Where Bob Dylan Wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' — Fat Black Pussycat, Greenwich Village

Bob Dylan is believed to have written 'Blowin' in the Wind' in April 1962 at the Fat Black Pussycat — a coffee house and performance space at 130 West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village — writing the song reportedly in under ten minutes at a table before performing it the same night at Gerde's Folk City a block away on West 4th Street. The song was published in the folk magazine Broadside shortly after and appeared on Dylan's second album, 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,' in 1963. Peter, Paul and Mary's cover version became a top five hit the same year, making it one of the defining songs of the civil rights era before Dylan had fully emerged as a major commercial artist in his own right.

The Fat Black Pussycat was one of the cluster of Greenwich Village coffee houses and folk venues — alongside Café Wha?, the Gaslight Café, and Gerde's Folk City — where Dylan had established himself in the eighteen months since his arrival in New York from Minnesota. He had come originally to visit the dying Woody Guthrie in hospital and stayed, absorbing the Village folk scene and developing his songwriting at extraordinary speed. 'Blowin' in the Wind' represented a leap beyond his early imitative work into something genuinely his own: a song that used the form of a traditional spiritual or folk ballad to ask unanswerable questions about war, freedom, and human conscience without providing any answers.

The building at 130 West 3rd Street has been used for various purposes since the Fat Black Pussycat closed. The block sits at the heart of what was the Greenwich Village folk world in the early 1960s, a short walk from Washington Square Park — the geographical and symbolic centre of the Village scene where Dylan and his contemporaries performed informally for whoever would listen. The song has been recorded by hundreds of artists and adopted as an anthem by movements from the American civil rights movement to Nelson Mandela's post-apartheid South Africa.