“Ballad of Hollis Brown” is on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, and I imagine that this is the album that most people think is his most overtly “protest” album.  I beg to differ; Dylan’s breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan includes four songs that are much closer to being protest songs than any of the songs on Times:  “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War”, “Oxford Town”, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. 

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Bob Dylan is much less of a protest singer than he is generally perceived to be.  I speak as someone who is as big a fan of the acoustic Dylan as of the electric Dylan, and I own dozens of songs from this time period that never made it onto any of Bob Dylan’s major-label albums – and there are hardly any protest songs among those recordings either. 

As to the other protest songs on Freewheelin’, Dylan’s angriest song by far, “Masters of War” is directed not at the politicians who get us into wars, but at the war-machine corporations who profit from them.  Dylan states in the liner notes on the album:  “I’ve never written anything like that before. I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out . . . a feeling of what can you do?”.  More than any other song that I can think of, in later years Bob Dylan dramatically altered the arrangement of “Masters of War” in concert performances to the point that it is almost unrecognizable from the original version. 

In a 2001 interview published in USA Today, Bob Dylan linked this song to the famous farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961:  “‘Masters of War’ . . . is supposed to be a pacifistic song against war.  It’s not an anti-war song.  It’s speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military-industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency.  That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up.”  

(May 2013)

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Items:    Masters of War