour hero. But there was no mystery to the song’s success. In the weeks before the Peter, Paul and Mary single was released, U.S. television screens had been filled with images from Birmingham, Alabama, where thousands of marching black children had been attacked by police with dogs and fire hoses. “How many times can a man turn his head / and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” The same insistent demand that now, not tomorrow, is the time to tackle injustice, fills the open letter Martin Luther King wrote from his Birmingham jail cell.

Peter, Paul and Mary were only the first of many to cover “Blowin’ in the Wind.” One of the artists who tried his hand with the song was Sam Cooke, the gospel star turned crossover teen idol. Cooke covered the song as part of his ceaseless efforts to fashion a mass, multiracial audience; ironically, for him, Dylan’s brave new song was a commercial opportunity—it was already familiar to a section of the white audience he wanted to reach.⁵⁸ But he was also drawn to the song because of his growing political engagement, and lamented to friends that it had to be a white boy who first dared talk about these realities on the jukeboxes. The success of “Blowin’ in the Wind” helped inspire Cooke’s own composition, the magnificent “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the first masterpiece of socially aware soul, written in late 1964. Even in 1966, when the sixteen-year-old Stevie Wonder decided to record “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Motown bosses worried that their prodigy would be tainted by political controversy. Wonder’s zestful rendition topped the R&B charts, and in the years to come the politics of race and war would become ever more explicit in black popular music.

Dylan himself never saw the song as a rallying cry but as a challenge—to the establishment and the movement, to the apathetic and the active. In the notes he wrote for Broadside in 1962, he declared:

Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is, but oh, I don’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper, it’s got to come down some time. . . . But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know it . . . and then it flies away again. . . . I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those who turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many wars. . . . You people over 21 should know better . . . cause after all, you’re older and smarter.

Soon after “Blowin’ in the Wind” made its way around the coffeehouses, Dave Van Ronk told the song’s author it was “incredibly dumb.” Dylan may have agreed, because within a year he dropped the tune from live performances—except for mandatory sing-alongs at folk festivals and the March on Washington. In 1971, when Dylan—after a long hiatus in his public support for good causes—appeared at the Concert for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison, the former Beatle suggested he sing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” An irritated Dylan asked Harrison whether he still performed “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” But the primitive Beatles classic did not carry the political resonance of the primitive Dylan classic, and Harrison was right to see its appositeness to a concert whose central purpose was a moral appeal to the comfortable and affluent to assist the poor and disaster-stricken—not tomorrow, but today. This was confirmed by the audience response when Dylan, yielding to Harrison, but seizing the moment, belted out the familiar number from the stage.⁵⁹

In June of 1962, the UAW-owned FDR Camp at Port Huron, north of Detroit, hosted the annual convention of Students for a Democratic Society. The then little-known SDS was the student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), a venerable social democratic think tank long committed to a stringent anticommunism. After five days of meetings, the fifty-nine delegates—ostensibly representing SDS’s two thousand student contacts—adopted the Port Huron Statement, which was to become the most widely circulated and influential manifesto of the New (white, American) Left, though it was created under the auspices of the old. Spurred by the protests against the bomb, the exponential growth of the civil rights movement, and many of the same discontents that drew young people to the folk revival, its authors consciously sought to map out a vision of American social change that would ring true for a new student generation.⁶⁰

The statement eschewed the vocabulary of the old Left. The words capitalism, imperialism, class, and revolution were nowhere to be found. Its specific proposals for reform were modest. It envisioned working in a renewed Democratic Party. But it was saturated with intimations that deeper and more radical change would be needed. “America rests in national stalemate,” the students declared. “America is without community, impulse, without the inner momentum necessary. . . . Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.”

The critique of American society in the Port Huron Statement was as much cultural as political. Speaking as young people to young people, the authors portrayed themselves as a generation shadowed by the bomb. They lamented “the decline of utopia and hope” but saw signs that “students are breaking the crust of apathy.” Unlike the old Left, they stressed individual freedom and creativity, which they argued were being stifled by the conformist, bureaucratic order of postwar America. “The goal of man and society should be human independence . . . finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic . . .” Politics itself would have to be redefined. Its function would be “bringing people out of isolation and into community.” Tactics, strategy, and ideology were tied together under the ringing rubric of “participatory democracy.”

The moment that created “Blowin’ in the Wind” also created the Port Huron Statement, which shares the song’s mixture of idealism and subdued impatience, as well as its longing for a bigger answer to the growing questions posed by the events of the day—the civil rights movement, the nuclear threat, and the bland complacency of the cultural mainstream. “We have no formulas, no closed theories . . .” the statement cautioned. Skeptical of both the liberal and Communist traditions, severed from organized labor by the Cold War, and emboldened by their own experience of material comfort, they paraded their innocent openness. Year zero had been declared on the American Left. It was a historical moment that was to shape Dylan’s trajectory in the coming years as well as the evolution of many others, not least SDS itself.

As a result of events at Port Huron, the young SDS leaders were upbraided by their elder LID sponsors. It was an article of faith for them that members of Communist and “totalitarian” groups had no place in the democratic left. Yet at the outset of the Port Huron meeting, the student delegates had voted to grant observer status to a member of a Communist Party youth organization. The LID veterans were also worried that the statement was too even-handed in its denunciation of U.S. and Soviet foreign policies. Worse yet, it openly opposed what it called “an unreasoning anticommunism.” The SDS people couldn’t see what the problem was. A generation gap had opened.

