Without question, the most important figure in the protest renaissance of the 1960s was Bob Dylan. Like his idol Woody Guthrie, Dylan believed he was "trying to be a singer without a dictionary, and a poet not bound with shelves of books." He had a voice caught in barbed wire, he looked like a cross between Harpo Marx and the younger Beethoven. "What I do," he said, "is write songs and sing them and perform them. Anything else trying to get on top of it, making something out of it which it isn't first, brings me down." Yet his song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" was about, or at least inspired by, the 1962 Cuban Missile confrontation; the "Ballad of Hollis Brown" commemorated a particularly bloody killing of a Dakota dirt farmer; "Oxford Town" concerned the ordeal of James Meredith; his recent return to activist singing, "Hurricane," is about a black prize fighter wrongly jailed (so it is claimed) for murder.

Dylan's protest songs are full of savage melancholy, flinty and drawling. Their subject matter is intolerance and the loss of liberty. (p. 208)

[His] lyrics have brought eloquence to an age that has little, dignity to a generation that tends to forget its meaning, and a terrible honesty to a society which prefers deceit. A prophet of reasoned defiance, he works in a medium where such an attitude had been virtually unknown among whites, though it is now seen as a cornerstone of future musical development. Like other folk artists, he steals from the past to revitalize the present. His debt to black music and to the blues in particular is often unacknowledged and damaging to both. But as a lyricist, his example stands as a warning to those who "go mistaking Paradise for that home across the road." (pp. 208-09)