On June 14, 1962, Bob Dylan recorded 'Blowin' in the Wind' at Columbia's Studio A in New York, a spare folk song built on simple, rhetorical questions about war, freedom, and justice. Released the following year, it became one of the most covered protest songs in American history, propelled further by Peter, Paul and Mary's hit version, and cemented Dylan's reputation as the voice of a restless generation.
Bob Dylan was 21 years old, largely unknown outside Greenwich Village folk clubs, when he stepped into Columbia Records' Studio A on June 14, 1962. The song he laid down that day, 'Blowin' in the Wind,' ran barely two and a half minutes, built on an old African American spiritual melody and a series of unanswerable questions: how many roads must a man walk down, how many times must the cannonballs fly.
Dylan later claimed he wrote it in about ten minutes, dashing it off at a table in a Village coffeehouse. The recording session was similarly unadorned—just voice, acoustic guitar, and harmonica, no producer's polish, no backing band.
The song didn't chart on its own until Peter, Paul and Mary released a smoother cover in 1963, which shot to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and turned Dylan into a songwriter every label wanted. It became inseparable from the civil rights movement, sung at the March on Washington that same August, and later voted one of the greatest songs of all time by Rolling Stone.