Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’
That grizzled-beyond-its-years voice, that free-tempo guitar playing, that wheezing harmonica, those political songs that stomp their targets into dust with sheer verbal overkill — Dylan was a very serious young man on his third album, combining the fiery indignation of youth with a slightly archaic, time-worn diction. (He mocked militarists in "With God On Our Side," confident that he had history on his.) The 22-year-old songwriter was already aware that he was something like the voice of a generation, too: the title track was a deliberate (and successful) attempt to create a rallying cry for the revolutionary mood of the times. "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" begins with the story of the killing of a black barmaid by a young white tobacco farmer, then expands to a rhetorically masterful indictment of the entire racist system around it; "When the Ship Comes In" rewrites one of Dylan's favorite songs, Brecht & Weill's "Pirate Jenny," into a just-you-wait threat to the foes of social change. And between the demands for justice, there's a trio of love songs — about parting, rather than reuniting. Released during the first throes of Beatlemania, The Times briefly stood as an exemplar of folk as "serious" music, unlike all that icky pop stuff… until Dylan smashed that particular duality a year later, too.