In July 1962, Dylan prefaced the Freewheelin’ recording of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” by saying: “Unlike most of the songs nowadays that are being written uptown in Tin Pan Alley—that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays—this wasn’t written up there, this was written somewhere down in the USA.” It’s a reworking of Guthrie’s Rainbow Room jibe, a claim of authenticity, and a restatement of the Lomax credo that true folk music reflected American reality. But the reality that Dylan writes about in this off-the-cuff number includes the TV figures of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, sports cars (“I don’t have no sports car / And I don’t even care to have one”), and a final admonition by Dylan to an imagined acolyte (at this stage he had none):

You want to be like me
Pull out your six-shooter
And rob every bank you can see
Tell the judge I said it was all right

Dylan played and wrote songs about outlaws of all kinds, and frequently imagined himself as one. But already in “Bob Dylan’s Blues” he displaces outlawry into a satirical realm. This slim one-and-a-half joke song may be based on a venerable blues, but it hints at a different world, one in which the authentic is contradictory and American reality frustratingly elusive.

It’s often claimed that Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in response to the Cuban missile crisis. Dylan himself seems to believe it. “I was in Bleecker Street in New York,” he recalled some years later. “People sat around wondering if it was the end and so did I. . . . it was a song of desperation. What could we do? Could we control men on the verge of wiping us out? The words came fast, very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.”⁶¹ Nonetheless, the fact remains that Dylan premiered “Hard Rain” at a Carnegie Hall hootenanny organized by Pete Seeger on September 22, 1962, some weeks before the U₂ spotted the Soviet missiles on Cuban soil. It was only on October 22 that Kennedy announced his naval blockade and the crisis erupted in the headlines.

None of which makes “Hard Rain” any less relevant to the missile crisis. The audience at Carnegie Hall seemed impressed by the new song, and Seeger himself quickly incorporated it into his repertoire. For these people, and for Dylan, the possibility of nuclear extinction had been in the air for some time. Dylan was able to write “Hard Rain” “before the event” not because he was a prophetic mystic, but because he was a political artist in a political milieu with an astute sense of the prevailing anxieties. The urgency and despair out of which Dylan says he wrote the song were undeniably real.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is the first of Dylan’s songs to be comprised of a series of disconnected, enigmatic images (an indulgence in obscurity to which he would not return for two years). The song borrows its quizzical refrain from “Lord Randal,” a Childⁱ ballad (“Oh, where have you been, Lord Randal, my son?”) and is driven by an insistent if rough-edged rhythm that anticipates his later turn to rock ’n’ roll. The singer’s vision in this song is panoptic: evoking global destruction (“seven sad forests” and “a dozen dead oceans”) as well as more metaphorical disasters (“ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,” “a newborn babe with wild wolves all around it”). He hears not only “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” but also “the song of a poet who died in the gutter.” Finally, he ventures out into a postapocalypse landscape that is also the reality of the here and now:

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number

At Carnegie Hall, Dylan introduced his audience to another new song, “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” the tale of a man driven to murder and suicide by poverty. (The melody is derived from the traditional “Pretty Polly.”) The language was as pared down as that of “Hard Rain” was luxuriant, but like “Hard Rain” it beats with a stark, bleak terror. This song has been disparaged as “hysterical” but that’s what it needs to be; it’s the hysteria of poverty and powerlessness. Dylan’s presentation of the self-destruction of the oppressed makes the blood run cold. “Hollis Brown” touches the tragic monumentality of the folk ballads it’s based on. Unlike them, it was written not for people who knew poverty all too well but for people who scarcely acknowledged it existed. Dylan was writing about what Michael Harrington called the “other America,” about the casualties of class that crossed racial boundaries.

Weeks after writing “Hard Rain” and “Hollis Brown,” Dylan returned to the theme of racial violence with “Oxford Town,” his response to that autumn’s events at the University of Mississippi. When James Meredith sought enrollment as Ole Miss’s first black student, whites across the South reacted in horror. In a display of reactionary defiance, Governor Ross Barnett blocked Meredith’s path. The Kennedy administration was forced to intervene. Federal agents escorted Meredith to his dormitory. In the most violent student disturbances of the decade, several thousand white college boys (pumped up by the regional media and the governor himself, and assisted by highway patrolmen and local police) besieged the campus, attacked the federal marshals guarding Meredith, slashed tires, hurled Molotov cocktails, bricks and lead pipes, and fired shotguns. “Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon,” Dylan sings, accurately— and another 28 were shot and 160 wounded. In the end, the Kennedy administration deployed 23,000 troops—three times the population of Oxford—to subdue the white resistance to Meredith.⁶² Dylan’s song is plainspoken and moving, if one-dimensional. He seems to have played it live only once—on his sole visit to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1991.⁶³

After “Oxford Town,” Dylan returned to an antimilitarist theme in “John Brown,” the tale of an innocent sent “off to war to fight on a foreign shore” (the song does not appear on any of Dylan’s sixties albums, but it became a staple of his live performances in the nineties, along with other antiwar material). The young soldier’s proud mother dispatches him with the advice: “Do what the captain says, lots of medals you will get.” She brags to the neighbors “about her son with his uniform and gun, / And these things you called a good old-fashioned war.” And Dylan hammers home the ghastly refrain: “Oh! Good old-fashioned war!”

Dylan’s song is less wistful and more graphic in its account of the costs of war. When the soldier returns from overseas and is met at the station by his mother, she is shocked at his condition:

Oh his face was all shot up and his hand was all blown off

And he wore a metal brace around his waist.

He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she did not know,

While she couldn’t even recognize his face!

