The greatest Bob Dylan song, according to Pete Seeger
Back in 1961, when Bob Dylan made that decisive step to abandon his life in Minnesota and head for New York City, he did so in the footsteps of the folk heroes that had gone before him, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Both figures, of course, had a colossal impact on the musical inspiration of Dylan’s early years, but Seeger, in particular, was there to support the blossoming songwriting genius throughout his earliest efforts. He was there shortly after Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village, and he was there backstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 – during which he did not take an axe to the sound desk, in spite of that scene in A Complete Unknown – in short, then, Seeger had a front-row seat to watch the ascension of Dylan from a, well, complete unknown, to the songwriting titan he soon became.
Seeger himself was never short of that songwriting talent himself. First emerging onto the airwaves during the late 1930s, Seeger immediately established himself among the most radical songwriters in the United States, devoting himself to left-wing activism and socially-conscious songwriting in a way which few other people had really thought to do. Inevitably, his political stance soon made him an enemy of the McCarthyist state, but it also made him a cult figure within folk circles.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a young Bob Dylan always held Seeger in a particularly high regard, and it is no surprise that that appreciation was soon reciprocated, too. Even when Dylan strayed from his folk roots during his infamous ‘electric Dylan’ reinvention, Seeger never lost his appreciation for the songwriting talents of his young prodigy, even if the legend surrounding that period often declares that Seeger resented Dylan’s move towards rock and blues.
If Seeger truly did resent Dylan’s sonic shift, he certainly hid it well, consistently praising the Minnesota-born songwriter and his ever-expanding musical repertoire throughout his life. During one interview, in fact, Seeger cited his all-time favourite Bob Dylan song, ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’, per Mojo.
“Back in 1963, I got together with Bob and Theodore Bikel for a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi,” Seeger recalled. “A friend of mine was making a little documentary film there, and the mayor told him, ‘We never had a [N-word] problem here, it’s outside agitators cause the trouble.’”
This incident was when Dylan’s rebellious, politically-charged tendencies shone through, according to Seeger. “Well, we had a little song festival in a cotton field, and Bob sang ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’ which he’d just written about Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Civil Rights activist who was murdered three weeks earlier.”
Seeger went on to explain the 1964 piece, “The song says just putting the murderers in jail wasn’t enough, it was about ending the whole game of segregation.” A
dding, “It was the first song I heard that connected the position of the Black field hands with that of the poor whites in the South.”
This fearless activism and unapologetic performance were enough to cement Dylan as a songwriting icon, as far as Seeger was concerned, and the recorded version of ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’, which went on to appear on The Times They Are A-Changin’, didn’t lose any of its revolutionary power.
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