The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

Dylan had become famous for his political songwriting—he is seen here in 1963 playing at a civil rights march with Joan Baez

Many critics have noted the extraordinary development of Dylan's songwriting immediately after completing his first album. One of Dylan's biographers, Clinton Heylin, connects the sudden increase in lyrics written along topical and political lines to the fact that Dylan had moved into an apartment on West 4th Street with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (1943–2011) in January 1962.[6] Rotolo's family had strong left-wing political commitments; both of her parents were members of the American Communist Party.[7] Dylan acknowledged her influence when he told an interviewer: "Suze was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked out the songs with her".[8]

Dylan's relationship with Rotolo also provided an important emotional dynamic in the composition of the Freewheelin' album. After six months of living with Dylan, Rotolo agreed to her mother's proposal that she travel to Italy to study art.[9][a 1] Dylan missed her and wrote long letters to her conveying his hope that she would return soon to New York.[10] She postponed her return several times, finally coming back in January 1963. Critics have connected the intense love songs expressing longing and loss on Freewheelin' to Dylan's fraught relationship with Rotolo.[11] In her autobiography, Rotolo explains that musicians' girlfriends were routinely described as "chicks", and she resented being regarded as "a possession of Bob, who was the center of attention".[12]

The speed and facility with which Dylan wrote topical songs attracted the attention of other musicians in the New York folk scene. In a radio interview on WBAI in June 1962, Pete Seeger described Dylan as "the most prolific songwriter on the scene" and then asked Dylan how many songs he had written recently. Dylan replied, "I might go for two weeks without writing these songs. I write a lot of stuff. In fact, I wrote five songs last night but I gave all the papers away in some place called the Bitter End."[13] Dylan also expressed the impersonal idea that the songs were not his own creation. In an interview with Sing Out! magazine, Dylan said, "The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn't do it, somebody else would".[14]

Dylan began work on his second album at Columbia's Studio A in New York on April 24, 1962. The album was provisionally entitled Bob Dylan's Blues, and as late as July 1962, this would remain the working title.[15] At this session, Dylan recorded four of his own compositions: "Sally Gal", "The Death of Emmett Till", "Rambling, Gambling Willie", and "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues". He also recorded two traditional folk songs, "Going To New Orleans" and "Corrina, Corrina", and Hank Williams' "(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle".[16]

Returning to Studio A the following day, Dylan recorded his new song about fallout shelters, "Let Me Die in My Footsteps". Other original compositions followed: "Rocks and Gravel", "Talking Hava Negiliah Blues", "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues", and two more takes of "Sally Gal". Dylan recorded cover versions of "Wichita", Big Joe Williams' "Baby, Please Don't Go", and Robert Johnson's "Milk Cow's Calf's Blues".[16] Because Dylan's songwriting talent was developing so rapidly, nothing from the April sessions appeared on Freewheelin'.[5]

The recording sessions at Studio A resumed on July 9, when Dylan recorded "Blowin' in the Wind", a song that he had first performed live at Gerde's Folk City on April 16.[17] Dylan also recorded "Bob Dylan's Blues", "Down the Highway", and "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance", all of which ended up on Freewheelin', plus one other original composition, "Baby, I'm in the Mood for You", which did not.[18]

At this point, music manager Albert Grossman began to take an interest in Dylan's business affairs. Grossman persuaded Dylan to transfer the publishing rights of his songs from Duchess Music, whom he had signed a contract with in January 1962, to Witmark Music, a division of Warner's music publishing operation. Dylan signed a contract with Witmark on July 13, 1962.[19] Unknown to Dylan, Grossman had also negotiated a deal with Witmark. This gave Grossman fifty percent of Witmark's share of the publishing income generated by any songwriter Grossman had brought to the company. This "secret deal" resulted in a bitter legal battle between Dylan and Grossman in the 1980s.[20]

Albert Grossman became Dylan's manager on August 20, 1962.[21] Since Dylan was under twenty-one when he had signed his contract with CBS, Grossman argued that the contract was invalid and had to be re-negotiated. Instead, Hammond responded by inviting Dylan to his office and persuading him to sign a "reaffirment"—agreeing to abide by the original contract. This effectively neutralized Grossman's strategy, and led to some animosity between Grossman and Hammond.[22] Grossman enjoyed a reputation in the folk scene of being commercially aggressive, generating more income and defending his clients' interests more fiercely than "the nicer, more amateurish managers in the Village".[23] Dylan critic Andy Gill has suggested that Grossman encouraged Dylan to become more reclusive and aloof, even paranoid.[24]