And a terrified, indignant Dylan wails in refrain: “Oh! Lord! Just like mine!” Finally, Brown recalls how “through the thunder rolling and stink” it came to him that he “was just a puppet in a play.” In “John Brown” Dylan told the story of Ron Kovic—disabled Vietnam veteran, antiwar crusader and author of Born on the Fourth of July—some seven years before Kovic lived through the nightmare and drew the lesson of the song from his own experience. The writing in “John Brown” is sometimes cumbersome, the naturalism is crude, and the hysteria less disciplined than in “Hollis Brown,” but in its repugnance at jingoism, glancing references to class, filial rage, and anguished opening to an internationalist vision, the song shows Dylan working to synthesize something new, a contemporary folk music that was emotionally raw and politically uncompromising. In “John Brown” social patriotism has begun to go sour. Not long after writing the song, Dylan would make his first trip abroad. Albert Grossman had somehow persuaded the BBC to cast Dylan in a small role in an original drama, and to pay his fare across the Atlantic.

In April 1951, the Communist Party of Great Britain organized a conference in London on “the American threat to British culture.” That threat emanated, it was argued, from the drive by American big business to foist “the American way of life”—greed, violence, and racism—on the British people, not least through the popularity of Hollywood films and “commercial dance music.” The party condemned a number of films—Kiss of Death, The Set-Up, White Heat, Brute Force, all now considered noir classics—for promoting sadism. The BBC was attacked for preferring American over British songwriters. American popular music played on “the hopes and frustrations of the people . . . brushing aside the idea of struggle.” It was a music of “wish fulfillment” and “sloppy eroticism,” “drugging the minds of the people,” most worryingly, young people: “Our youngsters are being brought up to know no other films or songs than American. They are being encouraged to wear American clothes, speak with American accents, ape American ways.” The antidote to this poison was “to popularize and re-discover our cultural heritage . . . to develop a popular, progressive culture based on our traditions.”⁶⁴

If the aim was to reach out to coming generations of working-class British youth, the party’s antagonism to American popular culture was to prove a major misjudgment. Ironically, the party itself, in its turn to folk culture, helped foster a growing interest in American musical idioms. The Communist Party’s early Ballads and Blues events—which an expatriate Alan Lomax helped to organize—were refreshingly eclectic, featuring both British folk and American jazz and blues artists, not least Big Bill Broonzy, who had also graced Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing gig in 1938. As Raphael Samuel recalled, the early British folk revival displayed a relaxed and innovative attitude toward heritage. It broke from the conservative pastoralism of the old Cecil Sharp^j societies and preferred smoky pubs to concert halls.⁶⁵

It was out of this new interest in old American music—especially New Orleans jazz—that the skiffle fad emerged in the mid-fifties. Lonnie Donegan had a hit with a thumping version of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line” and across the country teenagers emulated him—which was easy enough, because the musical elements of skiffle were rudimentary. When he arrived in London in 1955, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was startled to find these familiar tunes clothed in English accents; he concluded that English skiffle wasn’t “worth shit.” But Alan Lomax disagreed.

At first it seemed very strange to me to hear these songs, which I had recorded from convicts in the prisons of the south, coming out of the mouths of young men who had suffered, comparatively speaking, so little. But I soon realized that these young people felt themselves to be in a prison—composed of class-and-caste lines, the shrinking British empire, the dull job, the lack of money—things like these. They were shouting at the prison walls, like so many Joshuas at the walls of Jericho.⁶⁶

Lomax was prescient. Skiffle opened the door to a generation of British youth; it introduced them to the rhythmic enchantments and earthy realism of the African-American tradition. It was through skiffle that Lennon met McCartney. “This American-amalgamated, British-derived Africanized music has already filled a large vacuum in the musical life of urban Britain,” Lomax wrote. People were once again making their own music, and that was a phenomenon he always welcomed. Lomax urged the skifflers to continue their efforts, but warned them against indulging in “sophisticated chord progressions, like the jazz boys.” Instead, he advised them to “discover the song-tradition of Great Britain . . . Probably the richest in western Europe.”

During his stay in Britain, Lomax introduced Bert Lloyd (author of The Singing Englishman, an adventurous early Marxist essay in popular musicology) to Ewan MacColl, a working-class militant from Salford. MacColl had spent a decade as an actor and singer in left-wing theater companies but was now looking for a new approach to building a people’s culture. Following Lomax’s example, Lloyd and MacColl set about constructing a canon of working-class British folk music—shifting the focus from the feudal countryside to the industrial proletariat, and emphasizing a continuing tradition of protest from below. Lomax also introduced MacColl to Peggy Seeger, daughter of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. The meeting inspired MacColl to write the delicately haunting “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” and led to a partnership that ended only with MacColl’s death in 1989.^k

As the American challenge to homegrown music intensified, one wing of the folk movement became more purist. “I was convinced that we had a music that was just as vigorous as anything America had produced, and we should be pursuing some kind of national identity,” MacColl explained, “not just becoming an arm of American cultural imperialism.” Under the influence of MacColl and the Left, many Ballads and Blues clubs turned themselves into Singer’s Clubs, with policy rules governing what should and should not be performed. MacColl felt that “if the singer was English, then the songs should be from the English tradition”—which sparked off debates about the regional roots of English folk, not to mention its relationship to Irish, Scottish, and Welsh music. In 1957, there were said to be 1,500 Singer’s Clubs with 11,000 members. ⁶⁷

The big boost for the British folk revival came in the following year, with the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the first of the Aldermaston marches. These demonstrations were many times the size of the U.S. ban-the-bomb marches of the early sixties, and their political impact was much greater (they succeeded in making unilateral nuclear disarmament, briefly, an official Labour Party policy). They provided an impetus for the nascent New Left (the first of many) and a cradle of the sixties youth culture, as working-class Young Communists, university students, and footloose beatniks mingled in a common crusade and found a common interest in guitar-based music.

