"Chimes of Freedom" is a song written and performed by Bob Dylan and featured on his Tom Wilson-produced 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. The song depicts the thoughts and feelings of the singer and his companion as they shelter from a lightning storm under a doorway after sunset. The singer expresses his solidarity with the downtrodden and oppressed, believing that the thunder is tolling in sympathy for them.
Initially, critics described the song as showing the influence of the symbolist poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, but more recent biographers of Dylan have linked the origins of the song to verses the songwriter had written as a response to the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Some commentators and Dylan biographers have assessed the song as one of Dylan's most significant compositions, and critic Paul Williams has described it as Dylan's Sermon on the Mount.
The song has been covered many times by different artists, including the Byrds, Jefferson Starship, Youssou N'Dour, Bruce Springsteen, and U2.
Bob Dylan's version "Chimes of Freedom" was written shortly after the release of Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin' album in early 1964 during a road trip that he took across America with musician Paul Clayton, journalist Pete Karman, and road manager Victor Maymudes. It was written at about the same time as "Mr. Tambourine Man", which author Clinton Heylin has judged to be similarly influenced by the symbolism of Arthur Rimbaud. There are conflicting accounts about when during the trip this song was written. Some Dylan biographers state that he wrote the song on a portable typewriter in the back of a car the day after visiting civil rights activists Bernice Johnson and Cordell Reagon in Atlanta, Georgia. However, a handwritten lyric sheet from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Toronto, Canada that was reproduced in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 indicates that this story cannot be entirely true, since Dylan was in Toronto in late January and early February, before the road trip on which the song was supposedly written occurred. So, although parts of the song may have been written on the road trip, Dylan had started working on the song earlier.
In his memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave Van Ronk gave his account of the song's origins:
The first public performance of the song took place in early 1964, either at the Civic Auditorium in Denver on February 15, or at the Berkeley Community Theater in Berkeley, California, on February 22. "Chimes of Freedom" was an important part of Dylan's live concert repertoire throughout most of 1964, although by the latter part of that year he had ceased performing it and would not perform the song again until 1987, when he revisited it for concerts with the Grateful Dead and with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Recording With Dylan's commercial profile on the rise, Columbia was now urging Dylan to release a steady stream of recordings. Upon Dylan's return to New York, studio time was quickly scheduled, with Tom Wilson back as producer. The entire album Another Side of Bob Dylan was recorded in one long session on June 9, 1964, with Tom Wilson as producer. During the recording session, Dylan needed seven takes to get "Chimes of Freedom" right, though it was one of just three songs that Dylan recorded that day which he had previously performed in concert.
The entirety of the first (and only) recording session was held June 9 at Columbia's Studio A, located at 799 Seventh Avenue in New York City. According to Heylin, "while polishing off a couple of bottles of Beaujolais," Dylan recorded 14 original compositions, in a single three-hour session between 7pm and 10pm that night, 11 of which were chosen for the final album. The three that were ultimately rejected were "Denise Denise," "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "Mama, You Been on My Mind."Heylin, Clinton (1997). Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, 1960–1994, pp. 29–32. Macmillan. . Nat Hentoff's article on Dylan for The New Yorker, published in late October 1964, includes remarkable descriptions of the June 9 session. Hentoff describes in considerable detail the atmosphere in the CBS recording studio and Dylan's own asides and banter with his friends in the studio, with the session's producers, and Hentoff himself.
Lyrics The lyrics of the song are written in six stanzas of seven verses each. Each of the stanzas shares the same one verse refrain "An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing". The symbolism of the lyrics makes repeat use of a dual metaphor of freedom represented by the chimes or tolling of a bell on the one hand, and the enlightenment associated with freedom represented by thunder and lightning. The lyrics are located symbolically in the darkness after sunset (after "sundown") up until "midnight's" tolling of the chimes on the same evening.Lyrics of Dylan's Chimes of Freedom. . The initial verses of the song describe a fierce and unforgiving storm giving way at the end of the song to a partial lifting of the mist. The narrative of the song's lyrics has been described as depicting the point of view of the underprivileged and indigent seeking freedom.
Release Despite the song's appeal to cover artists, it has appeared sparingly on Dylan's compilation and live albums. It was, however, included on the 1967 European compilation album Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits 2. A very early live performance of the song, at London's Royal Festival Hall, in May 1964, was released in 2018 on Live 1962-1966: Rare Performances From The Copyright Collections. In 1993 Dylan played the song in front of the Lincoln Memorial as part of Bill Clinton's first inauguration as U.S. president.
