Read Online Bob Dylan by Andy Gill - Free Book Online

Miss–Kentucky football game on September 29, as he announced to roars of appreciation that he loved Mississippi, her people and her “customs”—a veiled reference to racism. At the same time, he was indeed cutting a deal with the Kennedys, who had threatened to make the negotiations public on national Television. Meredith, he suggested, could be registered late on Sunday night, September 30; and so, while 300 federal marshals acted as decoys, surrounding the administration building, that evening the black would-be student was smuggled into a campus dormitory. The double-crossing Barnett then announced that the defenders of the Southern way of life had been overpowered, triggering the build-up of an angry mob.
    That night, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech urging the students to comply with the law: “The honor of your university and state are in the balance,” he said. “Let us preserve both the law and the peace and then, healing those wounds that are within, we can turn to the greater crises that are without, and stand united as one people in our pledge to man’s freedom.”
    Stirring words these may have been, they made little impression on the white students who were, even as he spoke, pelting stones at the federal marshals, who responded with tear-gas. Reluctantly, Kennedy called out the National Guard, but not before the racist students had been joined by older rioters who brought guns, with which they shot 30 marshals and bystanders, killing two people. In all, 300 people were wounded. The battle raged all night but by dawn it was, literally, academic: James Meredith had been registered as a student at Ole Miss. Not, of course, that deeplyingrained racist attitudes were changed overnight: the troops remained in Oxford until Meredith graduated in the summer of 1963.
    The stand-off became one of the emblematic events of the civil rights struggle, and Dylan’s rapid response to it—the song was first published in the November 1962 issue of Broadside magazine—illustrates the journalistic efficacy of the topical protest song. As he was recording it in early December, John Hammond was trying to persuade Don Law, head of Columbia’s Nashville operation, that Dylan ought to be recording with the hot musicians down in Nashville. “You have to come up and hear this Dylan kid,” he told Law, who dropped by the studio just as Dylan was doing ‘Oxford Town’. After listening a while, Law turned to Hammond and said, “My God, John, you can never do this kind of thing in Nashville. You’re crazy!”

TALKIN’ WORLD WAR III BLUES
    One of the last songs to be recorded for the Freewheelin’ album, it seems likely that this talking blues was written to replace the ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ which had so frightened the Columbia executives. If this is true, the result is very much a net gain: partly improvised in the studio, this is a far superior piece to its bigot-baiting predecessor, whose narrow-focus concerns lay more in the past of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts than the more pressing problems of the Sixties. ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’, by comparison, zeroed in on a couple of more pertinent contemporary issues: America’s growing fascination with psychoanalysis that had enabled Alfred Hitchcock to have a hit movie (Psycho) based on a specious psychoanalytic theme; and the looming specter of nuclear annihilation, which would soon be coming to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was also room left in the song for a few offhand side-swipes at things like the gratuitous materialism of automobile adverts (“Cadillac… good car to drive after a war”), and the pitiful state of Tin Pan Alley pop, which was rapidly approaching its nadir at the time (between January and April 1963, when this track was recorded, such giants as Steve Lawrence, Paul & Paula, The Rooftop