Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'
When I first heard these lines, I wondered which mothers and fathers this singer with what I assumed was a sore throat had in mind when he wrote and sang them. This was the first time I listened to a song by Bob Dylan, a singer-songwriter-poet whose writing I would grow to become obsessed with. I knew it was an old song, so I knew the times he was referring to did not refer to mine, and yet the song speaks directly to me now. I realised that was the beauty of this song, this song that spoke so prophetically about the changing times, and yet managed to remain timeless itself.
He also seems to be aware of the predicament of those who attempt to prophesise, calling to those who claim to know what’s coming.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'
The lines filled me with a sense of unknown and unlimited possibilities. Anything could happen, if only we let it. And throughout the song, he speaks directly to the old guard, the people most likely to hold society back. He calls on everyone around to be ready to either swim in the flood of change or invariably sink to the bottom. He warns the writers and critics to wait and watch what happens before jumping to talk about that which they do not yet know. He asks the senators and congressmen—the makers of society’s norms—to clear the halls for the change to wash through. Lastly, he calls the personal moral custodians, the parents, to either accompany their children and embrace the change, or get out of their way as the wheel of time spins on.
The song is part of Dylan’s contribution to the folk tradition of musicians like Woody Guthrie, who was a major influence on Dylan, from his songwriting to the way his voice sounded. Songs in the folk tradition often consisted of stories and social issues of the day set within simple repetitive song structures that generations of songwriters repurposed to write songs that were at once familiar and new. The song structures made them easy for crowds of people to remember the stories and sing along. This is the tradition Dylan built on and elevated with his songs.
Written in the early 1960s at the peak of the counterculture movement in the United States, the song took on a life of its own outside Dylan embraced by the youth of the day. Often played at their protest rallies and marches with other Dylan songs like Blowin’ in the Wind, the song made Dylan a protest hero, much to Dylan’s own discomfort. While many of Dylan’s songs spoke to the biggest issues of the day—songs like Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, and Only a Pawn in Their Game—and gave him the appearance of a prophet-poet, this song would go on to become one of his most famous songs.
Dylan himself wrote the song as an anthem of sorts, saying at the time, “This was definitely a song with a purpose.… The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time." And what an anthem it became. Even Dylan, for all his prescience, might not have foreseen that the song would continue to remain an anthem more than half a century later, that a young boy on the other side of the planet would come across it for the first time and connect to it just as much as someone in the 60s did, that the times would still be a-changing.
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