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}} "The Times They Are a-Changin'" is a song written by Bob Dylan and released as the title track of his 1964 album of the same name. Dylan wrote the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the time, influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads. Released as a 45 r.p.m. single in Britain in 1964, it reached number 9 in the British top ten〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Bob Dylan | Artist )〕 and was Britain's hundredth best selling single of 1965.〔Best selling U.K. singles; http://www.uk-charts.top-source.info/top-100-1965.shtml〕 Ever since its release the song has been very influential to people's views on society, with critics noting the general yet universal lyrics as contributing to the song's everlasting message of change. The song ever since has been an occasional staple in Dylan's concerts. The song has been covered by many different artists, including Nina Simone, The Byrds, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, Joan Baez, Phil Collins, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen. The song was ranked #59 on ''Rolling Stone'' ==Inspiration and composition== Dylan appears to have written the song in September and October 1963. He recorded it as a Witmark publishing demo at that time, a version that was finally released on ''The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991''. The song was then recorded at the Columbia studios in New York on October 23 and 24, and the latter session yielded the version that became the title song of Dylan's third album.〔Gray, 2006, ''The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia'', p. 662.〕 The ''a-'' in the song title is an archaic intensifying prefix as seen in the British songs, "A-Hunting We Will Go" and '"Here We Come A-wassailing", from the 18th and 19th century. Dylan recalled writing the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the moment. In 1985, he told Cameron Crowe: "This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads ...'Come All Ye Bold Highway Men', 'Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens'. I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time."〔''Biograph'', 1985, Liner notes & text by Cameron Crowe.〕 Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin recounts how Tony Glover stopped by Dylan's apartment in September 1963, picked up a page of the song Dylan was working on and read a line from it: "'Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call.' Turning to Dylan, Glover said, 'What is this shit, man?' Dylan shrugged his shoulders and replied, 'Well, you know, it seems to be what the people want to hear.〔Heylin, ''Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited'', p. 126.〕 Dylan critic Michael Gray called it "the archetypal protest song." Gray commented, "Dylan's aim was to ride upon the unvoiced sentiment of a mass public—to give that inchoate sentiment an anthem and give its clamour an outlet. He succeeded, but the language of the song is nevertheless imprecisely and very generally directed."〔 Gray suggests that the song has been outdated by the very changes that it gleefully predicted, and hence the song was politically out of date almost as soon as it was written. The lyrics used reflected his views on social injustices and the government’s unhelpful attitude towards change. Literary critic Christopher Ricks suggests that the song transcends the political preoccupations of the time in which it was written. Ricks argues that Dylan is still performing the song, and when he sings "Your sons and your daughter/Are beyond your command", he sings inescapably with the accents not of a son, no longer perhaps primarily a parent, but with the attitude of a grandfather. Ricks concludes: "Once upon a time it may have been a matter of urging square people to accept the fact that their children were, you know, hippies. But the capacious urging could then come to mean that ex-hippie parents had better accept that their children look like becoming yuppies. And then Republicans..."〔Ricks, 2003, ''Dylan’s Visions Of Sin'', pp. 260–271.〕 Critic Andy Gill points out that the song's lyrics echo lines from the Book of Ecclesiastes which Pete Seeger adapted to create his anthem "Turn, Turn, Turn!". The climactic line about the first later being last, likewise, is a direct scriptural reference to Mark 10:31: "But many that are first shall be last, and the last first."〔Gill, 1999, ''My Back Pages'', pp. 42–43.〕 Less than a month after Dylan recorded the song, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. The next night, Dylan opened a concert with "The Times They Are a-Changin; he told biographer Anthony Scaduto: "I thought, 'Wow, how can I open with that song? I'll get rocks thrown at me.' But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there. I know I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the country and they were applauding the song. And I couldn't understand why they were clapping, or why I wrote the song. I couldn't understand anything. For me, it was just insane." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Times They Are a-Changin' (song)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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