Remembering Judy Collins’ cover of the Bob Dylan classic ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’
Bob Dylan is one of the rarefied few about whom it can be said, ‘it’s probably one of the most important songs in history, but it isn’t one of his very best’. Dylan’s old tracks, by his own fervent admission, were not protest songs—they were liminal works that contained the whole gambit of life. While songs like ‘Times They Are A-Changin’’ seem to raise an eyebrow to their creator’s claim, it works heavily in his favour that the anthem remains as timeless and relevant today as it did in the unnamed time he sings about.
Upon release, the single and album that shares its name made it clear that pop culture had to be cognizant of the world it was emerging into. With classic Carnivalesque folk stylings, Dylan places one foot into the past and lunges the other boldly into the future, creating a ditty that seems to have a journey stretching out behind it and a beacon firmly in its grip. Aside from everything else, it is, as strewn in the sentence above, a ditty—this was the birth of pop culture, after all, and if it wasn’t a hit it would’ve faded into futility.
As it happens, it was somewhat a hit and as such, it genuinely proclaimed a message that was heeded by the masses and may well have brought about some progressive change. As Dylan said of the anthem: “I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. This is definitely a song with a purpose. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to.”
As such, the track has entered society at large and a measure of that is just how many artists have tried their hand at it. It is the theme song to a revolution and people continue to revisit it as the wave of pop culture unfurls ad infinitum. Like the old songs of Greenwich Village, as brilliantly stated in the film Inside Llewyn Davis: “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.”
Thus, years after its release, the classic country and folk phenom, Judy Collins, figured she’d dust it down and wheel it out in an updated rehash. Fair enough, the panpipes might offer a smattering of dated 90s production to her version of the track but her soaring vocal take does more than enough to gloss over that as she hits high notes with the grace and ease of a chirping blackbird and her composure nor power wanes throughout. It’s as though she could wipe out Sputnik with a sigh.
Taken from her 1998 covers album, Collins cast an aged eye back over the counterculture movement and reprised classic tracks like leafing through a dogeared book years down the line. The result is earthy and wistful and, as ever with Collins, so easy listening that the song could even give pause to a blue-arsed fly trying to escape through a windowpane. In short, this is as calming as the revolution gets.
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