The British folk revival was more overtly politicized than its U.S. counterpart, and the influence of the organized Left, including the Communist Party, was significant. As in America, however, there was a conviction that folk music was the authentic voice of the oppressed and a refuge from the soullessness of commercial mass culture. “The clubs themselves seem to have served as some kind of refuge for the sociologically orphaned,” wrote Samuel, “the ex-working class from whose ranks the new generation of singers were largely recruited.”⁶⁸

When Pete Seeger toured Britain in 1961, he was impressed by the buoyancy of the folk movement and in particular by the new topical songwriting promoted by MacColl and Lloyd. He heard modern ballads for modern times—though always set to traditional tunes and traditional accompaniments—and on his return urged his American colleagues to follow the British example, which led to the launching of Broadside.

Dylan arrived in London in December 1962. He checked into the Mayfair, where the BBC had booked him a room, but felt uncomfortable in such plush surroundings (“I knew then what it is like to be a Negro,” he told Robert Shelton). He set off to the folk clubs, where he felt much more at home. Here he soaked up the contending schools of folk practice and the various political perspectives that lay behind them. He met and heard many of the younger singers, including Martin Carthy, who introduced Dylan to the original British sources of the Appalachian songs he knew from the work of Lomax and Harry Smith. “His time in England was actually crucial to his development,” said Carthy, “it had a colossal effect on him.”⁶⁹

Dylan reworked Carthy’s arrangement of “Scarborough Fair” into two of the best of his early love songs, “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Jean Ritchie’s version of “Nottamun Town”—an Appalachian adaptation of a song from an English mummers’ play—was refashioned into “Masters of War.” In the coming months “Lord Franklin” would become the prematurely nostalgic “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” “The Road and the Miles to Dundee” would become “The Walls of Red Wing,” which deals with the repressive conditions in a juvenile detention center. Most significantly, Dominic Behan’s “The Patriot Game” (itself derived from an old Appalachian tune) would give birth to “With God on Our Side.” Behan had written:

Come all you young rebels and list while I sing
For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.

It banishes fear with the speed of a flame
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

In London Dylan learned that Behan had taken his cue from Samuel Johnson’s definition of patriotism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel.” The idea clearly made an impression on him, and runs through his work from “With God on Our Side” to “Tombstone Blues.”^l But in London he told a British interviewer, “I don’t like singing to anybody but Americans. My songs say things. I sing them for people who know what I’m saying.” He took this chip-on-the-shoulder American identity into the heart of the London folk scene, won over some and antagonized many.

The Singer’s Club at the Pindar of Wakefield on Gray’s Inn Road was run by MacColl and Peggy Seeger and reflected their priorities. Dylan sang “Masters of War” and “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” MacColl and Seeger were not impressed. Strangely, Dylan was doing what MacColl wanted young singers to do: use old tunes to comment on current political realities. But there was, from the beginning, something about Dylan that MacColl could not accept. “I have watched with fascination the meteoric rise of this American idol,” MacColl told Sing Out! readers in 1965. “And I am still unable to see in him anything other than a youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth rate drivel . . . What poetry? The cultivated illiteracy of his topical songs or the embarrassing schoolboy attempt at free verse?”⁷⁰

Yet in the course of his visit to London (he also popped over to Paris), Dylan’s work took a decidedly political turn. When he met up with his friend, the novelist and songwriter Richard Fariña, toward the end of his time abroad, he told him: “Man, there’s things going on in this world you got to look at, right? You can’t pretend they ain’t happening. Man, I was in New York when that Cuba business came over the radio, and you think that don’t put something in your head? Man, you can keep on singing about Railroad Bill and Lemon Trees, or you can step out, right?”⁷¹ And when Dylan returned to New York he made a similar point to Shelton, “I need some more finger pointin’ songs . . . Cause that’s where my head’s at right now.”

The interchange between the English-speaking cultures on either side of the Atlantic was constant and complex throughout the decade. Without this mutual influence, it’s impossible to imagine the evolution of either British or American popular music, or the dissident subcultures that sprouted in both countries. The impact of African-American music on British youth was immeasurable, but there was also significant traffic in the opposite direction. A month after Dylan’s visit, “Please, Please Me,” the Beatles’ first hit, entered the British charts. It was a momentous development for which the British Communist Party, to name but one, found itself unprepared.

Both “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side” burst the boundaries of the soft-focus pacifism of previous antiwar songs. Both are concerned not merely with the imminence of war, but with its deeper causes, with the forces that promote and profit from fear and violence. Both are magnificently enraged and enduringly radical. Five years before students in large numbers were to take action against campus collusion with the Pentagon and the weapons industry, “Masters of War” unmasked the military-industrial complex:

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher

Dylan points the finger of guilt at the war-makers and the war-profiteers and jabs it in their faces. The song is dry, sparse, and unwavering in its indictment and its anger. The bare, archaic-sounding guitar chords hint at momentous tragedies past and to come, while the flat, steely voice speaks of hard lessons learned and not forgotten. Not least a lesson from Woody Guthrie: that the greatest criminals are those that “hide behind desks.” Enraged by the omnipotent, unaccountable manipulators who threaten to annihilate his world, Dylan once again asserts his right to speak out:

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Fully aware of his temerity in speaking out, he is nonetheless convinced of its urgent necessity. Paradoxically, the sense of impotence in the face of a prospective nuclear holocaust emboldened both Dylan and his generation. Confronted with such recklessness, there was no time to waste and nothing to lose. A voice had to be raised—if only to pronounce a curse. The climactic verse (which Joan Baez refused to sing) is morbidly unforgiving:

I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

That Dylan was no liberal even before he made his break with the liberals is confirmed by “With God on Our Side,” another composition of early 1963. Here he subjects the epic narrative of American history and national identity to an iconoclastic revision worthy of Malcolm X. Effacing himself in the first verse (“Oh my name it is nothin’ / My age it means less”), he notes that he was taught that “the land that I live in / Had God on its side.” He then embarks on a coruscating survey of the genocide and militarism engendered by this nationalist fundamentalism. “Oh the history books tell it / They tell it so well”—but they do not tell the truth: about the Indians, about the Spanish-American War and World War I, about the post-World War II rehabilitation of ex-Nazis. Dylan brings the story up to the minute, observing “I’ve learned to hate Russians / All through my whole life,” and spells out what this latest incarnation of the national mission means:

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side.

