"This here, it ain't a protest song"
1962-04-16?, Gerde's Folk City?, New York, NY
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“This here, it ain’t a protest song or anything like that,” Bob Dylan says before his final song on today’s tape, “because I don’t write protest songs.” He then proceeds to debut his new not-a-protest song: “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Yes, as early as April 1962, when “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a brand-new song he’d written just days before, he was already feeling hemmed in by people calling him a protest singer. It didn’t take until Another Side of Bob Dylan or going electric at Newport. He was pushing against the “protest song” stigma practically since he began writing, well, protest songs.
The funny thing about him acting all anti-protest song here is that he’d only just begun writing what most would consider his protest-song canon. This show took place before he had written “Masters of War” or “The Times They Are a-Changin’” or “Only a Pawn in Their Game” or “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” (Hell, the subjects of the latter two songs were still alive at this point.) He’d only written what some consider his first protest song, “The Death of Emmett Till,” two months prior. It’s like he’s preemptively pushing against a label he doesn’t even have yet: Protest singer. Maybe he knows he’s about to get it, and is trying to head it off. Unsuccessfully.
This may well be the first time anyone heard “Blowin’ in the Wind,” though, as often happens with these very early shows, the details are too vague to state that definitively, from the date (April 16…probably) to the venue (Gerde’s Folk City…probably) to whether he’d already performed “Blowin’” at some lost-to-history show a day or two before (probably?). It’s almost certainly the first time anyone in this room heard it, at least. There’s no recognition applause when he begins, certainly no singing along. He wouldn’t record it for three more months. In fact, he’s not even finished writing it. It ends after two verses. The final verse (“How many times must a man look up…”) hasn’t been written yet.
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