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The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the second studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on May 27, 1963, by Columbia Records. Whereas his self-titled debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, this album represented the beginning of Dylan's writing contemporary lyrics to traditional melodies. Eleven of the thirteen songs on the album are Dylan's original compositions. It opens with "Blowin' in the Wind", which became an anthem of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary soon after the release of the album. The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as among Dylan's best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

May 27, 1963

April 24, 1962 – April 24, 1963

Columbia A (New York City)

44:14

Dylan's lyrics embraced news stories drawn from headlines about the ongoing civil rights movement and he articulated anxieties about the fear of nuclear warfare. Balancing this political material were love songs, sometimes bitter and accusatory, and material that features surreal humor. Freewheelin' showcased Dylan's songwriting talent for the first time, propelling him to national and international fame. The success of the album and Dylan's subsequent recognition led to his being named as "Spokesman of a Generation", a label Dylan repudiated.


The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan reached number 22 in the US (eventually going platinum), and became a number-one album in the UK in 1965. In 2003, the album was ranked number 97 on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2002, Freewheelin' was one of the first 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

In popular culture[edit]

The album's cover photo was carefully recreated by Cameron Crowe for his 2001 Tom Cruise–starring film Vanilla Sky[103] and by Todd Haynes for his 2007 Dylan biopic I'm Not There.[104] It also served as a visual reference for the Coen brothers' 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis.[105]


A copy of the vinyl album itself is an important prop in Jacques Rivette's 1969 film L'Amour fou. In one key scene, the male lead, Sebastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), is in the apartment of his girlfriend, Marta (Josée Destoop), helping her sort through LPs she could potentially re-sell in order to raise some quick cash. He holds up her copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which she declines to sell on the grounds that she still listens to it.[106]


In November 2023, Rolling Stone cited "Bob Dylan Core", a TikTok trend inspired by the album cover, as turning Generation Z on to Dylan. According to the article, videos tagged with the #BobDylanCore hashtag had been viewed 11.5 million times.[107]

Legacy[edit]

The success of Freewheelin' transformed the public perception of Dylan. Before the album's release, he was one among many folk-singers. Afterwards, at the age of 22, Dylan was regarded as a major artist, perhaps even a spokesman for disaffected youth. As one critic described the transformation, "In barely over a year, a young plagiarist had been reborn as a songwriter of substance, and his first album of fully realized original material got the 1960s off their musical starting block."[108] Janet Maslin wrote of the album: "These were the songs that established him as the voice of his generation—someone who implicitly understood how concerned young Americans felt about nuclear disarmament and the growing Civil Rights Movement: his mixture of moral authority and nonconformity was perhaps the most timely of his attributes".[109]


This title of "Spokesman of a Generation" was viewed by Dylan with disgust in later years. He came to feel it was a label that the media had pinned on him, and in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan wrote: "The press never let up. Once in a while I would have to rise up and offer myself for an interview so they wouldn't beat the door down. Later an article would hit the streets with the headline "Spokesman Denies That He's A Spokesman". I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs".[110]


The album secured for Dylan an "unstoppable cult following" of fans who preferred the harshness of his performances to the softer cover versions released by other singers.[3] Richard Williams has suggested that the richness of the imagery in Freewheelin' transformed Dylan into a key performer for a burgeoning college audience hungry for a new cultural complexity: "For students whose exam courses included Eliot and Yeats, here was something that flattered their expanding intellect while appealing to the teenage rebel in their early-sixties souls. James Dean had walked around reading James Joyce; here were both in a single package, the words and the attitude set to music."[111] Andy Gill adds that in the few months between the release of Freewheelin' in May 1963, and Dylan's next album The Times They Are A-Changin' in January 1964, Dylan became the hottest property in American music, stretching the boundaries of what had been previously viewed as a collegiate folk music audience.[112]


Critical opinion about Freewheelin' has been consistently favorable in the years since its release. Dylan biographer Howard Sounes called it "Bob Dylan's first great album".[55] In a survey of Dylan's work published by Q magazine in 2000, the Freewheelin' album was described as "easily the best of [Dylan's] acoustic albums and a quantum leap from his debut—which shows the frantic pace at which Dylan's mind was moving." The magazine went on to comment, "You can see why this album got The Beatles listening. The songs at its core must have sounded like communiques from another plane".[113]


For Patrick Humphries, "rarely has one album so effectively reflected the times which produced it. Freewheelin' spoke directly to the concerns of its audience. and addressed them in a mature and reflective manner: it mirrored the state of the nation."[108] Stephen Thomas Erlewine's verdict on the album in the AllMusic guide was: "It's hard to overestimate the importance of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the record that firmly established Dylan as an unparalleled songwriter ... This is rich, imaginative music, capturing the sound and spirit of America as much as that of Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, or Elvis Presley. Dylan, in many ways, recorded music that equaled this, but he never topped it".[85]


In March 2000, Van Morrison told the Irish rock magazine Hot Press about the impact that Freewheelin' made on him: "I think I heard it in a record shop in Smith Street. And I just thought it was incredible that this guy's not singing about 'moon in June' and he's getting away with it. That's what I thought at the time. The subject matter wasn't pop songs, ya know, and I thought this kind of opens the whole thing up ... Dylan put it into the mainstream that this could be done".[114]


Freewheelin' was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry in 2002. The citation read: "This album is considered by some to be the most important collection of original songs issued in the 1960s. It includes "Blowin' in the Wind," the era's popular and powerful protest anthem."[115] The following year (2003), Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it number 97 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time,[94] maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list,[116] before dropping to number 255 in a 2020 revised list.[117]


The album was included in Robert Christgau's "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings, published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981).[118] It was also included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.[119] It was voted number 127 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000).[120]


Taylor Swift cited the album as the inspiration for her song "Betty" on Folklore. As "Betty"'s co-writer, The National's Aaron Dessner explained to Vulture, "She wanted it to have an early Bob Dylan, sort of a Freewheelin' Bob Dylan feel".[121]

Bob Dylan – acoustic guitar, harmonica, vocals

Additional musicians


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