In defining the current nuclear competition with the Soviets as the most recent episode in a history of murder and hypocrisy, Dylan spews contempt on the liberal justifications for the Cold War and U.S. overseas interventions. In this song, Dylan expresses the embitterment of a generation of politically innocent young Americans who discovered with shock that the people they had been told were the good guys were actually something else entirely—the experience eloquently described by SDS president Carl Oglesby at a demonstration against the Vietnam War in October 1965: “Others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”⁷² In response to the growing horrors of Vietnam, more and more were to question their country’s historical record. The “social patriotism” that had inspired activists in the first half of the sixties came to seem naive or worse, and the radical analysis and uncompromising contempt of songs like “With God on Our Side” more truthful, politically and emotionally.

The Cold War and the bomb were always, for Dylan, as much a state of mind as a geopolitical reality. In the coming years, the ban-the-bomb movement would give way to the much larger anti-Vietnam War movement, which Dylan would shun. But the horror and absurdity of nuclear weapons competition, the insanity of a system that claimed “a world war can be won,” continued to haunt his music.

In April 1963, Dylan penned yet another song about the death of a black man. “Who Killed Davey Moore?”^m is a rapid response to the fatal outcome of Moore’s featherweight title fight against Sugar Ramos (Moore died on March 23; Dylan premiered the song on April 12.). It is a concise but sweeping analysis of the ethical complicity of a whole society in the (avoidable) death of a single man. The cock-robin refrain is used to nominate and expose the guilty. One by one, Dylan allows them to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Anyone familiar with boxing and its history will recognize all the routine rationalizations, as the referee, the crowd, the manager, the gamblers, and the boxing writers wash their hands of the dead boxer’s blood: “Boxing ain’t to blame, / There’s just as much danger in a football game . . . Fist fighting is here to stay, / It’s just the old American way.”

In the final verse he focuses on the winner of the fatal fight. Dylan tells us he “came here from Cuba’s shore / Where boxing ain’t allowed no more.” This line got a big cheer when Dylan debuted the song at his milestone Town Hall concert (an indication of the explicitly leftist identity that bound Dylan and his audience at this point). But neither Dylan nor the audience had got it quite right. Revolutionary Cuba did not ban boxing; on the contrary, in the coming years Cuba would produce a rich array of world-dominating boxing talent, from Teofilo Stevenson to Felix Savon. The vehicle for this sporting efflorescence was a planned program of state intervention and funding. What Cuba had banned was “professional boxing,” prizefighting. Despite the error, Dylan was wise enough to place money at the center of boxing’s ethical morass. “I hit him, yes, it’s true, / But that’s what I am paid to do.” And in its portrait of the complicity of spectators in the violence of the spectacle, of the individual in the corruption of his society, the song foreshadows the more ambitious work Dylan was to produce later in the decade.

Two weeks later, on May 2, four thousand black children marched through the city center demanding an end to Jim Crow. The subsequent police assault was broadcast worldwide. On May 10, Birmingham’s white authorities were forced to accept a deal with King and the movement. The victory renewed civil rights agitation across the South. In the ten weeks that followed there were 758 demonstrations and 14,733 arrests in 186 cities.⁷⁴

One of those cities was Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, where local NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was leading an increasingly militant fight against segregation.ⁿ “In the racial picture, things will never be as they were,” Evers warned a local television audience, as the sit-ins and arrests mounted, “History has reached a turning point, here and over the world.”⁷⁵ On the evening of June 11, President Kennedy told a nationwide TV audience that he too had come to believe that “a great change is at hand.” Under pressure from the actions in the South, and their impact in the North, Kennedy announced that he would send a major civil rights bill to Congress—a great triumph for the movement. Later that night, Evers returned home from one of the endless series of meetings through which that movement was sustained. As he stepped out of his car, he was shot to death by a hidden assassin. Three and half weeks later, on July 5, the twenty-one-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi, to give his support to a SNCC voter registration drive.

For decades, the black population in the Delta country around Greenwood had been terrorized by one of the most tyrannical white supremacist regimes in the South. It was considered impossible to organize these downtrodden rural workers, people who knew only powerlessness and isolation. Bob Moses, whose selfless dedication was already legendary among SNCC workers, had arrived there in the spring of 1962, determined to crack open the monolith.⁷⁶ In June of that year, he took his first batch of local volunteers to Highlander for training. Two months later, the SNCC office in Greenwood was besieged and ransacked. One of Moses’s new recruits, a sharecropper (and singer) named Fannie Lou Hamer, was punished for the crime of seeking to register to vote by being kicked off the plantation where she had lived for eighteen years.

