Maggie's Farm

Another two years would pass before Dylan famously moved beyond his folk beginnings by “going electric,” but at the time of the release of “Freewheelin” Dylan was already being hailed as a folk hero and eloquent voice of social protest.  While the following album would only add to this reputation, the majority of Dylan’s music even at this time was still largely personal in scope and consciously avoidant of social critique.  Even a song such as “Blowin’ In The Wind,” which has been adopted by numerous left-leaning groups as an appropriate anthem, merely poses questions, rather than prescribing solutions.  “How many years can a mountain exist,” Dylan sings, “until it is washed to the sea?”  The socially-tinged questions are juxtaposed with such expressions of infinite time, implying that Dylan perhaps saw these problems as permanent and inevitable, if unfortunate, products of human experience.

 At the same time, the lyrics of the songs, rather than their musical structure, were already taking the folk music formula and standing it on its head.  “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” the song which led Allen Ginsberg to declare that “the torch had been passed” from one generation of poets to the next, takes the lyrical question-and-answer structure of the Scottish ballad “Lord Randal” and fills it with line after line of surrealistic yet vivid imagery, perhaps inspired by the reading of French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud.  The signs of progression away from the folk scene were already in plain view, yet many of Dylan’s breathless supporters could not see the writing on the wall, and failed to do so again even when Dylan made the statement explicit the following year with “Restless Farewell,” the last song on “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”  That Dylan created some of the greatest so-called “protest” songs ever written is more a testament to his immense songwriting talent, which has wrestled with a vast number of themes and topics over the past 40 years, than a reflection of any particular political leaning or agenda.  Songs with a political or protest slant would sporadically reappear in later years (“Hurricane,” for example, or  “Neighborhood Bully”), but viewed within a broader context the “protest phase” was actually even briefer than Dylan’s later Christian evangelical period, which gave rise to three full albums.

 Taken as a whole, “Freewheelin’” is a groundbreaking artistic creation that shows Dylan coming to grips with the vast potential of his fertile and creative mind.  The songs that resulted are hardly the first tentative steps of a beginner, but rather timeless creations that have lost little or none of their power almost a half-century later, even as Dylan continues to introduce them to new audiences in his live performances.