“Words are always filled with historical meanings, and that makes language a shifting medium through which we see the world. The songs on John Wesley Harding have shifting meanings, too. They’re so layered in terms of intertextual references that the words are less about objectivity and more about being enmeshed in history. When we’re in this language, we don’t own it or use it to signify. We’re just borrowing this system of significance for our time on earth.”

Robert Reginio 

“To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

 “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Bob Dylan

“There must be some way out of here / Said the Joker to the thief / There’s too much confusion / I can’t get any relief”.

“All Along the Watchtower

I pity the poor immigrant/who wishes he would’ve stayed home’

Who uses all his power to do evil,/But in the end is always left so alone

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

“No martyr is among you now / Whom you can call your own / So go on your way accordingly / And know you’re not alone”.

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”

Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding by Robert Reginio argues that the 1967 album is a sophisticated, critical response to the social turmoil of the 1960s in America rather than a retreat by Dylan to his folk roots. It shows that John Wesley Harding is not merely a record but a pedagogical tool that, if studied properly and with clarity, can reveal how art, politics, and class formation interact with the kind of political organisation the working-class needs.

Reginio’s book, according to Dr Barry Faulk (Florida State University), is a “pathbreaking study” and a “necessary corrective” to existing scholarship.”: Reginio opposes the common assumption that John Wesley Harding was a simple, acoustic retreat because of his 1966 motorcycle accident. Instead, he argues the songs use “archaic tonality” to mask a complex, biting commentary on American politics and the myth of the “Summer of Love”.

A word of caution is needed, as the reader should know that Reginio takes a “Post Structuralist Approach” to Dylan, drawing on theories by figures such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Both are similar in their philosophical outlooks, with Jacques Derrida advancing “deconstruction, to explain that there is nothing outside the text, he elevated language and textual play above an independent, objective social reality. This move dissolves stable reference, undermines the possibility of objective truth and relativises the relation between thought and material conditions. As for Julia Kristeva, drawing on psychoanalysis and semiotics, emphasizes the semiotic and the subject’s internal, linguistic drives. While opposing the philosophical outlook of both Derrida and Kristeva

By 1967, Dylan had broken with the role assigned to him by the folk-liberal milieu. As David Walsh notes in his long appraisal of Dylan’s trajectory, the artist “rejected the role that had been prepared for him by the ‘left’ folk music world” and moved across social and cultural circles rather than forging a consistent political line. John Wesley Harding should be read in the wake of that rupture: it follows the electric period and his motorcycle accident, and it arrives amid the radicalisation and disillusionment of the late 1960s. The record’s pared-down sound and biblical/shadow-play imagery mark both withdrawal and renewed moral interrogation.

John Wesley Harding is one of my favourite Bob Dylan albums and is one of the most important records for anyone studying culture and politics from the 1960s. It marks a decisive stylistic and ethical shift from the electric confrontations of 1965–66 and the explicit protest songs of 1962–64 to a leaner, quieter, quasi-biblical mode. To understand its significance for Marxist study, we must situate the album within Dylan’s trajectory and the wider political context.

After the electrified breakthrough and the controversial Newport performance in 1965, and following his 1966 motorcycle crash, Dylan’s public persona retreated while his songwriting changed. Critics and historians have noted that his move away from the role of “people’s troubadour” combined personal, musical and commercial factors, producing work that was inward-looking and allegorical rather than the direct indictment of power of earlier songs. Musically, John Wesley Harding strips arrangements to the essentials; lyrically, it draws on folk, country, and biblical imagery, producing ambiguous parables rather than straightforward protest.

Reginio correctly situates the album (1967) within the political convulsions of the 1960s. As James Brewer writes, “Anyone old enough by the summer of 1968 to be conscious of events will remember the upheavals rocking the political landscape. Younger people with a historical awareness will surely have some knowledge of them as well. On March 31, 1968, US President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the face of mounting anti-war sentiment, shocked the country by announcing he would not seek re-election. Only weeks before the release of Music From Big Pink, Robert F. Kennedy, by then a leading candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, was assassinated. Dr Martin Luther King, who had come out strongly against US intervention in Indochina, was in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the sanitation workers’ strike when he was assassinated in early April. Inner city rebellions exploded in major US cities after King’s murder, as they had the year before, dubbed the “Long Hot Summer of 1967.”[1] 

“All Along the Watchtower”

The album’s sparse arrangements—on these two songs, acoustic guitars, organ, restrained rhythm—force attention onto language and narrative. This austerity is not retreat into solipsism but a formal device that foregrounds moral judgment and parable.

