“Blowin’ in the Wind” was written by Bob Dylan in 1962 — the song that effectively launched his international reputation. Dylan first performed the song publicly at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village on April 16, 1962, and recorded it for Columbia on July 9, 1962, for inclusion on his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963. Pete Seeger has identified the melody as an adaptation of the older African American spiritual “No More Auction Block” (which itself underlies “We Shall Overcome”).
The song’s commercial breakthrough came not through Dylan’s own recording but through the Peter, Paul and Mary cover, released in June 1963 just three weeks after the Dylan album. The Peter, Paul and Mary version reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, sat at #1 on the Middle-Road chart for five weeks, and won two Grammys at the 1964 ceremony (6th Annual Grammy Awards) — Best Folk Recording and Best Performance by a Vocal Group. The trio’s clean three-part harmony arrangement made the song a defining anthem of the early-1960s civil-rights movement.
A notable version is Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys’ recording on their 1968 Columbia album Changin’ Times — their most explicit engagement with the folk-crossover and protest worlds, recorded just a year before the duo’s permanent split. The album also included “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Don’t Think Twice,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”; Randy Scruggs played guitar and 12-string on the sessions, with Charlie McCoy on harmonica. The Foggy Mountain Boys’ arrangement brought the question-and-answer lyric into a rolling bluegrass-country groove, and in bluegrass settings today the song remains a regular at jam sessions where pickers want a piece in the early-1960s folk-protest tradition.
