Generally speaking, politicians (and even “the Establishment”) are rarely in Bob Dylan’s sights.  As an example, “Oxford Town” was written in direct response to an invitation from Broadside magazine for folk singers to write a song about the black student, James Meredith who enrolled at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962.  That’s about as close to a pure protest song as anything Dylan ever wrote.  However, I imagine that most people living outside the state of Mississippi have no idea that “Ole Miss” is located in the city of Oxford, and Dylan never mentions the student or the university.  In a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel, Bob Dylan talked about “Oxford Town”:  “It deals with the Meredith case, but then again it doesn’t. . . .  I wrote that when it happened, and I could have written that yesterday.  It’s still the same.  ‘Why doesn’t somebody investigate soon’ – that’s a verse in the song.” 

The most complex and imaginative of these songs, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is sometimes mistakenly linked with the Cuban Missile Crisis; but actually, Bob Dylan had already written the song before the crisis happened.  

In the Studs Terkel interview mentioned above, Dylan uncharacteristically laid out what he meant by some of the lyrics in “Hard Rain”:  “No, it’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain.  It isn’t the fallout rain.  I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen. . . .  In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.” 

(May 2013)