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If the title of this debate were "Does Bob Dylan consider himself a folk singer?" then I would be writing for the other side, because it is a well documented fact that Dylan hates labels. The label that raises his ire the most is being called the "voice of his generation." He's been known to spew venom back at interviewers who broach the subject.

But the truth is, labels need to be placed on things-including art-so that when history is written it can be organized, filed and future generations will have something to go on. Sometimes the future might not agree with what the past labeled something. Four decades ago many people called MLK a traitor, and worse. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone call him that today. We don't give national holidays to traitors.

It might be a stretched analogy, but people used to call Bob Dylan a traitor four decades ago, too. There was the famous cry of "Judas" when he plugged in an electric guitar and played with a band. The folk music purists of the day saw Dylan not only as the Savior of their genre but also as one who might save the world. Naive, to be sure, but his songs were that good. He tapped into the zeitgeist of a burgeoning movement in a way that only a handful of others had in the 20th century. Picasso, Hemingway, Kerouac, their names roll off the tongue without much thought. And when it comes to the 60's so does Dylan's. The early masterpieces still hold up today, not only as near-perfect statements of history, but still relevant. You could sing "Blowing In the Wind," "Masters of War" and "With God On Our Side" at any peace rally today and the lyrics would not sound dated at all. They are timeless.

In between then and now, though, Dylan has gone through many phases. There was the drug-addled, folk-rock stage, the homespun-country stage, the Born Again stage, the I'm-Jewish-again stage, etc.
Through all these transmutations of sound, look and style Dylan always wrote and sang folk songs. The only problem a lot of people had with these changes were the original folk-purists, who see "folk" as a certain type of sound and politics. While Dylan liked the sound-and even bettered it-and liked the humanity behind the politics, he abhorred being their poster-boy. But the themes of his songs have remained the same-railing against power, hatred of war and relationships between men and women.

These are all folk themes. In the 70's he sang "Hurricane" to get a wrongly convicted man out of prison, and recorded "Blood On the Tracks," an album about the heartbreak that comes with the dissolution of a relationship. If folk music is supposed to be music for "folks" then you don't get more folk than that. He continues to write songs along these lines, "Working Man Blues #2" from his latest album being a fine example.

The title of the debate "Is Bob Dylan a folk singer?" comes off as a rhetorical question. The rhetoric is the same as those purists four decades ago who couldn't stand to see their poster-boy go electric and express himself in different ways. The complaint now is that Dylan is still alive and recording but not writing protest songs anymore. Just because a song is not a protest song doesn't mean it isn't a folk song.

In fact, with the release of his latest album-"Modern Times"-Dylan is doing exactly what he did on his very first album almost five decades ago, where he was trying to sound like an old man singing re-worked old folk-blues songs. The only difference now is he is an old man, and still singing re-worked old folk-blues songs.

Folk and blues are an idiom that have gone together like peanut butter and chocolate for well over a century. Bob Dylan is simply one of the more famous examples of this unique American folk tradition.

Learn more about this author, Blake Guthrie.
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