In an attempt to starve out resistance, state officials blocked the distribution of federal food supplies in two Delta counties. On the brink of famine, the sharecroppers fought back. The turnouts for SNCC’s mass meetings grew, as did the numbers seeking to register. It was a show of black defiance unprecedented in the post-Reconstruction Delta. In February 1963, gunshots were fired at an SNCC worker sitting in a car on a country road. SNCC activists from around the country poured into Greenwood, including executive secretary Jim Forman, a onetime student activist from Chicago who had visited the South as a journalist and enlisted in the struggle. Throughout March 1963, amid shootings and arson attacks, Moses and Forman organized protests, marches, and meetings, and refused to scale down the voter registration challenges. Medgar Evers visited the town and was soon followed by Dick Gregory and reporters from the national press. Having been attacked by police dogs in the course of an attempt to register voters, eight SNCC workers, including Moses and Forman, found themselves convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced to eight months in prison. They elected to serve the time rather than appeal. However, they were quickly released as a result of a compromise deal cut by the federal government (behind the SNCC workers’ backs) with the Greenwood authorities.

The movement in the Delta soon ground to a halt. Despite promises by the White House that the perpetrators of racist violence would be brought to account, the Justice Department dropped its suit against Greenwood in late May. In early June, in nearby Winona, local cops jailed and brutally assaulted SNCC activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer. They were on their way back from a training session at Highlander—whose premises were themselves soon raided and padlocked by state authorities, then burned to the ground.^o

So by the first week of July 1963, the beleaguered Greenwood movement was in need of outside support and attention, and Dylan’s visit promised both. It was the actor-singer Theodore Bikel’s idea that Dylan “should get a first-hand impression of the struggle in the South.” He approached Albert Grossman with the proposal, and when Grossman complained about the cost, Bikel wrote out a check. He and Dylan flew to Atlanta and then on to Jackson, where they were met by two SNCC workers who drove them to Greenwood. Here they joined Pete Seeger, Len Chandler, and the Freedom Singers, who had all come down to sing at the rally scheduled for the next morning. Throughout the journey, Bikel told Shelton, Dylan was quiet, scribbling notes on stray pieces of paper, as was his habit. “His political attitudes were less strongly formed than many of ours. It seemed a personal thing with him to be going down into the deep South.”⁷⁷

Dylan did not arrive in Greenwood unprepared. After all, this was the land where the blues began, as Alan Lomax called it. It was the land of Dylan’s early masters, Bukka White, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and John Lee Hooker. It was the land where Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, and Emmett Till had all met their fates. Through the music and the history, Dylan already knew the Delta as a place of suffering and disgrace as well as tortured resilience. But this close-up experience of Jim Crow and the people who had risen to challenge it was something different. Bikel recounts Dylan’s distress at his first sight of whites-only water fountains and toilets and the awe he expressed at the courage of the activists, many in the spartan SNCC uniform of work shirts and dungarees. Briefly, he shared the austerity and fear that made up their daily lives. That first night in Greenwood he slept in a church loft. The next morning he lay flat in the back of a car as he was driven the three miles out of town to attend a rally at a farm owned by the redoubtable McGhee family, who in Stokely Carmichael’s words, “asked and gave no quarter . . . that was one family that never ‘took low’ for anyone. There was no quit in them.”

The midday heat was intense, and the rally was postponed till later in the afternoon. In the meanwhile, Dylan conversed with Forman and Moses, as well as Julian Bond and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who told Shelton that it was at Greenwood that she felt closest to Dylan. “The Greenwood people didn’t know that Pete, Theo and Bob were well known. They were just happy to be getting support. But they really liked Dylan down there in the cotton country.” According to Bikel, Dylan admitted to the black farmers that “he hadn’t met a colored person till he was nine years old, and he apologized that he had so little to offer.”

At dusk, the visiting performers clambered onto the back of a truck next to a cotton patch and performed for an audience of some 300 black people. They were watched by police in patrol cars and Klan members—and recorded for posterity by New York filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, who was on hand with a TV crew.^p Dylan chose this moment to unveil his response to the Medgar Evers killing. By all accounts, the topicality of the song gripped the audience—some of whom would have seen Evers himself in recent months. Even more, the political analysis exercised a strong appeal, as Johnson Reagon has confirmed. In contrast to the moralistic and utopian rhetoric favored by the movement at this time, Dylan’s song argued that racist violence was the product of political manipulation and an unjust social system.^q

Dylan’s exposé of the white elite’s divide-and-rule strategy and his insistence on the link between poverty and racism struck powerful chords among the SNCC activists, whose thinking about the nature of the challenge they faced was undergoing rapid evolution. The concert finished with Dylan joining the Freedom Singers, Seeger, Bikel, and Chandler for renditions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome.” (Later that summer, the performance was to be reprised by much the same company at both the Newport Festival finale and the Washington march.)

Dylan’s encounter with the era’s premier agents of social change was brief but seems to have left a deep impression. He certainly listened carefully to the Forman-penned, Lewis-delivered SNCC speech later that summer in Washington, and over the years he made many respectful references to the people he met in Greenwood. Soon after his stay in one of America’s poorest and most oppressed communities, Dylan was whisked off to a Columbia Records sales conference in Puerto Rico. He chose to entertain the assembled reps by playing “With God on Our Side” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” (its second public outing). The southern contingent, especially, didn’t like it; many walked out. That didn’t seem to bother Dylan. In contrast, when he was asked to put on a tie so that he could join the Columbia execs at an expensive restaurant, he exploded.⁷⁸

Meanwhile, the SNCC workers in Greenwood made little headway. In the six months following the federal government’s deal with the white officials, only 590 blacks succeeded in registering to vote. On election day, white voters outnumbered black by 33 to 1—in a county where the black population was twice that of the white. The frustrations of Greenwood led many in SNCC to rethink their assumptions. The problem they faced was not so much redneck prejudice as reactionary institutions: from the courthouse to the White House. Forman argued that the movement should turn to “challenging the political structure of the country.” Moses conceived his “white shield” strategy, and began recruiting white northern students for what was to become the Mississippi Summer project of 1964. In a way, Moses had decided that what was needed to protect the movement in Greenwood and similar places was not one, but many Bob Dylans, and not just for a fleeting celebrity visit.