While recording Freewheelin' in New York, Dylan had his first performance at Carnegie Hall

On September 22, Dylan appeared for the first time at Carnegie Hall, part of an all-star hootenanny. On this occasion, he premiered his new composition "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall",[25] a complex and powerful song built upon the question and answer refrain pattern of the traditional British ballad "Lord Randall". "Hard Rain" would gain added resonance one month later, when President Kennedy appeared on national television on October 22, and announced the discovery of Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba, initiating the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the sleeve notes on the Freewheelin' album, Nat Hentoff quotes Dylan as saying that he wrote "Hard Rain" in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis: "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one".[26] In fact, Dylan had written the song more than a month before the crisis broke.

Dylan resumed work on Freewheelin' at Columbia's Studio A on October 26, when a major innovation took place—Dylan made his first studio recordings with a backing band. Accompanied by Dick Wellstood on piano, Howie Collins and Bruce Langhorne on guitar, Leonard Gaskin on bass, and Herb Lovelle on drums, Dylan recorded three songs. Several takes of Dylan's "Mixed-Up Confusion" and Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right Mama" were deemed unusable,[27] but a master take of "Corrina, Corrina" was selected for the final album. An 'alternate take' of "Corrina, Corrina" from the same session would also be selected for the b-side of "Mixed Up Confusion", Dylan's first electric single issued later in the year. At the next recording session on November 1, the band included Art Davis on bass, while jazz guitarist George Barnes replaced Howie Collins. "Mixed-Up Confusion" and "That's All Right Mama" were re-recorded, and again the results were deemed unsatisfactory. A take of the third song, "Rocks and Gravel", was selected for the album, but the track was subsequently dropped.[28]

On November 14, Dylan resumed work with his backup band, this time with Gene Ramey on bass, devoting most of the session to recording "Mixed-Up Confusion". Although this track did not appear on Freewheelin', it was released as a single on December 14, 1962, and then swiftly withdrawn.[29] Unlike the other material which Dylan recorded between 1961 and 1964, "Mixed-Up Confusion" attempted a rockabilly sound. Cameron Crowe described it as "a fascinating look at a folk artist with his mind wandering towards Elvis Presley and Sun Records".[30]

Also recorded on November 14 was the new composition "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (Clinton Heylin writes that, although the sleeve notes of Freewheelin' describe this song as being accompanied by a backing band, no band is audible on the released version).[26][31] Langhorne then accompanied Dylan on three more original compositions: "Ballad of Hollis Brown", "Kingsport Town", and "Whatcha Gonna Do", but these performances were not included on Freewheelin'.[28]

Dylan held another session at Studio A on December 6. Five songs, all original compositions, were recorded, three of which were eventually included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", "Oxford Town", and "I Shall Be Free". Dylan also made another attempt at "Whatcha Gonna Do" and recorded a new song, "Hero Blues", but both songs were ultimately rejected and left unreleased.[28]

Twelve days later, Dylan made his first trip abroad. British TV director Philip Saville had heard Dylan perform in Greenwich Village, and invited him to take part in a BBC television drama: Madhouse on Castle Street. Dylan arrived in London on December 17. In the play, Dylan performed "Blowin' in the Wind" and two other songs.[32] Dylan also immersed himself in the London folk scene, making contact with the Troubadour folk club organizer Anthea Joseph and folk singers Martin Carthy and Bob Davenport. "I ran into some people in England who really knew those [traditional English] songs", Dylan recalled in 1984. "Martin Carthy, another guy named [Bob] Davenport. Martin Carthy's incredible. I learned a lot of stuff from Martin."[33]

Carthy taught Dylan two English songs that would prove important for the Freewheelin' album. Carthy's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" would be used by Dylan as the basis of his own composition, "Girl from the North Country". A 19th-century ballad commemorating the death of Sir John Franklin in 1847, "Lady Franklin's Lament", gave Dylan the melody for his composition "Bob Dylan's Dream". Both songs displayed Dylan's fast-growing ability to take traditional melodies and use them as a basis for highly personal songwriting.[34]

From England, Dylan traveled to Italy, and joined Albert Grossman, who was touring with his client Odetta.[35] Dylan was also hoping to make contact with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, unaware that she had already left Italy and was on her way back to New York. Dylan worked on his new material, and when he returned to London, Martin Carthy received a surprise: "When he came back from Italy, he'd written 'Girl From the North Country'; he came down to the Troubadour and said, 'Hey, here's "Scarborough Fair"' and he started playing this thing".[36]

