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Download "The Times They Are A Changin'"

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             Come mothers and fathers
             Throughout the land
             And don’t criticize
             What you can’t understand

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      Billy had been a fan of Bob Dylan as a teen, and signed with Columbia Records in the early 1970s rather than Atlantic Records in part because Dylan was on Columbia.  So it was natural that Billy performed Dylan's classic song "The Times They Are A Changin'"  while in Russia in 1987.   When Dylan released the song back in the 1960s in the United States, it perfectly captured the changing cultural and political climate of the United States including the Civil Rights movement and Free Speech movement.  Billy aptly saw that something similar was happening in Russia at the time.  
     As Rolling Stone reported: "Every night, he performed a cover of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are-A Changin'' and gave a speech (with the aid of a translator) about the song. 'I have a feeling that what's going on in your country right now is very much like the 1960s," he said one night. "This song has been going around and around my head since I've been here.'" 

     Ten years later, in 1997, Billy would cover another Dylan tune, "To Make You Feel My Love" on Billy's Greatest Hits, Volume III.  Billy's version actually was released before Dylan's own version.  Billy has also recorded Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" on My Lives.

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Michael Jackson, Christie Brinkley, Bob Dylan and Billy Joel at the recording of "We Are The World" (1985).  Photo: Sam Emerson.

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     If a folk music version of Billy's songs were ever recorded, here is a list of his "folk songs":

• Why Judy Why
  
• You're My Home
• The Ballad of Billy The Kid
• The Entertainer (minus the synthesizers)
• Summer, Highland Falls (it was covered by Peter, Paul and Mary)
• She's Always A Woman (guitar influenced by Gordon Lightfoot)
• Through The Long Night (an Irish folk song)
• Allentown (like Woody Guthrie)
• Goodnight Saigon (was covered by Joan Baez)
• The Downeaster 'Alexa'
• ​And So It Goes (inspired by "Barbara Ellen")
• Two Thousand Years
• Famous Last Words

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The Times They Are A Changin'  <<           >>
(Kohuept) (1987) (My Lives) (2005) (A Matter of Trust) (2014)

(Words and music by Bob Dylan) 

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

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’

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

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’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music.

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Billy performs the Bob Dylan song "The Times They Are A Changin'" on Russian television in 1987.  It was the perfect song for the moment and time.

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Bob Dylan performing "The Times They Are A Changin'" on U.S. television in 1964.

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Billy performs Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love" and discusses the time Dylan came to Billy's home with his daughter who was a fan of Billy's music, from Late Night with David Letterman (1997).

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