Songs like “All Along the Watchtower” (though released on later singles/performances) and many tracks on the record use legal, outlaw, and prophetic imagery—figures “outside the law,” testimonies, judgments. The album’s title itself evokes the frontier judge and a biblical outlaw archetype, blending American folk law and biblical registry to question authority and culpability.

Dylan deploys ambiguous narrators and compressed, elliptical lines. This resists facile appropriation by liberal managers of culture who wanted a single “voice of a generation.” As Elijah Wald’s account of Dylan’s musical path shows, Dylan was always a musical sponge whose form choices shifted with social circles and aims.[2]

All Along the Watchtower is one of Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic and influential songs. The three-stanza lyric compresses a parable-like scene—watchmen, a joker and a thief, a princess in a tower—into a terse, prophetic tableau. The song’s spare, elliptical language and biblical cadence mark a shift from Dylan’s mid‑60s surrealism and topical songs toward a more aphoristic, mythic idiom. Its meaning has been variously read as an existential fable, a critique of social order, or a poetic expression of historical rupture. The most famous reinterpretation is Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 electric cover, which transformed the song’s sound and popular resonance. Numerous artists have since covered the song.[3]

In I Pity the Poor Immigrant Dylan’s figure of the immigrant—vulnerable, suspect, morally ambivalent—maps onto real processes under capitalism: forced migration, precarious labour, and social exclusion. Such conditions are not isolated misfortunes but structural consequences of capitalist accumulation and imperialism.

One thing worth noting about the album’s title is the figure of John Wesley Harding. As Tony Attwood from the website Untold Dylan writes, “Dylan’s preoccupation with outlaws does intrigue. And especially his tendency to upgrade certified nutcases to well-behaved, humane role models. Jesse James gets a single, friendly name check (in “Outlaw Blues”), and in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, he plants the paradox that to live outside the law, you must be honest. A first standard-bearer, then, of that motto is John Wesley Harding. The half-beatification of Billy the Kid (1973) may be attributed to Peckinpah or to the angelic aura of the protagonist, Kris Kristofferson, but with “Hurricane” (1975), Dylan rather breaks his neck when he passionately defends a repeatedly convicted murderer and declares him a hero. A low point came with “Joey” (1975), the epic hymn to the immoral Mafia killer Joey Gallo.[4] It should be noted that Hurricane Carter was exonerated and released.

Dylan’s preoccupation with rescuing ruffians from historical obscurity aside for serious readers and students, John Wesley Harding provides a useful case study in the relation of artist to class struggle — Dylan’s shift underscores that cultural figures do not automatically translate artistic dissidence into political leadership. As David Walsh in his article (Does Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize?) Dylan’s career shows the danger of individualistic detachment and the absorption into celebrity culture, which can dilute oppositional potential. There are limits to Dylan’s cultural reformism; the album’s parabolic language can obscure material causes and class relations. This reinforces why Marxist cultural analysis insists on linking aesthetics to social forces and political organisation.

As David Walsh points out, “Bob Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist, or artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social processes–which threatened to ‘slow down’ or even block his rise–by avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn’t realise was that in turning his back on social life and softening his attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting himself off from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what was best in him.”

About the Author

Robert Reginio is Professor of English at Alfred University, where he currently serves as the Margaret and Barbara Hagar Professor of the Humanities. He has published widely on Bob Dylan, including essays in The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me (Routledge, 2023) and Multitudes: Teaching Bob Dylan (Bloomsbury, 2024). He has presented his work on Bob Dylan at several international conferences and symposia and serves on the editorial board of the journal The Dylan Review.

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[1] Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band—a documentary film- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/25/once-m25.html

[2] An interview with Elijah Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric!- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/02/13/ojlf-f13.html

[3] americana-uk.com/versions-all-along-the-watchtower

[4]  John Wesley Harding (1967). The argument against.bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/8381