Sometime during that early summer of 1963 Dylan wrote “North Country Blues.” Unlike “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” it’s a formally conservative exercise in first-person narrative. But in matching his tale of Mississippi to one of Minnesota, Dylan brought the systemic critique of “Only a Pawn” back home. The voice in the song belongs to a woman in an iron-mining town in the Mesabi range in northern Minnesota. Her life is the story of a community married to an industry. She speaks of the dangers of mining, of accidental death, of early marriage and child-rearing, and of times when “the lunch bucket filled every season” before “The work was cut down / To a half a day’s shift with no reason.” Through her tale, Dylan shows us, close-up, how decisions made afar, in the name of market forces, shatter lives.

“North Country Blues” must be one of the earliest musical protests against what’s come to be known as globalization. Dylan’s portrait of a working-class community broken by unemployment, and the drink and depression that follow, has proved dismally prescient: the narrative of “North Country Blues” has been repeated across the United States and Europe; it’s become the common experience of the world. (The song anticipates Bruce Springsteen’s “Youngstown” by thirty years.)

In a way, this impersonal tale is one of Dylan’s most personal: this is a song about his home turf and some of the people he grew up with. But the song is not just a montage of personal observations; it grows out of the application of those observations to a political framework. In “North Country Blues,” the community is broken by an economic system—the same system that pits white against black. The system that murdered Medgar Evers.

Three weeks after the giant march on Washington, the racists replied. On a Sunday morning, the 16th Street church in Birmingham, which had served as an organizing center during the victorious spring campaign, was bombed. Four African-American girls were killed. The naked brutality of the act—and its ramifications in the context of the historic victory won at Birmingham earlier in the year—elicited songs from Dylan’s friends Phil Ochs and Richard Fariña (“On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine, / And the choirs kept singing of Freedom”), jazz from John Coltrane, poetry from Langston Hughes, and prose from James Baldwin. And it transformed Nina Simone, a classically trained pianist with an eclectic range of musical interests. Simone had been born in the South but had moved to New York to study at Juilliard; she had already recorded jazz, blues, and Broadway tunes. As a black woman who defied musical categories, Simone had long been acquainted with the realities of power in white-dominated America. But the Birmingham bombing put an end to her patience. She wrote her first protest song, “Mississippi Goddam,” and sent it off to Broadside. “It erupted out of me,” she recalled.

“Mississippi Goddam” was an uncompromising outcry not just against a racist atrocity, but against a nation and its liberal defenders. But Simone dedicated far more than a song to the movement. From the autumn of 1963, she was ever-present on the front lines in the South. Bernice Johnson Reagon said she “captured the warrior energy that was present in the people. The fighting people.”⁷⁹

The story came from a newspaper clipping Gordon Friesen gave to Dylan, one of many the Broadside co-editor offered the singer as possible sources for topical songs.⁸⁰ In February 1963, Hattie Carroll, a middle-aged black woman, had died after being struck with a cane by William Zantzinger, a young white man from a wealthy family. The incident had taken place at a charity ball, where Zantzinger was a patron and Carroll served behind the bar. In August, Zantzinger was sentenced to six months in prison for his offense. It was a report of the sentencing that sparked Dylan’s song.

He set his tale to a tune adapted from the sixteenth-century Scottish ballad, “Mary Hamilton” (like Hattie Carroll, the story of a maidservant whose life is destroyed by the whims of the powerful). He recorded the new song in the studio on October 23 and premiered it live at Carnegie Hall three days later. It left the audience stunned, as it so often has in the years since then. This is one of Dylan’s most immediately accessible and affecting songs, a mesmerizing piece of storytelling that takes the audience step by step through the social mechanics of a single injustice.

In Broadside, Phil Ochs praised the song as a model for the new generation of songwriters. “One of his most important techniques is that he always avoids the obvious,” said Ochs, who complained that “so many of the songs sent to Broadside . . . overstate the obvious when it doesn’t need to be stated at all.”⁸¹ In “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Dylan doesn’t even bother to tell us that Carroll is black and Zantzinger is white. It wasn’t necessary—not in the America of 1963. The racial context was a given. Within it, Dylan focused on Carroll as a worker and mother, and Zantzinger as a scion of wealth and privilege. Critics sometimes complain that there are no individuals in Dylan’s protest songs, only social forces and abstractions. But for the purposes of this song we don’t need to know anything more than we are told.

The first verse states the facts of the case, newspaper style. The baldness of the narrative is relieved by the poetic detail of the “cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger” (and its internal rhyme with “Zanzinger,” as Dylan spells it) and the vocal attention he lavishes on every syllable of “Baltimore hotel society gathering.” In the second verse, a portrait of Zantzinger—his inherited wealth, his social status, his bad manners, and indifference to the consequences of his actions—ends with the information that he was out on bail within minutes. The third verse tells us about Hattie Carroll: her age (fifty-one), her ten children (actually, according to the newspaper report, she had eleven), her life of menial labor. Three lines in succession end with the word table (the table on which she waited and at whose head she never sat), flatly stressing the grinding reduction of a human spirit dispossessed and exploited by others. This verse concludes with a slow-motion re-creation of the attack itself, the movement of the cane through the air: “doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle.”

