THE STORY OF A SONG: Bob Dylan - "Blowin’ in the Wind"

With a melody rooted in the slavery-era spiritual No More Auction Block (which he’d learned from Odetta) and lyrics that he’d just completed (and taped to his microphone), Bob Dylan first publicly performed Blowin’ in the Wind at a Monday night hootenanny at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village on April 16, 1962. Tony Fletcher: “Word spread quickly through the Village grapevine: Dylan had written a classic.”— Albert Grossman had first seen Dylan perform in July 1961, but it wasn’t until hearing this song the following spring that he saw the potential; after Dylan was able to get out of his initial song publishing deal with Duchess Music, Grossman (as detailed by Clinton Heylin) brokered a new deal with powerful M. Witmark & Sons on July 12, 1962, the song was registered for copyright eighteen days later, and Dylan had himself a new manager. After it had been featured on the cover of the folk music journal Broadside (published in late May),— he recorded the song at Columbia’s Studio A in New York.— But as sessions for his second album dragged on into the following spring, it would not be until the end of summer 1963 that Dylan’s recording of his anthem was released. (Its first broadcast performance came in England when he sang it under the opening credits of a BBC play called Madhouse on Castle Street, aired on January 13, 1963.) By the time The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan hit stores—just as Dylan was seen by millions on CBS-TV’s live broadcast of the August 28 March on Washington climaxed by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech —Blowin ’ in the Wind had become an instant classic as rendered by Peter, Paul & Mary in their single issued in late June.

Todd Harvey remarks that while Dylan himself has acknowledged the song’s connection to No More Auction Block, “it represents a significant reworking,” as the only direct melodic similarities between the two are in the opening and final measures. Their respective lyric structures also share characteristics, as “both texts are short, somewhat ambiguous while still reaching their mark, and they both contain a memorable refrain.”— The song’s central metaphor has been associated with a line from the 1959 film On the Beach. Christopher Ricks cited a telling detail of Dylan’s lyric design: “The song’s claims to courage, and its asking courage of others, its incipient solidarity, all required that it convey a certain political loneliness, and this is effected by continually playing plurals against singulars. — “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?”

Although some in the folk community had mixed feelings about the song on the ground that it was merely rhetorical, Peter Yarrow was convinced of its greatness from the first time Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman played it for him. “It is precisely because Bobby was a poet that he invited people to participate in the definition of what his message truly was,” he told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes. “And like a true poet, I think he stepped back from prescribing an interpretation.”—The point of the song was the evil of indifference to suffering, as Dylan put it in the liner notes to Freewheelin’: “Some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and they know it’s wrong.”