Blowin' in the Wind

The story

Bob Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. He first performed a two-verse version at Gerde's Folk City in New York on 16 April 1962, a performance that was recorded and circulated among collectors, and soon added a middle verse. The song was first printed in May 1962 in the sixth issue of Broadside, the magazine of topical songs founded by Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, and in June 1962 in Sing Out! with comments by Dylan. He recorded it on 9 July 1962 for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 and also issued as a single.

The song drew on older sources. Its theme may come from a passage in Woody Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory (1943), whose work had shaped Dylan's political thinking. Pete Seeger first identified its melody as an adaptation of the African American spiritual "No More Auction Block", which, according to Alan Lomax, was sung by formerly enslaved people who fled to Nova Scotia after Britain abolished slavery in 1833; in 1978 Dylan told the journalist Marc Rowland that he had taken it from that spiritual and that his song followed the same feeling. The critic Michael Gray saw in the lyric Dylan's quiet use of Biblical rhetoric, beginning from the Book of Ezekiel.

The song became world-famous through Peter, Paul and Mary, who shared Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. The Chad Mitchell Trio had recorded it first, but their label delayed the album. Peter, Paul and Mary's single, released in June 1963, sold 300,000 copies in its first week, reached number two on the Billboard pop chart on 17 August 1963 with more than a million sold, and won two Grammy Awards in 1964. A claim reported in Newsweek in November 1963 that a high-school student, Lorre Wyatt, had written the song was eventually shown to be false.

It has been called an anthem of the civil rights movement. In Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home, Mavis Staples recalled her astonishment that a young white man could voice the frustration and hopes of Black Americans so strongly, and Sam Cooke, deeply impressed, sang it and was moved by it to write "A Change Is Gonna Come". The critic Andy Gill saw it as Dylan's first move from the particular to the general: a song vague enough to apply to almost any question of freedom.

It travelled into other settings. In the 1960s and 1970s it was sung at Catholic folk masses and as a hymn in Protestant churches; in 1997 Pope John Paul II drew on it before some 300,000 young Italian Catholics at a church congress where Dylan performed, and in 2007 Pope Benedict XVI wrote that he had been uneasy with such stars performing in a church setting. In 1975 a Sri Lankan school textbook printed it as poetry in place of Shakespeare, causing controversy, and protesters against the Iraq War revived it. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994 and was ranked number 14 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" in 2004.

What it says

A protest song about peace, war and freedom. Its mood is quiet and searching.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.