Dylan flew back to New York on January 16, 1963.[37] In January and February, he recorded some of his new compositions in sessions for the folk magazine Broadside, including a new anti-war song, "Masters of War", which he had composed in London.[38][39] Dylan was happy to be reunited with Suze Rotolo, and he persuaded her to move back into the apartment they had shared on West 4th Street.[40]

Dylan's keenness to record his new material for Freewheelin' paralleled a dramatic power struggle in the studio: Albert Grossman's determination to have John Hammond replaced as Dylan's producer at CBS. According to Dylan biographer Howard Sounes, "The two men could not have been more different. Hammond was a WASP, so relaxed during recording sessions that he sat with feet up, reading The New Yorker. Grossman was a Jewish businessman with a shady past, hustling to become a millionaire".[22]

Because of Grossman's hostility to Hammond, Columbia paired Dylan with a young, African-American jazz producer, Tom Wilson. Wilson recalled: "I didn't even particularly like folk music. I'd been recording Sun Ra and Coltrane ... I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. [Dylan] played like the dumb guys, but then these words came out. I was flabbergasted."[41] At a recording session on April 24, produced by Wilson, Dylan recorded five new compositions: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "Talkin' World War III Blues", "Bob Dylan's Dream", and "Walls of Red Wing". "Walls of Red Wing" was ultimately rejected, but the other four were included in a revised album sequence.[42]

The final drama of recording Freewheelin' occurred when Dylan was scheduled to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show on May 12, 1963. Dylan had told Sullivan he would perform "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", but the "head of program practices" at CBS Television informed Dylan that this song was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society, and asked him to perform another number. Rather than comply with TV censorship, Dylan refused to appear on the show.[43] There is disagreement between Dylan's biographers about the consequences of this censorship row. Anthony Scaduto writes that after The Ed Sullivan Show debacle, CBS lawyers were alarmed to discover that the controversial song was to be included on Dylan's new album, only a few weeks from its release date. They insisted that the song be dropped, and four songs ("John Birch", "Let Me Die in My Footsteps", "Rambling Gambling Willie", "Rocks and Gravel") on the album were replaced with Dylan's newer compositions recorded in April ("Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "Talkin' World War III Blues", "Bob Dylan's Dream"). Scaduto writes that Dylan felt "crushed" by being compelled to submit to censorship, but he was in no position to argue.[44]

According to Heylin, "There remains a common belief that [Dylan] was forced by Columbia to pull 'Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues' from the album after he walked out on The Ed Sullivan Show." However, the "revised" version of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was released on May 27, 1963; this would have given Columbia Records only two weeks to recut the album, reprint the record sleeves, and press and package enough copies of the new version to fill orders. Heylin suggests that CBS had probably forced Dylan to withdraw "John Birch" from the album some weeks earlier and that Dylan had responded by recording his new material on April 24.[45] Whether the songs were substituted before or after The Ed Sullivan Show, critics agree that the new material gave the album a more personal feel, distanced from the traditional folk-blues material which had dominated his first album, Bob Dylan.[46]

A few copies of the original pressing of the LP with the four deleted tracks have turned up over the years, despite Columbia's supposed destruction of all copies during the pre-release phase (all copies found were in the standard album sleeve with the revised track selection). Other permutations of the Freewheelin' album include versions with a different running order of the tracks on the album, and a Canadian version of the album that listed the tracks in the wrong order.[47][48] The original pressing of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is considered the most valuable and rarest record in America,[48] with one copy having sold for $35,000.[49]

"Blowin' in the Wind" is among Dylan's most celebrated compositions. In his sleeve notes for The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991, John Bauldie writes that it was Pete Seeger who first identified the melody of "Blowin' in the Wind" as Dylan's adaptation of the old Negro spiritual "No More Auction Block". According to Alan Lomax's The Folk Songs of North America, the song originated in Canada and was sung by former slaves who fled there after Britain abolished slavery in 1833. In 1978, Dylan acknowledged the source when he told journalist Marc Rowland: "'Blowin' in the Wind' has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song called 'No More Auction Block'—that's a spiritual and 'Blowin' in the Wind' follows the same feeling."[50] Dylan's performance of "No More Auction Block" was recorded at the Gaslight Cafe in October 1962, and appeared on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.

