'The Times They Are A-Changin" Still Speaks To Our Changing Times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at NPR.org/Anthem . Imagine you are 13 years old, on the cusp of adolescence. You are sitting in a comfortable suburban home, watching a news program about a civil rights protest. Young people, not much older than you, are being beaten with water from fire hoses and attacked by police dogs. The images shatter your comfortable world. You feel angry, confused. You want to do something, but you're not sure what. That 13-year-old was me. And right around that same time, I discovered Bob Dylan . Pretty much nothing was ever the same after that. When Dylan first hit the music scene, Joan Baez was the reigning queen of folk. She would soon fall in love with both the man and his music — but even today, Baez doesn't pretend to know what went on in Dylan's head when he wrote the song "The Times They Are a-Changin' " in 1963.