“Masters of War” is a song by Bob Dylan, written over the winter of 1962–63 and released on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in the spring of 1963. The song’s melody was adapted from the traditional “Nottamun Town.” Dylan’s lyrics are a protest against the Cold War nuclear arms build-up of the early 1960s.
During 1963, Dylan performed the song at major concerts, including his performances at New York City’s Town Hall on April 12, Brandeis University’s Brandeis Folk Festival on May 10, and Carnegie Hall on October 26. He also played it at an afternoon workshop at his first Newport Folk Festival appearance on July 27. A live, electric version, recorded at Wembley Stadium in 1984, was included on Dylan’s 1985 Real LIve European tour album. He performed the song during the 1991 Grammy Awards ceremony where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award. After 1963’s performances, Dylan did not play an acoustic version of “Masters of War” for 30 years, until his Hiroshima concert in Japan in 1994.
In the album notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Nat Hentoff wrote that Dylan startled himself with this song, and quotes Dylan saying: “I’ve never written anything like that before. I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out… a feeling of what can you do?” Critic Andy Gill described the song as “the bluntest condemnation in Dylan’s songbook, a torrent of plain speaking pitched at a level that even the objects of its bile might understand it.” Gill points out that when the song was published in Broadside magazine in February 1963, it was accompanied by drawings by Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, which depicted a man carving up the world with a knife and fork, while a hungry family forlornly looks on.
On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower gave his farewell address from the Oval Office. In this speech, he warned that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In an interview, published in USA Today in September 2001, Dylan linked his song to Eisenhower’s speech, saying: “Masters of War”… is supposed to be a pacifistic song against war. It’s not an anti-war song. It’s speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military-industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up.”
Pete Seeger covered the song on his 1965 album Strangers and Cousins. Recorded live in Japan, the cover features Seeger playing an acoustic guitar, with each lyric followed by a spoken translation of the lyric by a Japanese translator. Seeger and Dylan had a close personal and professional relationship, with Dylan citing Seeger as a source of inspiration in both musical and political spheres. Additionally, they both participated in anti-war activism during the ’50s and ’60s, and Seeger shared many of the pacifist values expressed by Dylan in “Masters of War”.The choice to cover the song in Japan links back to Seeger’s involvement with activism against Japanese-American internment camps. His activism led to an FBI investigation, and he was later placed on an FBI blacklist of “communist” entertainers. These issues also held significance in Seeger’s personal life; his wife, Toshi Seeger, was the daughter of a Japanese political exile.
