Nine Questions

#7 of the Rolling Stone Readers Picks of the their favorite Bob Dylan songs. Rolling Stone writes:

The song that first branded Dylan a prophet asks nine questions and answers none of them. A rewrite of the anti-slavery spiritual "No More Auction Block," Dylan claimed to have knocked out this meditation on humanity’s inhumanity in 10 minutes. The version of the song most people heard in 1963 wasn’t Dylan's – it was Peter, Paul and Mary's cover, which hit Number Two on the pop chart. But in any version, the words are so simple, it sounds like they'd been handed down from the sky on stone tablets. "It’s absolutely wonderful writing," says Merle Haggard. "It was timely then and is still timely today."

You can read the article and hear the pieces here. 

And the Tenth Question ...

Number One however is not a big surprise - oh yes, Dylan did do that one in China.  He always does that one in concert.  Rolling Stone calls it the single greatest song of all time.  And it rocks at the Dylan's concerts, when the lights come up and the audience sings along asking perhaps a bigger question then all nine asked in Blowin in the Wind (and a question that, you may remember, even Spock couldn't answer in The Voyage Home), especially when it drips with his signature sarcasm that no doubt is aimed - like so many of his greatest songs are as well - at himself.