Critic Andy Gill wrote: "'Blowin' in the Wind' marked a huge jump in Dylan's songwriting: for the first time, Dylan discovered the effectiveness of moving from the particular to the general. Whereas 'The Ballad of Donald White' would become completely redundant as soon as the eponymous criminal was executed, a song as vague as 'Blowin' in the Wind' could be applied to just about any freedom issue. It remains the song with which Dylan's name is most inextricably linked, and safeguarded his reputation as a civil libertarian through any number of changes in style and attitude."[51]

"Blowin' in the Wind" became world-famous when Peter, Paul and Mary issued the song as a single three weeks after the release of Freewheelin'. They and Dylan both shared the same manager: Albert Grossman. The single sold a phenomenal three hundred thousand copies in the first week of release. On July 13, 1963, it reached number two on the Billboard chart with sales exceeding one million copies.[52] Dylan later recalled that he was astonished when Peter Yarrow told him he was going to make $5,000 from the publishing rights.[30]

There has been much speculation in print about the identity of the girl in "Girl from the North Country". Clinton Heylin states that the most frequently mooted candidates are Echo Helstrom, an early girlfriend of Dylan from his hometown of Hibbing,[53] and Suze Rotolo, for whom Dylan was pining as he finished the song in Italy.[54] Howard Sounes suggests the girl Dylan probably had in mind was Bonnie Beecher, a girlfriend of Dylan's when he was at the University of Minnesota.[55][a 2] Musicologist Todd Harvey notes that Dylan not only took the tune of "Scarborough Fair", which he learned from Martin Carthy in London but also adapted the theme of that song. "Scarborough Fair" derives from "The Elfin Knight" (Child Ballad Number 2), which was first transcribed in 1670. In the song, a supernatural character poses a series of questions to an innocent, requesting her to perform impossible tasks. Harvey points out that Dylan "retains the idea of the listener being sent upon a task, a northern place setting, and an antique lyric quality".[56] Dylan returned to this song on Nashville Skyline (1969), recording it as a duet with Johnny Cash, and he returned to it again in the studio with an unreleased organ and sax version in 1978.

A scathing song directed against the war industry, "Masters of War" is based on Jean Ritchie's arrangement of "Nottamun Town", an English riddle song. It was written in late 1962 while Dylan was in London; eyewitnesses (including Martin Carthy and Anthea Joseph) recall Dylan performing the song in folk clubs at the time. Ritchie would later assert her claim on the song's arrangement; according to one Dylan biography, the suit was settled when Ritchie received $5,000 from Dylan's lawyers.[57]

Dylan composed "Down the Highway" in the form of a 12-bar blues. In the sleeve notes of Freewheelin', Dylan explained to Nat Hentoff: "What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat."[26] Into this song, Dylan injected one explicit mention of an absence that was troubling him: the sojourn of Suze Rotolo in Perugia: "My baby took my heart from me/ She packed it all up in a suitcase/ Lord, she took it away to Italy, Italy."

"Bob Dylan's Blues" begins with a spoken intro where Dylan describes the origins of folk songs in a satirical vein: "most of the songs that are written uptown in Tin Pan Alley, that's where most of the folk songs come from nowadays".[58] What follows has been characterized as an absurd, improvised blues[58] which Dylan, in the sleeve notes, describes as "a really off-the-cuff-song. I start with an idea and then I feel what follows. Best way I can describe this one is that it's sort of like walking by a side street. You gaze in and walk on."[26] Harvey points out that Dylan subsequently elaborated this style of self-deprecatory, absurdist humor into more complex songs, such as "I Shall Be Free No.10" (1964).[59]

Dylan was only 21 years old when he wrote one of his most complex songs, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", often referred to as "Hard Rain". Dylan is said to have premiered "Hard Rain" at the Gaslight Cafe, where Village performer Peter Blankfield recalled: "He put out these pieces of loose-leaf paper ripped out of a spiral notebook. And he starts singing ['Hard Rain'] ... He finished singing it, and no one could say anything. The length of it, the episodic sense of it. Every line kept building and bursting".[60] Dylan performed "Hard Rain" days later at Carnegie Hall on September 22, 1962, as part of a concert organized by Pete Seeger. The song gained added resonance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, just one month after Dylan's first performance of "Hard Rain", when U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave his warning to the Soviet Union over their deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Critics have interpreted the lyric 'hard rain' as a reference to nuclear fallout, but Dylan resisted the specificity of this interpretation. In a radio interview with Studs Terkel in 1963, Dylan said,

No, it's not atomic rain, it's just a hard rain. It isn't the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen ... In the last verse, when I say, "the pellets of poison are flooding the waters", that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.[61]

