6 Blowin’ in the Wind

Chapter 6 Blowin' in the Wind In 1961 Bob visited Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a town right next to Boston, and the home of Harvard University. Cambridge's folk music community rivaled New York's. Joan Baez was the queen of the Cambridge folk scene. She had a perfect, pure soprano and sang traditional English and American songs. Her first three albums all went gold, selling more than five hundred thousand copies each.

Bob had first seen Joan on TV back in Minnesota. She had shiny black hair down to her waist. He wrote about his first impression of her in Chronicles: Volume One: "I couldn't stop looking at her, didn't want to blink. The sight of her made me sigh. All that and then there was the voice. She sang in a voice straight to God. Nothing she did didn't work."

Joan Baez was not impressed when she heard Dylan's first album. But her opinion changed two years later when she heard the song "Blowin' in the Wind." It is the first cut on Bob's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The song asks a series

of questions that touch on war, civil rights, and injustice. Each chorus ends "The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind / The answer is blowin' in the wind." By that he meant that the answers to our problems were right in front of us, although we often could not see that. Since it first came out, "Blowin' in the Wind" has been recorded by many musicians. Probably the most famous version is by the folksinging trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Their recording shot to number two on the Billboard chart in 1963.

The cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan featured a memorable photograph. Suze and Bob are walking down a wintery Greenwich Village street. They are huddled against the wind and look very young and in love. Freewheelin' was an immediate success and brought Bob to the attention of folkies all across the United States. The release of the album in late May was part of a string of events that made Bob famous. In 1962 he hired a new manager who got Bob a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show in May 1963. This was the big time! Bob was planning to perform "Talkin' John Birch Society Blues." The song made fun of a small, very conservative group called the John Birch Society. He later changed the name of the song to "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues." During rehearsals a CBS lawyer told Ed Sullivan that Bob couldn't sing the song. CBS was nervous that the John Birch Society might sue the network. When Ed Sullivan gave Bob the news, he blew up. He was being censored! Bob walked out of the television studio and went home.

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