(1964) The Times They Are a-Changin'

Bob Dylan

ReleasedFebruary 10, 1964

LabelColumbia Records

RecordedAugust 6 – October 31, 1963

ProducerTom Wilson

StudioColumbia Studio A, New York City

Genres

Primary

Contemporary folkSinger-songwriter

Scene

Greenwich Village

ListenRYM·Apple Music·Spotify

Tracks45:36

Side one22:45

1	The Times They Are a-Changin'	3:15
2	Ballad of Hollis Brown	5:06
3	With God on Our Side	7:08
4	One Too Many Mornings	2:41
5	North Country Blues	4:35

Side two22:51

1	Only a Pawn in Their Game	3:33
2	Boots of Spanish Leather	4:40
3	When the Ship Comes In	3:18
4	The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll	5:48
5	Restless Farewell	5:32

Every song on The Times They Are a-Changin’ is Bob Dylan’s own, the first of his albums to drop traditional covers entirely, and almost every one is about somebody else’s suffering.¹ Recorded across three months of 1963, in the season of the March on Washington and the weeks before the Kennedy assassination, it is the starkest and most uniformly political record Dylan ever made: ten ballads, mostly voice and acoustic guitar, on racism, poverty, war, and the people the powerful step over.² It is the summit of his protest phase — and, on its closing track, the sound of him already walking away from it.

Musical and production context

Dylan cut the album at Columbia’s Studio A between August and October 1963, with Tom Wilson producing throughout, the young jazz hand who had taken over from John Hammond on the final sessions of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.³ By now Dylan was writing fast and surely enough to fill a whole album with his own songs and no one else’s, a step his first two records had only half-taken, and he cut them with a deliberate plainness that matched their subjects. The arrangements strip almost to nothing: voice, a single picked guitar, harmonica, and a great deal of silence. There is none of the comic relief that leavened Freewheelin’, none of the love songs’ warmth left unguarded. The tone is set by the title track, a hymn in rolling 3/4 time whose lines fall with the inevitability of scripture: it turns to senators, parents, and critics in turn and tells each the same thing — “you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone” — half prophecy and half warning, written, Dylan later said, deliberately as an anthem for a moment that was demanding one.⁴

The cover

The sleeve makes the album’s severity a face. Barry Feinstein’s photograph is a stark black-and-white close-up of Dylan, head slightly bowed, jaw set, the light raking across an unsmiling expression that reads decades older than his twenty-two years.⁵ After the snowbound tenderness of the Freewheelin’ cover — Dylan with Suze Rotolo on his arm — this is the opposite image, and it tells the truth about the record inside: no girl, no warmth, no jacket against the cold, only the grain of the photograph and the set of the mouth. It is the face the press would soon fix the phrase “the voice of a generation” onto, exactly as Dylan was deciding he wanted no part of it.

The songs

The album’s weight is in its reportage, and three songs answer real events with a held, deliberate fury. “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” lays out the killing of a Black barmaid by William Zantzinger, a wealthy young Maryland tobacco farmer who struck her with a cane at a society ball and drew six months in jail; Dylan keeps his anger in check through verse after factual verse, telling the listener after each one to hold off (“take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears”) and unleashing the grief only when the sentence comes down at the end.⁶ “Only a Pawn in Their Game” takes the murder of Medgar Evers and refuses the easy target: it indicts not the man who pulled the trigger but the political machine that taught poor white men to hate, the rare protest song that pities the killer to widen the charge.⁷ “With God on Our Side” walks through a century of American wars, from the cavalry to the Cold War, repeating the title as a refrain until the phrase rots in the mouth — the lie that heaven endorses whoever holds the rifle.⁸

Around the topical songs stand the parables. “Ballad of Hollis Brown” follows a starving South Dakota farmer to the murder of his own wife and five children and his own suicide, the dread tightening over a single hammered chord. “North Country Blues” is sung in the voice of a woman watching the iron mines close around her — Dylan’s own Mesabi Range, where he grew up, turned to elegy, and one of the first times he wrote convincingly from inside a life not his own.⁹ “When the Ship Comes In” is the album’s burst of triumph, an Old Testament vision of the day the powerful are drowned and the meek inherit; Dylan reportedly wrote it in a fury after a hotel clerk, taking him for a vagrant, refused him a room until Joan Baez vouched for him, and he and Baez sang it together that August at the March on Washington, where he also performed “Only a Pawn.”¹⁰

The rest turns inward, and it is where the album’s hardness cracks. “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “One Too Many Mornings” are quiet love songs shadowed by Suze Rotolo’s long stay in Italy and the relationship ending as he wrote; “Boots” unfolds entirely as an exchange of letters, the lover’s drift audible in the lengthening gaps between them.¹¹ And the record closes on a tell. “Restless Farewell”, written overnight to round out the album and built on the traditional Irish song “The Parting Glass”, is a goodbye — to a lover, to his critics, to the very role of spokesman the other nine songs had built for him. By the time it reached stores, Dylan was already cutting the personal, surreal songs of Another Side of Bob Dylan; the protest singer was signing off in real time.¹²

What it inherits and what it introduces

Times draws on the topical-song tradition that Greenwich Village had revived: the broadside ballad, the work song, the form that turns a true story into an argument. Dylan had learned from Woody Guthrie that a song could be a newspaper with a tune; here he made a whole album of them, with a literary control the older topical singers never reached.¹³ What he introduced was the all-original protest album as a single sustained statement, ten songs pointed the same way, a moral argument carried across a whole record. It is the high-water mark of the early-sixties protest song, and in “Restless Farewell” it is also the moment its leading figure decided the form had become a cage.

Reception

The album reached number twenty on the American chart and number four in Britain, where the folk boom was cresting.¹⁴ Its truer reception, though, was as a credential. It sealed Dylan’s standing as the voice of the protest movement and the conscience of his generation, a crown the press fixed on him at the very moment he was working to shake it off; within a year he would be telling interviewers he had never meant to lead anything. The timing sharpened the irony. The album was finished by late October 1963 and reached stores the following February, into a country still stunned by Kennedy’s murder that November, where the title song’s certainty that an old world was passing fell on a national grief it had never been written to meet. Critics have long placed the record a notch below the albums on either side, narrower and more severe than either, yet its strongest songs — “Hattie Carroll” and the title track above all — rank among the most durable he ever wrote, and the album is now permanently enshrined among the canonical records of the 1960s.¹⁵

Influence and legacy

The title song became the permanent anthem of change itself, sung at marches and played over montages for sixty years, long since detached from any single cause.¹⁶ “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” stands as the model of how a protest song can persuade by withholding — letting the facts indict and the fury wait — and songwriters have studied its restraint ever since.¹⁷ But the album’s deepest influence is the one Dylan set in motion by leaving it behind. Having delivered the album the protest movement had been building toward and then abandoned the mode, he made a model of his own restlessness — the freedom to follow it wherever it led, toward the personal, the surreal, and within two years the electric music that would remake rock. The protest singer had quietly stopped being one, and popular song has been following his example ever since.

MAP

Explorer

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Musical and production context

The cover

The songs

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

MAP

Explorer

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Musical and production context

The cover

The songs

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

Footnotes