Dylan, Bob

Autograph manuscript signed ("by Bob Dylan") of his lyrics for "The Times They Are A-Changin'," written in pencil on a sheet of unruled three-hole notebook paper (8 1/2 x 11 in.; 217 x 280 mm), text written in four numbered verses of 10, 10, 9, and 8 lines, including the single-line refrain, titled at the conclusion within a rough-lined frame, verso with an autograph fragment of the first five lines of the first verse of Dylan's "North Country Blues"; some light discoloration, graphite smudging and offsetting, creased and nearly separated at central verical fold, edges chipped with loss, some internal tears and small losses not costing any text apart from the "Th" of "They" in the title.

Kevin Krown — Eve MacKenzie — Peter MacKenzie — the present owner

The original autograph lyrics for "The Times They Are A-Changin'," the title track of Bob Dylan's third album and arguably his most famous song.

When, in January 1961, Bob Dylan rambled out of the Wild West and into New York town he was reunited with Kevin Krown, another young would-be folksinger who had determined to make his way to Greenwich Village. Likely inspired by On the Road, Krown had hitchhiked from his home in Chicago to Denver in the summer of 1960. In Denver, Krown met Dylan, who had recently fled (or been fired from) a gig playing piano at a Central City strip club called the Gilded Garter. Later that year Dylan stayed a few days with Krown on his first, abortive journey to New York City.

Although he was a newcomer himself, Krown showed Dylan around the Village. He accompanied Dylan on the latter's first visit to his hero, Woody Guthrie and introduced him to Mac and Eve MacKenzie, at whose 28th-Street apartment Dylan frequently stayed throughout 1960 and 1961. Krown also made some of the earliest recordings of Dylan's music, including the very first recording that featured him playing harmonica as well as guitar. Together with Terri Thal, the wife of "Mayor of MacDougal Street" Dave Van Ronk, Krown promoted Dylan and tried to book him into out-of-town clubs beyond the comfortable confines of the Gaslight and Gerde's Folk City. He even helped choose the set-list for Dylan's first, eponymous album. In Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, the rock critic and historian Clinton Heylin describes Krown as "perhaps Dylan's closest friend in his first year in New York. In a telling omission, Dylan's own idiosyncratic memoir, Chronicles Volume One, never mentions Krown.

But perhaps the most signal service Krown performed was preserving the manuscripts of some of Dylan's earliest song lyrics—an effort that the MacKenzies also participated in. The Bob Dylan who came to New York was not a songwriter. Like most folksingers, he performed a repertoire of traditional arrangements of traditional songs. For instance, Dylan's first album (Bob Dylan, which was recorded in November 1961 and released in March 1962), featured just two original compositions and ten folk and blues standards, only four of which even had identifiable authors. But by the autumn of 1961, Dylan was spending part of almost every day writing at the MacKenzies' kitchen table. And, as Heylin writes, "Thanks to Eve and Mac's sense of these writings' historical worth and Dylan's devil-may-care attitude toward them, the manuscripts of many of these formative efforts have survived. ..." Kevin Krown deserves thanks as well.

By the time Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in May 1963 (recorded in several sessions from April 1962 to April 1963), the ratio of his original compositions to traditional songs had exactly reversed, and his inexorable progression beyond the bounds of conventional folk music had begun.

"The Times They Are A-Changin'" was the quintessential 1960s "protest" song, although according to Dylan, that term did not exist when he wrote the song and he did not intend it as such. "Topical songs weren't protest songs," he writes in Chronicles.  The term 'protest singer' didn't exist any more than the term 'singer-songwriter.' You were a performer or you weren't, that was about it—a folksinger or not one. 'Songs of dissent' was a term people used but even that was rare. ... I didn't think I was protesting anything." Of course, Dylan was also to shortly redefine terms like "folksinger" and "singer-songwriter."

According to Clinton Heylin's recent study, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957–1973, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" was first recorded in late October 1963 and first performed at Carnegie Hall on 26 October of that year. Dylan's attitude about the song has seemed to shift. In his biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades Revisted, Heylin recounts that when a friend spotted the lyric "'Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call," and asked Dylan, "'What is this shit, man?' Dylan shrugged his shoulders and replied, 'Well, you know, it seems to be what the people want to hear.'" But in an interview for the liner notes for the 1985 release of the Biograph compilation, Dylan told Cameron Crowe: "This was definitely a song with a purpose." It is tempting to think that one of the songs purposes was to signal that Dylan's own music was changing. He was, after all, just two years away from returning to the electric guitar and releasing Bringing It All Back Home and Subterranean Homesick Blues.

The world has turned over many times since Dylan first recorded a demo (on piano) of "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and many of the mothers and fathers that the song addressed are dead, while their sons and daughters now have children and grandchildren of their own. But the resonance of the song has long outlasted the turbulent decade in which it was written. Cover versions have been used in advertising campigns for the Bank of Montreal and the accounting giant of Coopers and Lybrand. Dylan's own original was used in the gripping opening sequence of the film adaptation of the seminal graphic novel The Watchmen, and his live performance of it earlier this year highlighted the White House concert, "A Celebration of the Music from Civil Rights Movement."