ABSTRACT
Bob Dylan’s third studio album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, lyrically his most politically and socially engaged, was released in January 1964. Several of the songs on the album, as had been the case with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, were based on traditional British folk-song melodies. Dylan had accepted an offer from Baez, who then enjoyed a more substantial musical reputation and a larger audience than his own, to appear as a guest performer on her 1963 tour. Dylan then played Carthy his new song ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, which was eventually to appear on his fifth studio album Bringing It All Back Home, released in March 1965. In contrast, the predominant emphasis of much of the folk-music movement of that period, both in the United States and in Britain, most conspicuously, for instance, at the Singers’ Club in London, the ‘people’, the industrial and rural working classes – rather than on the individual.
