Bob Dylan by Andy Gill Page B

has the easy-going innocence of those days passed, but the convictions once held so firmly—“It was all that easy to tell wrong from right”—as issues of simple black and white clarity have blurred into infinite shades of gray complexity.
    Dylan claims, in the liner-notes, that the inspiration for the song came from a conversation he had with the singer Oscar Brown Jr. one night inGreenwich Village, though he carried the idea around in his head for some while before it took on a more concrete form. Dylan’s several return journeys to Minnesota before and after the release of his first album undoubtedly helped crystallize the theme of the song, as he realized the disparate paths taken by himself and his old friends from Hibbing and the Dinkytown campus neighborhood of Minneapolis.
    â€œIt was obvious he’d grown,” recalled his country-blues chum Spider John Koerner after one such visit. “He was friendly and all that, but it was obvious he was into something stronger than we got into. You could see it, something forceful, something coming off.” By summer of 1962, old folkie friends like Tony Glover, Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake, who published the Minneapolis folk magazine Little Sandy Review , were chiding Dylan about his new protest-song direction, suggesting he should try and strike a balance between his new style and his older, traditional style, and though he was already feeling used by certain civil rights organizations, Dylan clearly felt his Minnesota friends were being left behind.
    A year later, the gap was growing wider still, as he made clear in a promotional appearance for his forthcoming album on April 26 on Chicago’s WFMT radio station where he was interviewed by Studs Terkel about his life and work. Asked about childhood friends, Dylan replied: “They still seem to be the same old way… I can just tell by conversation that they still have a feeling that isn’t really free… They still have a feeling that’s… tied up in the town, with their parents, in the newspapers that they read which go out to maybe 5,000 people. They don’t have to go out of town. Their world’s really small.”
    Dylan’s world, by contrast, was growing larger all the time, as demonstrated by the melody he appropriated for ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ from the traditional British folk ballad ‘The Franklin’, which Dylan had heard performed by the English folk singer Martin Carthy while visiting London in December 1962.

OXFORD TOWN
    After the serious, sometimes angry tone taken on social matters earlier on the album, ‘Oxford Town’ is shorter and sweeter in style, if not in subject matter, offering a jaunty, hootenanny singalong treatment of a specific civil rights issue: the violent struggle for the registration of the first black person at the University Of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) in September 1962.
    After winning a Federal court ruling allowing him to register at the university, James Meredith was denied entry to the university registrar’s building by demagogic state governor Ross Barnett, who was attempting to ride the tide of resentment rolling through the South at the imposition of what Southerners saw as Yankee directives aimed at breaking their spirit. Attorney General Robert Kennedy inquired whether Barnett would make a deal to allow Meredith to register, and was informed, “I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.” Mississippi, Kennedy pointed out, had to obey, being part of the United States, to which Barnett responded, “We have been a part of the United States, but I don’t know whether we are or not.” “Oh,” asked Kennedy, “are you getting out of the Union?”
    He wasn’t, but the idea clearly appealed to Barnett, who made a strident speech in defense of the principle of segregation on the pitch at half-time of the Ole