In April 1962, Bob Dylan was twenty years old, nearly broke, and by the cold arithmetic of the record business, a failure. His first album, released the month before, had sold so poorly that people inside Columbia Records had taken to calling him “Hammond’s folly,” after John Hammond, the legendary producer who had signed him. Then, one April afternoon in a Greenwich Village café, he wrote a song made of nothing but questions.
The song asked how many roads a man must walk down before you call him a man, how many years a mountain must exist before it is washed to the sea, how many times cannonballs must fly before they are forever banned. It offered no answers, only a refrain: the answer is blowin’ in the wind. Within sixteen months, that refrain would be sung at Newport, carried up the pop charts by Peter, Paul and Mary, and performed before the Lincoln Memorial on the day of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Blowin’ in the Wind did not just launch Dylan’s career as a songwriter. It changed what a popular song was allowed to ask.
What makes the story remarkable is how little of it was new. The melody was old — older than Dylan, rooted in the slavery era. The genius was in what a twenty-year-old did with borrowed bones, and how quickly the song escaped him.
Ten Minutes, by His Own Telling
Dylan himself supplied the legend, and it should be handled with care. “I wrote Blowin’ in the Wind in ten minutes,” he later told the Los Angeles Times, “just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records.” Biographers broadly agree the song came fast, in April 1962, and that Dylan first wrote two verses, adding the middle verse a few weeks later. But “ten minutes” is Dylan’s own retrospective claim, repeated so often it has hardened into fact. The honest version is this: by his telling it took ten minutes, nobody timed him, and the speed matters less than the method.
The method was the folk process itself. The melody came from No More Auction Block, an African-American spiritual of the slavery era — sometimes titled Many Thousands Gone — about the refusal ever to be sold again. Dylan acknowledged the debt openly, and he had heard the song close at hand: the New World Singers, friends of his in the Village, performed it in their sets, with Delores Dixon stepping forward to sing it. In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan confirmed the spiritual was the musical starting point. Taking an old tune and setting new words to it was no scandal in that world; Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had built careers on it. Dylan simply aimed the melody of a song about escaping bondage at the questions of 1962 — war, freedom, and how long a nation could look away.
Sung at Gerde’s the Same Night
The song’s first audience heard it almost immediately. On April 16, 1962, Dylan played Blowin’ in the Wind at Gerde’s Folk City, the basement club on West 4th Street that was the folk scene’s proving ground — by some accounts on the very day he finished it. In the room was Gil Turner, of the New World Singers, who was so struck that he asked Dylan to teach him the song on the spot — Dylan wrote out the words and chords and taped them to the microphone stand — and Turner sang it to the Gerde’s crowd that same evening. A song written that afternoon was already somebody else’s by nightfall.
Print came next. The lyrics appeared in May 1962 in Broadside, the little mimeographed magazine of topical songs co-founded by Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, and then in Sing Out! in June, with Dylan’s own note that the answer “ain’t in no book or movie or TV show” but is “in the wind.” In the folk world of 1962, that was distribution: singers around the country could now learn the song, and did.
Recorded in July, Released the Following May
Columbia taped the song on July 9, 1962, at Studio A in New York, during the sessions for Dylan’s second album, with John Hammond producing. The recording is stark: Dylan alone with guitar and harmonica, singing the nine questions plainly, without ornament. It then waited nearly a year in the vault, because The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was not released until May 27, 1963, with Blowin’ in the Wind placed first — the opening statement of an album that announced Dylan as the folk movement’s essential new writer. Columbia also issued Dylan’s version as a single that August; it did not chart. The voice was too raw for pop radio in 1963. The song needed smoother ambassadors, and Dylan’s manager was already managing them.
The Trio Who Carried It to Number Two
Albert Grossman managed both Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, the polished folk trio whose harmonies had already taken If I Had a Hammer into the Top 10. Grossman brought them the song, and the trio recorded it — reportedly in a single take — and released it as a single in June 1963, just three weeks after Freewheelin’ reached the shops. The result was the fastest-selling single Warner Bros. had ever had: some 300,000 copies in its first week, more than a million as it climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 17, 1963, held off the top only by Stevie Wonder’s Fingertips, with five weeks at number one on the Middle-Road chart. At the 1964 Grammy Awards it won Best Folk Recording and Best Performance by a Vocal Group.
The trio’s success did something permanent: it made Dylan famous as a writer before he was famous as a singer. Listeners who might never have bought a Dylan album knew his name from the label credit, and other artists came calling for his songs. The movement, meanwhile, adopted the record wholesale — setting the stage for the two great public moments of that summer.
Newport, Washington, and an Anthem
On July 26, 1963, Dylan closed the evening at the Newport Folk Festival by leading an extraordinary ensemble — Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Freedom Singers — in Blowin’ in the Wind, the new anthem sung by the movement’s whole choir at once. A month later, on August 28, came the March on Washington. The details matter, because memory often blurs them: it was Peter, Paul and Mary who sang Blowin’ in the Wind that day. Dylan performed When the Ship Comes In alongside Baez and sang his searing Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the murder of Medgar Evers. His most famous song was present in other voices — which was, in a way, the point. It no longer belonged to him.
The Schoolboy Who Said He Wrote It
Success brought a strange footnote. In November 1963, Newsweek reported a rumour that Dylan had not written the song at all — that it was the work of Lorre Wyatt, a student at Millburn High School in New Jersey, who had supposedly sold it to Dylan. Classmates insisted they had heard Wyatt sing it before Dylan’s name was attached. The story was false, and the timeline alone disproves it: Dylan had performed the song publicly and published it in Broadside in the spring of 1962. What had actually happened was simpler and sadder. Wyatt had learned the published lyrics, performed the song at school claiming it as his own to impress classmates and win a place in a school singing group, and the lie outgrew him. In 1974, he finally admitted the deception publicly. By then the rumour had followed Dylan for a decade.
Questions That Never Got Answered
The honours accumulated slowly, the way they do for standards. Dylan’s recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994; Peter, Paul and Mary’s version followed in 2003. In 2004, Rolling Stone placed the song at number 14 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Hundreds of artists have recorded it, from Sam Cooke, who worked it into his live show within months, onward through generations Dylan could not have imagined in that Village café.
Look back at the construction and it is almost austere: three verses, nine questions, no answers, a borrowed melody from a spiritual sung by people escaping slavery. Dylan, who resisted the “protest singer” label almost as soon as it was pinned on him, built the most durable protest song ever written precisely by refusing to preach. He asked, and left the answering to whoever was listening. Sixty years on, the questions about war, freedom, and wilful blindness remain unanswered — which is why the song has never stopped being sung. The answer is still blowin’ in the wind, and everybody still knows it.
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