Come you princes and gamblers
And I’ll tell you a tale
About an unborn world
From the cold winds of hell
I think you will find
That my story’s been told, indeed it’s centuries old
And though I am young,
You may know me quite well.
They may call me king bishop,
They may say I’m unkind
That I’m a blue-tuned sailor,
Got a simple mind
Tell me, when you look in the mirror
Or through your window view
Do you see a stranger’s eyes
Staring straight at you?
All you big-wigs and con-men
Who stole from my town
How’s the blood in your coffee,
Soaked in your nightgowns?
And how does it feel
To live behind a wall?
They may call you rich men,
But you don’t know wealth at all.
To the big who are small,
Self-proclaimed greats of all time
Who sweat over accolades,
Wasting their rhymes
Man, they couldn’t pay me
To put on your shoes
Held down by the weight
Of having something to prove.
To those who march through the wild,
Along the borderline;
To the persecuted and exiled,
I’m yours and you are mine
And to every shade of oppressor,
Your day will come soon
But in the end, just remember,
You are me and I am you.
You may quote from the wise,
Or your scriptures of old
But when you spill the blood of my brother,
Call the prophets your own,
In the eyes of the Lord,
You cast every stone
To twist the good word
In your own quest for the throne.
And so to all those
Who’ve taught me to love
Who in the same second,
Flaunt their handguns
Your sons and your daughters
Look to you every year
As you preach of peace
In the cold fortress of your fears
Come you princes and gamblers
And I’ll tell you a tale
About a battle-scarred world
That’s seen some serious hell
I think you will find
That my story’s been told, indeed it’s centuries old
And though I am young,
You ought to know me well.
Yea, along life’s ladder,
You may recognize every rung
And though you may feel real old;
Know today, we are young.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the song Blowin’ in the Wind.
Like many millions of people, when I first heard it I was moved; and I appreciated the depth and meaning in every line, every question posed by the author, each one pertaining to a fact of human history consistently revealing itself for each new generation.
I couldn’t help but be a little disheartened by the fact that these questions are still so relevant, so many years later.
Yet in the years following my first encounter with the song—for all it’s undeniable eloquence and power—the chorus still struck me as frustratingly flat.
To ask questions like “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” only to say that the answer is blowin’ in the wind, felt a little bit cheap, as though each of us might as well throw up our hands and just say ‘oh well.’
It was the only thing about the song that bugged me. However, lately I’ve been looking at it differently.
Maybe I’m just slow and people have been hip to it all long, or maybe I’m taking shots in the dark and totally inserting my own meaning into the song, but that chorus means far more to me now than it did before.
What I think now is that if it feels underwhelming and flat to the listener, then that’s a good thing, because it should feel underwhelming and unsatisfying.
The song was never about spoon-feeding us the answers to age-old questions anymore than it was pointing its finger at any one group of people. If it’s pointing its finger at anybody, then it’s doing so at everybody.
The real subject of scrutiny isn’t any one country or group or individual, but something deeper and typically more silent, something to which all of us are vulnerable.
Apathy. The very thing that bothered me about the song might actually be the main point of the song in the first place.
The answer, actually, is not blowing in the wind. If it is, it’s only because we’ve given into the same apathy, hopelessness, bitterness and fear that convinces people to throw up their hands and give up right from the start, and leave it to some unseen force outside of their control.
In the last verse, Dylan writes “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?”
There could be a lot of ways to interpret that line, but for me, it’s the one time throughout the song in which the author winks at us, as if to undermine that seemingly disappointing chorus.
As far as we know, there is only a sky above us, and it seems to care little if at all about the affairs of men and women. It will provide no answer to our problems, beyond the possibility of serving as a mirror. One that allows us to recognize that the answer to these questions is in our hands. It always has been and always will be.
To me, that’s a timeless truth. Elemental as the wind.
Outside of the various nightclubs in which he’d played throughout the south, few had heard of Robert Johnson in those immediate years following his death. But that began to change in 1961.