A version sung by Dylan and Joan Osborne in 1999 appears on the original television soundtrack album of the film titled The 60's. A recording of Dylan performing the song at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival was included on the 2005 album The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack. The same performance can also be seen on the 2007 DVD The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965. In 2009, Dylan continued to perform "Chimes of Freedom" in concert, although he did not play the song live during the 23 years between late 1964 and 1987.
Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International is a 4-CD charity compilation album featuring new recordings of 73 compositions by Bob Dylan by multiple artists, released on January 24, 2012. The set includes Dylan's original 1964 recording of the title song. Proceeds from the album were donated to the human rights organization Amnesty International. It debuted in the U.S. at number 11 on the Billboard 200 with 22,000 copies sold.Chimes of Freedom Debuts at #11 on Billboard! Amnesty International. Retrieved February 2, 2011.
Personnel Bob Dylan – vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica Tom Wilson – production
Reception and critical comments "Chimes of Freedom" has been widely discussed by Dylan's many interpreters, including biographers, journalists, academics and music historians.
Critic Paul Williams has described the song as Dylan's Sermon on the Mount. The song is a lyrical expression of feelings evoked while watching a lightning storm. The singer and a companion are caught in a thunderstorm in mid-evening and the pair of them duck into a doorway, where they are both transfixed by one lightning flash after another. The natural phenomena of thunder and lightning appear to take on auditory and ultimately emotional aspects to the singer, with the thunder experienced as the tolling of bells and the lightning bolts appearing as chimes. Eventually, the sights and sounds in the sky become intermixed in the mind of the singer, as evidenced by the lines:
Over the course of the song, the sky and mist begin to partially clear and the lyrics can be interpreted as a proclamation of the hope that as the sky clears in the progress of the difficult night, that all the world's people will endure their setbacks and eventually proclaim their successful survival to the sound of the chimes of freedom.
In his 2003 book, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art, Mike Marqusee notes that the song marks a transition between Dylan's earlier protest song style (a litany of the down-trodden and oppressed, in the second half of each verse) and his later more free-flowing poetic style (the fusion of images of lightning, storm and bells in the first half).Marqusee, M. (2003). Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art. The New Press. In this later style, which is influenced by 19th century French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, the poetry is more allusive, filled with "chains of flashing images." In this song, rather than support a specific cause as in his earlier protest songs, he finds solidarity with all people who are downtrodden or otherwise treated unjustly, including unwed mothers, the disabled, refugees, outcasts, those unfairly jailed, "the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked," and, in the final verse, "the countless confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse" and "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe." By having the chimes of freedom toll for both rebels and rakes, the song is more inclusive in its sympathies than previous protest songs, such as "The Times They Are A-Changin'", written just the prior year. After "Chimes of Freedom", Dylan's protest songs no longer depicted social reality in the black and white terms which he renounced in "My Back Pages", but rather use satirical surrealism to make their points.
In addition to Rimbaud's symbolism, Oliver Hopkins has suggested that the song also shows the influence of the alliterative poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poetic vision of William Blake, and the violent drama, mixed with compassionate and romantic language, of William Shakespeare. Dylan had used rain in a symbolic manner in earlier songs, notably "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall".
Clinton Heylin has suggested the assassination of U.S. President, John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, as a possible inspiration for Dylan's song, although Dylan has denied that this is the case. Dylan drafted a number of poems after Kennedy's death on November 22, 1963. Heylin suggests one of those poems, a six-line piece, seems to contain the genesis of "Chimes of Freedom":
Kennedy was killed on a Friday, and the cathedral bells in the poem have been interpreted as the church bells announcing his death. Heylin suggests that using a storm as a metaphor for the death of a president is comparable to Shakespeare's use of a storm in King Lear. By the time Dylan wrote the first draft of "Chimes of Freedom" the following February, it contained many of the elements of his poem from the end of Autumn after the death of the president, except that the crippled ones and the blind were changed to "guardians and protectors of the mind." In addition, the cathedral bells had become the "chimes of freedom flashing", as seen by two lovers who are sheltering in a cathedral doorway.
In his biography of Dylan, Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilentz comments that shortly before Dylan met poet Allen Ginsberg, "Chimes of Freedom" started to come to form; later in 1964 and 1965, they would continue to influence each other. Wilentz states:
Dylan had already been experimenting with writing free verse, without intending that it would serve him as lyrics. Not long before he met Ginsberg, he poured out a poem about the day of Kennedy's murder... Pulled together, the lines would form part of what Dylan called the 'chain of flashing images' that soon went into 'Chimes of Freedom'—marking both Dylan's reconnection of those aesthetics and the transformation of those aesthetics into song. And in 1964 and 1965, Ginsberg and Dylan influenced each other as both of them recast their public images and their art.