This Day in Music History (“Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” Released)

May 27, 1963—Three days after his 22nd birthday, Robert Zimmerman, the boy from the North Country of Minnesota, completed his transformation into Bob Dylan, the most heralded new member of the suddenly exploding folk-music scene, with the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

In my favorite scene in A Hard Day’s Night, Ringo Starr is asked by a journalist out of touch with his music and his generation if he’s a mod or a rocker. “I’m a mocker,” Ringo answers, with a gravity belying the insouciance of the reply. With the quip, the cheerful Liverpool moptop served notice that he and his bandmates would not let the media pigeonhole them into a single category; that they’d absorbed both categories in their music; and that in fact his generation had created new categories beyond the imagination of their interlocutors. 

So it was with Bob Dylan. That’s what you would expect with this magpie of musical and literary influences, implied by one word in his album title: “freewheelin’.” 

The press latched onto the album’s protest songs, casting him as a kind of musical scion of Woody Guthrie, but in fact the subject matter extended into the personal as well as the political, because he was absorbing everything that came his way in the Greenwich Village where he had lived for the last couple of years—not just the usual suspects of the folk-music scene, but also Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Harry Belafonte, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly, and Smokey Robinson (“America’s greatest living poet,” he told a group of nonplussed music journalists). 

Over the years, Dylan’s albums have comprised a collective work in progress, with one identity and pose exchanged for another. The same thing can be glimpsed in microcosm in his sophomore effort. 

It all began on April 24, 1962, with producer John Hammond recording a mélange of traditional songs and others heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie. After several months, a second producer, Tom Wilson – later famous for tweaking Simon & Garfunkel’s acoustic “Sounds of Silence” with a rock beat—was brought in. 

Though not as startling in this instance, Wilson gave a booster shot to the raspy young singer, who promptly experimented with different styles and voices, on compositions that have become essential parts of his songbook: “Girl From the North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” 

The last of these, covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, became Warner Bros.’ fastest-selling single to date, reaching #2 on the pop charts that summer. The success of the LP justified the faith in him shown by Hammond, the legendary producer who discovered Billie Holliday and Bruce Springsteen. 

Dylan’s eponymous debut album had cratered, and Columbia Records was getting nervous about this unusual song stylist. In 1963, more than 200 folk-music albums were released, according to David Hadju’s Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. Now Dylan’s label had the artist who was not only acclaimed as the best of the bunch, but even as “the voice of a generation.”