John Hammond was the head of Columbia Records—the same man who had tried to book Johnson years ago for a bill at Carnegie Hall, only to discover that he’d died just weeks before.By this time, Hammond already had a few feathers in his cap, having signed the likes of Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to the label. Now he was overseeing the production and release of King of the Delta Blues Singers, the compilation album featuring those original songs which Johnson recorded inauspiciously some 25 years ago in San Antonio.
The album would prove to be a monumental influence in the oncoming wave of rock and roll set to sweep the cultural landscape in a couple years.
One of the first people to hear the record before it was even released was a young artist Hammond had just signed to the label, an unassuming folk-singer mostly known in the Greenwich Village folk revival scene.
People knew him as the kid who sang Woody Guthrie songs, who talked and dressed like Guthrie, but whatever else John Hammond saw in Bob Dylan seems a bit of a mystery since there were other artists in the neighborhood arguably making a bigger splash at the time.
Nobody had any real indication that he wrote his own songs.Not John Hammond nor perhaps even Dylan himself.
His debut album, Bob Dylan, featured mostly traditional songs—some obscure, others well-known—songs that had been covered and performed various times in the clubs and cafes of Greenwich Village, not least of which included House of the Rising Sun, soon to be cemented as a classic by Eric Burdon and the Animals a few years later.
Even so, the album made very few waves.Personnel at Columbia were already regarding the kid as Hammond’s folly, as though he were some pet project everybody could overlook in light of Hammond’s already proven success.
When he listened to his album for the first time, Dylan later confessed, he was highly disturbed and he immediately felt the need to go out and make another record.
By this time, Hammond had given Dylan a preview of the Robert Johnson album set to be released by Columbia. And when Dylan heard it, like so many of his contemporaries to follow, he was greatly affected by the sound. Yet perhaps unlike his contemporaries—especially those blues-obsessed musicians gearing up in the U.K. who were more entranced by Johnson’s guitar playing—Dylan found that he was particularly drawn to the lyrics.
He describes it best in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One:
I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease.I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them.I thought about Johnson a lot, wondered who his audience could have been.It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these.You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. -Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1 (2004)
Just how much hearing Johnson’s music influenced the making of Dylan’s next record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, can only be guessed; but given Dylan’s own words on hearing the music, it seems at the very least that it might have inspired him to start heading in a more authentic and personal direction, that realizing Johnson’s profound originality might have further encouraged him to veer from covering the old folk standards and start getting serious about finding his own voice.
If so, then authenticity began with staying true to the times in which he lived, when the Cold War was at its peak and the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing.
Unlike his previous record, Freewheelin’ would mostly feature original songs, songs that would quickly establish Dylan as an early voice in the underground folk revival now spreading across America as part of the emerging 1960s counter-culture.
Blowin‘ In the Wind, the album’s anthemic first track would prove to be one of the most celebrated and recognizable songs in Dylan repertoire, and the number of times it was covered in the ensuing months and years would bear testimony to its cultural and social relevance.
Now, for those readers looking to take their first dive into Dylan’s work, it’s difficult to pinpoint any one song or album to start, but I think one place that’s as good as any is The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, because in many ways, it’s his true first album. Though his previous self-titled debut did feature two original songs including Song for Woody, a tribute to his hero Woody Guthrie; I think Freewheelin’ marks the beginning of Dylan making his own path, taking those real first steps to becoming the artist he was looking to be.
Now of course, as is the case with Robert Johnson and so many of the artists we’ll be talking about in this series, it’s impossible to capture the scope and influence in an artist’s work in one article, so you can be sure we’ll be revisiting Dylan’s music in many more articles to come.
But in closing, for now, and in honor of these two giants of American Music and on that subtle art of conveying strong emotion and images through seemingly subtle means, here’s the opening verse of one of Dylan’s early songs off Freewheelin’, called Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.
It’s one of my personal favorites, and one in which I think the spirit of Robert Johnson looms quite heavily.
Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now
Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It’ll never do anyhow
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’ll be travelin’ on
But don’t think twice it’s all right.
Quinby & Co. 