Many people were astonished by the power and complexity of this work. For Robert Shelton, who had given Dylan an important boost in his 1961 review in The New York Times, this song was "a landmark in topical, folk-based songwriting. Here blooms the promised fruit of the 1950s poetry-jazz fusion of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Rexroth."[62] Folk singer Dave Van Ronk later commented: "I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution."[63] Seeger expressed the opinion that this song would last longer than any other written by Dylan.[64]

Dylan wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" on hearing from Suze Rotolo that she was considering staying in Italy indefinitely,[65] and he used a melody he adapted from Paul Clayton's song "Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone)".[66] In the Freewheelin' sleeve notes, Dylan comments: "It isn't a love song. It's a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It's as if you were talking to yourself".

Dylan's contemporaries hailed the song as a masterpiece: Bob Spitz quotes Paul Stookey saying "I thought it was a masterful statement", while Dave Van Ronk called it "self-pitying but brilliant".[67][68] Dylan biographer Howard Sounes commented: "The greatness of the song was in the cleverness of the language. The phrase "don't think twice, it's all right" could be snarled, sung with resignation, or delivered with an ambiguous mixture of bitterness and regret. Seldom have the contradictory emotions of a thwarted lover been so well expressed, and the song transcended the autobiographical origins of Dylan's pain".[69]

"Bob Dylan's Dream" was based on the melody of the traditional "Lady Franklin's Lament", in which the title character dreams of finding her husband, Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, alive and well. (Sir John Franklin had vanished on an expedition searching for the North West Passage in 1845; a stone cairn on King William Island detailing his demise was found by a later expedition in 1859.) Todd Harvey points out that Dylan transforms the song into a personal journey, yet he retains both the theme and the mood of the original ballad. The world outside is depicted as stormy and harsh, and Dylan's most fervent wish, like Lady Franklin's, is to be reunited with departed companions and to relive the fond memories they represent.[70]

"Oxford Town" is Dylan's sardonic account of events at the University of Mississippi in September 1962. U.S. Air Force veteran James Meredith was the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, Mississippi. When Meredith first tried to attend classes at the school, some Mississippians pledged to keep the university segregated, including the state governor Ross Barnett. Ultimately, the University of Mississippi had to be integrated with the help of U.S. federal troops. Dylan responded rapidly: his song was published in the November 1962 issue of Broadside.[71]

The "talkin' blues" was a style of improvised songwriting that Woody Guthrie had developed to a high plane. (A Minneapolis domestic recording that Dylan made in September 1960 includes his performances of Guthrie's "Talking Columbia" and "Talking Merchant Marine".)[72] "Talkin' World War III Blues" was a spontaneous composition Dylan created in the studio during the final session for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. He recorded five takes of the song and the fifth was selected for the album. The format of the "talkin' blues" permitted Dylan to address the serious subject of nuclear annihilation with humor, and "without resorting to his finger-pointing or apocalyptical-prophetic persona".[72]

"Corrina, Corrina" was recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks, and by their leader Bo Carter in 1928. The song was covered by artists as diverse as Bob Wills, Big Joe Turner, and Doc Watson. Dylan's version borrows phrases from a few Robert Johnson songs: "Stones In My Passway", "32-20 Blues", and "Hellhound On My Trail".[73] An alternate take of the song was used as a B-side for his "Mixed-Up Confusion" single.[74]

"Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance" is based on "Honey, Won't You Allow Me One More Chance?", a song dating back to the 1890s that was popularized by Henry Thomas in his 1928 recording. "However, Thomas's original provided no more than a song title and a notion", writes Heylin, "which Dylan turned into a personal plea to an absent lover to allow him 'one more chance to get along with you.' It is a vocal tour de force and ... showed a Dylan prepared to make light of his own blues by using the form itself."[75]

"I Shall Be Free" is a rewrite of Lead Belly's "We Shall Be Free", which was performed by Lead Belly, Sonny Terry, Cisco Houston, and Woody Guthrie. According to Todd Harvey, Dylan's version draws its melody from the Guthrie recording but omits its signature chorus ("We'll soon be free/When the Lord will call us home").[76] Critics have been divided about the worth of this final song. Robert Shelton dismissed the song as "a decided anticlimax. Although the album has at least a half dozen blockbusters, two of the weakest songs are tucked in at the end, like shirttails."[77] Todd Harvey has argued that by placing the song at the close of the Freewheelin' LP, Dylan ends on a note of levity which is a relief after the weighty sentiments expressed in several songs on the album.[78]