The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan

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Part two of the DYLAN VINYL collection which is a brand-new collection of every single Bob Dylan album on high-quality 180-gram vinyl plus a collectors’ magazine

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was the second Bob Dylan album released on May 27th 1963. Eleven of the thirteen songs are Dylan compositions. Some very early first pressing copies contained four songs that were ultimately replaced by Columbia on all subsequent pressings. These songs were “Rocks and Gravel”, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”, “Rambling Gambling Willie” and “Talkin’ John Birch Blues”. Copies of the “original” version of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (in either mono or stereo) are extremely rare. I don’t have a rare copy

Side 1
Blowin’ in the Wind
Girl from the North Country
Masters of War
Down The Highway
Bob Dylan’s Blues
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Side 2
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Bob Dylan’s Dream
Oxford Town
Talking World War III Blues
Corrina, Corrina
Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance
I Shall Be Free

My Top Three

1) Blowin In The Wind
Blowin’ in the Wind is among Dylan’s most celebrated compositions. It became world-famous when Peter, Paul and Mary issued the song as a single three weeks after the release of Freewheelin’. It has been described as a protest song and poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war, and freedom. The refrain “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind” has been described as “impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind”. In 2004, it was ranked number 14 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.

2) A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Dylan was only 21 years old when he wrote one of his most complex songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, often referred to as “Hard Rain”. Critics have interpreted the lyric ‘hard rain’ as a reference to nuclear fallout, but Dylan, as with most of his lyrics, resisted the specificity of this interpretation.

3) Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
This was the B side of “Blowin”. Dylan said of the song: “It isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It’s as if you were talking to yourself”.