Blowin’ in the Wind

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Bob Dylan was just 21 when he wrote this anthem — and by his own account, the first version poured out in about ten minutes one April afternoon in a Greenwich Village café. The melody wasn’t new: Dylan adapted it from “No More Auction Block,” an old spiritual sung by formerly enslaved people, which gives the song its haunting, hymn-like bones. It first appeared not on a record but in a folk magazine called Broadside, and Dylan released it on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963. The song even has its own scandal: a New Jersey high school student named Lorre Wyatt was rumored to have written it and sold it to Dylan — a complete myth, but one that shadowed Dylan for a decade before Wyatt publicly came clean.

But it was Peter, Paul and Mary who turned it into a phenomenon, and that happened because of a shrewd manager. Albert Grossman represented both Dylan and the trio — he had assembled Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers himself in 1961, envisioning an updated version of Pete Seeger’s Weavers — and he handed his young songwriter’s tune to his hit-making group. Their version, released in June 1963, sold faster than any record Warner Bros. had ever put out, climbed to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and won two Grammy Awards. Overnight it made Dylan famous as a songwriter and made the trio the musical voice of the civil rights movement.

Then came the moment that sealed it. On August 28, 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary stood before a quarter-million people at the March on Washington and sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” — the same afternoon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Two years later they marched from Selma to Montgomery. Their activism cost them: the trio received hate mail and death threats, and kept going anyway. Decades later, Mary Travers said this was the song that meant the most to her, because its questions never stopped being current — you could open any morning’s newspaper and find one of them staring back. Perhaps the finest tribute came from Sam Cooke, who was so struck that a young white songwriter had written it that he was inspired to answer with his own masterpiece, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”