The Times They Are A-Changin’
Released:- 10th February 1966
Official Release Number:- 3
Dylan Vinyl Number:- 1
Part one 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
Dylan’s third studio album was his first featuring solely original songs. The title track was a rallying cry to create a better world whilst the other songs clamoured against injustices in US society. Recorded over six sessions in New York the album was released in January 1964 reaching no. 20 in the US and no. 4 in the UK. It remains one of the most important albums of all time, capturing the spirit of political and social change in the 1960’s.
Side 1
The Times They Are a-Changin’
Ballad of Hollis Brown
With God on Our side
One Too Many Mornings
North Country Blues
Side 2
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Boots of Spanish Leather
When the Ship Comes In
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Restless Farewell
My Top Three
1) The Times They Are a-Changin’
Dylan wrote the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the time, influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads. In 1985, he told Cameron Crowe, “This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads …’Come All Ye Bold Highway Men’, ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’. I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.”
2) The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
The song gives a generally factual account of the killing of a 51-year-old African-American barmaid, Hattie Carroll on February 9, 1963 by then 24-year-old William Devereux “Billy” Zantzinger, a young man from a wealthy white tobacco farming family in Charles County, Maryland, and of his subsequent sentence to six months in a county jail, after being convicted of assault.
3) Ballad of Hollis Brown
The song tells the story of a South Dakota farmer who, overwhelmed by the desperation of poverty, kills his wife, children and then himself.
