The 1963 song that gave Bob Dylan his greatest enemy: “I’ll see them all in their graves”
Being one of the greatest songwriters of all time isn’t really something that Bob Dylan aspired to be when he was younger.
He was more than happy to follow in the footsteps of the giants who came before him, but looking through a lot of his songs, what makes them great is how he’s quoting his own heart whenever he talks about the problems getting him down, whether that was his personal troubles at home or him telling fables about the harsh realities that we face every single day. The one place he could be most vulnerable was in his songs, but he did have a few moments where he felt like the public didn’t truly understand what he was trying to get at in his songs.
Then again, it’s hard to know whether Dylan was ever giving someone a straight answer whenever he was being interviewed. He kept a lot of his songs close to the chest whenever he made a new record, and even if there was no room for metaphor, he was going to play around with journalists when they asked him the more obvious questions about what his songs were about all the time.
But when you listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it’s not like it was hard to look through every song and see what he was getting at. ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’ is one of the best lovesick songs from his early period, and ‘Masters of War’ is still one of the best anti-war songs ever created, but ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is the kind of song that can be interpreted in a million different ways if you want to.
Because while Dylan gets the reputation of preaching from a pulpit whenever he sings, he’s just asking questions. He knows that the answer is somewhere along the cool breeze, but it’s hard to really understand why people still choose to hate their fellow man, and lob cannonballs their way. He was saying it was on a lot of people’s minds, but Dylan wasn’t really ready for the kind of backlash that would come when every other supposed scholar threw their two cents in.
Whenever any artist puts one of their songs into the world, it really doesn’t belong to them anymore, and when everyone started to dissect it, Dylan got a little too uncomfortable with how everyone was taking it. He was already wise beyond his years, but given that he was one of the premier folk artists in his field, he had to deal with more than a few critics claiming that he wasn’t actually the one behind his signature tune.
Compared to all of the other folkies of his generation, Dylan pointed to ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ as the first time the press tried to call him a plagiarist, saying, “Newsweek printed that some kid from New Jersey wrote ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ and it wasn’t me at all. And when that didn’t fly, people accused me of stealing the melody from a 16th-century Protestant hymn. And when that didn’t work, they said they made a mistake, and it was really an old Negro spiritual.”
“So what’s so different? It’s gone on for so long, I might not be able to live without it now. Fuck ’em. I’ll see them all in their graves.”
Bob Dylan
But even if the melody didn’t fully belong to him, that shouldn’t have really mattered in the folk tradition. A lot of the greatest artists with acoustic guitars in their hands were bound to come across similar melodies every now and again, and even if someone did have a point about plagiarism, no one could have asked the questions that Dylan did whenever he stepped up to the microphone with that harmonica strapped across his neck.
There are only so many notes that anyone can choose from when writing their songs, and Dylan was the one proving that it was more about how much personality was put into every single line. Some people still might argue that his voice sounds the same way sandpaper feels, but the reason why it still resonates over all these years is that you believe him whenever he’s singing his songs.
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