“Oxford Town” is a song written by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 1962. It was recorded in Columbia’s Studio A on December 6, 1962 for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The song was composed in response to an open invitation from Broadside magazine for songs about one of the top news events of 1962: the enrollment of a black student, James Meredith, in the University of Mississippi on October 1. Among other submissions was Phil Ochs’ song “Ballad of Oxford, Mississippi”. The lyrics and music from Dylan’s song were printed December 1962 in Broadside’s issue #17. Except that the University of Mississippi is located in Oxford, Mississippi, “Oxford Town” does not mention either Meredith or the university by name. (More from Wikipedia)
“Ballad of Hollis Brown” is on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, and I imagine that this is the album that most people think is his most overtly “protest” album. I beg to differ; Dylan’s breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan includes four songs that are much closer to being protest songs than any of the songs on Times: “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War”, “Oxford Town”, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that Bob Dylan is much less of a protest singer than he is generally perceived to be. I speak as someone who is as big a fan of the acoustic Dylan as of the electric Dylan, and I own dozens of songs from this time period that never made it onto any of Bob Dylan’s major-label albums – and there are hardly any protest songs among those recordings either.
Generally speaking, politicians (and even “the Establishment”) are rarely in Bob Dylan’s sights. As an example, “Oxford Town” was written in direct response to an invitation from Broadside magazine for folk singers to write a song about the black student, James Meredith who enrolled at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962. That’s about as close to a pure protest song as anything Dylan ever wrote. However, I imagine that most people living outside the state of Mississippi have no idea that “Ole Miss” is located in the city of Oxford, and Dylan never mentions the student or the university. In a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel, Bob Dylan talked about “Oxford Town”: “It deals with the Meredith case, but then again it doesn’t. . . . I wrote that when it happened, and I could have written that yesterday. It’s still the same. ‘Why doesn’t somebody investigate soon’ – that’s a verse in the song.”
(May 2013)
