Blowin' in the Wind

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Written by: Dylan
Produced by: John Hammond
Released: May '63 on Columbia
Charts: Did not chart

In April 1962, at Gerde's Folk City in New York's Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan gave a quick speech before playing one of his new songs: "This here ain't no protest song or anything like that, 'cause I don't write no protest songs," he said. He then sang the first and third verses of the still- unfinished "Blowin' in the Wind." Published in full a month later in the folk journal Broadside and recorded on July 9th, 1962, for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind" was Dylan's first important composition. It is also the most famous protest song ever written. As a songwriter, Dylan was still emerging from his Woody Guthrie fixation. But in a decisive break with the rhetorical, current-events conventions of topical folk, Dylan framed the crises around him in a series of fierce, poetic questions that addressed what Dylan believed was man's greatest inhumanity to man: indifference. "Some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and they know it's wrong," he declared in the Freewheelin' liner notes. Earlier this year, Dylan revealed more about the mechanics of writing the song in the Los Angeles Times: "I wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' in ten minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That's the folk tradition. You use what's been handed down" -- and, of course, pass it on.

Appears on: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (Columbia)

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