These lines aren’t easily explicated, and however you look at them, the words retain their mystery. But the thrust, I think, is clear. To “philosophize” here seems to imply to “rationalize,” to dissolve “disgrace” (a much stronger word than injustice, carrying overtones of both private and public shame) into mere words. The refrain is addressed to those who counsel patience, the supercilious liberals who offer their sympathy, their “tears,” but little else. They’re the same people Nina Simone talked about in “Mississippi Goddam,” the ones who say “go slow.” They are able to react, at a safe distance, to the appalling events Dylan shares with them. But he warns them to wait, to withhold their knee-jerk response, and thus creates the dramatic and political platform for the devastating final verse.

The last act of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is played out in the courtroom. Dylan had already written pityingly of the human costs of an inhumane judicial system in “Donald White,” “Seven Curses,” and “Percy’s Song.” In “Hattie Carroll” he hammers away at the august claims of the judiciary, the spectacle designed “to show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level,” that “the ladder of law has no top and no bottom.” And with a flourish of plain statement, reveals them all to be hollow, when the judge:

. . . handed out for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six month sentence

Dylan then swoops, one last time, into the refrain, reversing the second line: “Bury the rag most deep in your face, for now is the time for your tears.” The song pivots on this ending: driving home the complicity of the law, the power of wealth and its hold on the state, the institutional basis of the injustices suffered by individuals. At the same time, it challenges listeners to examine their own part in a system capable of such routine cruelty and hypocrisy.

As Ochs recognized, “Hattie Carrol” had wrought the protest idiom to a new level of formal achievement—one that strengthened its political impact. The melody is a simple fragment set to three-quarter time, recycled over metronomic strumming. Using this regularity as a springboard, Dylan cleverly varies the verse structure, elongating the narrative unit and heightening the suspense. The first verse has six lines of exposition before reaching the refrain. The second has seven. The third has eleven. The climactic fourth also has eleven—and is bolstered by the introduction, for the first time in the song, of end rhyme: half-rhymes in level/gavel, caught’em/bottom, before the ringing full rhyme on the punch line: repentence/sentence. Meanwhile, Dylan’s guitar stutters, pauses and hastens, accenting key moments in the narrative.

Like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” and “With God on Our Side,” “Hattie Carroll” points to the systemic nature of the problems that agitated growing numbers of young people. It does so without for a moment taking its eyes off specific individuals in a specific setting. The subsequent fate of Billy Zantzinger^r would seem to bear out Dylan’s analysis of why and how Hattie Carroll died. In 1991, Zantzinger was convicted by a Maryland court of collecting more than $60,000 rent on rural shanties that lacked indoor plumbing or sanitary outhouses, and which in many cases he no longer even owned. The victims were almost all poor black people. Zantzinger faced a possible jail term of twenty-five to fifty years for the offenses. In the end, he was sentenced to eighteen months—on a work-release program—and fined $50,000.⁸²

The Carnegie Hall audience that applauded “Hattie Carroll” was also treated to the premiere of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Already, in “When The Ship Comes In,” unveiled at the March on Washington, Dylan had dared to envision an all-encompassing change, a historic vindication of the oppressed and their movement. In the new song, he presented that change, that vindication, as imminent and inevitable. Most importantly, he asserted that the instrument of change was to be a generation—Dylan’s generation: “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.” He seems to have been clear about what he was doing:

This was definitely a song with a purpose. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and for whom I wanted to say it to. You know, it was influenced by the Irish and Scottish ballads. . . . Come all ye bold highway men, come all ye miners, come all ye tender-hearted maidens. I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, ya know, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. . . .⁸³

Later, when the song became a millstone around his neck, Dylan disparaged it as something he wrote because it was what people wanted to hear. It’s true that such a neat fit between artist and audience should always rouse suspicions. It’s also true that the song’s triumphalism was not reflective of Dylan’s fickle mood of this period, and it cannot be found in the other songs he wrote at the time (the delicately pained “One Too Many Mornings” and the lushly pantheistic “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”). Because means and ends seem so precisely joined in “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (and because the song is so familiar), it’s easy to miss what an extraordinary composition it is, for all its irritating qualities.

Like “When The Ship Comes In,” it uses the Biblical language of prophecy and redemption to invoke a great secular victory (the last verse derives from the Gospel of Mark, 10:31: “But many that are first shall be last; and the last first”—Jesus’ pledge to the poor). However, it lacks the humorous glee and the element of self-conscious fantasy that enliven the earlier song. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” seems animated by the conviction that right will prevail over might, that the tide of social justice is ineluctable. Who needs God when you’ve got history on your side? However, this is no Marxist determinism. The song’s lyricism derives less from its assertion of collective invincibility than from the tender confidence of its enormous—but elementary—ambitions.

In a sense there’s less of Dylan here than in his other protest songs. It’s rare indeed to find him subordinating himself so entirely to the larger movement. Nonetheless, the artist is there in the song’s confrontational energy and sweeping vision of a final judgment. As in “When The Ship Comes In,” social change is depicted as a violent storm: “You better start swimmin’ / Or you’ll sink like a stone” . . . “it’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.” Dylan embraces the irresistible whirlwind, and relishes the day when it will expose all that is hollow and false. In Biblical style, he issues a prophetic warning against complacency; he reminds the powerful that ultimately they are impotent.

The song sets a lyric of paratactic rigor and simplicity to a tune that is buoyant but also vulnerable. For all its brash self-confidence, it is careful to say “please” to its elders—even as it warns them not to obstruct the movement for change. Here, senators and congressmen are treated with a reverence that was soon to be replaced in Dylan’s work by savage contempt. The media are less fortunate:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin

It was the unexpected achievements of the civil rights movement that made this statement and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” possible and even plausible. The song blends arrogance with innocence, an individualist ethical appeal (“lend a hand”) with a faith in collective action, ambitious radicalism with liberal naïveté. In doing so it expresses the consciousness of its moment precisely.