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20/06/2006
Favourite Dylan album? Freewheelin’, of course
John Innes asks fellow readers: which is your favourite Dylan album? I’ll start the ball rolling, with some notes on Freewheelin’.
The real Bob Dylan, subdued on the first album, was revealed on Freewheelin'. A work of canonical importance, it heralded the emergence of a writer who would go on to lay down some of the greatest songwriting of the century.
The impact of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was immediate. Many who bought the vinyl album on release still look back on it as the defining moment in their musical education. It showcased a supremely confident young writer-performer who changed the course of popular music: he gave it a brain.
To an audience to whom intelligence in song lyrics is a natural, it takes an effort of will to see that, before Bob Dylan, it wasn't so. The popular music world onto which Freewheelin' exploded had seen the sexual excitement of Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel transmuted into the anodyne teen balm of Bobby Vee's Please Don't Ask About Barbara. In this pelvic-focussed marketplace, Freewheelin' sounded like a secret missive smuggled from the grave of Shakespeare.
While the album's unity stems from Dylan's vocal delivery, accompanied only by a then unfamiliar folk acoustic guitar and harmonica, it’s a richly complex document revealing the ambitious breadth of Dylan's lyrical concerns.
Mistakenly viewed as a "protest" album, Freewheelin' is an amalgam of several very different types of song. The sheer strength of the "protest" songs, exploring the young Dylan's take on the twin threats of Cold War annihilation, and the Civil Rights freedom struggle of American blacks, explains the popular misconception that Freewheelin' is a political album.
Because of their universality, two of the political songs, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, and Blowin' in the Wind retain their searing power forty years after the event. The other two, Masters of War and Oxford Town, now seem too grounded in their immediate contexts to retain their power.
But the most enduring group of songs are the four intensely intimate love songs: Girl of the North Country, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, Corrina, Corrina, and Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance.
Freewheelin' also underlines Dylan's rootsy credentials, with two tributes to his blues antecedents, Down the Highway, and Bob Dylan's Blues. And, just as Verdi exhibited virtuosic versatility by writing comedy as well as tragedy, Dylan shows his talents as a jester by inserting in what is at times a bleakly nihilistic collection a couple of comedy gems, Talkin' World War III Blues, and I Shall Be Free.
Freewheelin’: my favourite Dylan album. What’s yours? Why?
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963): Blowin’ in the Wind; Girl of the North Country; Masters of War; Down the Highway; Bob Dylan’s Blues; A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall; Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right; Bob Dylan’s Dream; Oxford Town; Talkin’ World War III Blues; Corrina, Corrina; Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance; I Shall Be Free
Gerry Smith
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