Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams
Everybody sees hisself walkin' around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
And some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can't be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours"
I said that
~ Bob Dylan
When Bob Dylan was recording Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963, he was also scheduled to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. Apparently, CBS executives had a problem with the song "Talkin' John Birch Society Blues" and asked that Dylan sing something else. (Ed Sullivan did not agree with that position.) Dylan walked off the set. Shortly after, the big wheels at Columbia Records removed the song and replaced it with "Talkin' World War III Blues." Although Dylan was not pleased with the removal of the song, he was in a delicate position, as he needed to have the album produced.
Although both of the "talkin' blues" songs (a style that Woody Guthrie popularized) were about paranoia and the hysteria surrounding communism, "Talkin' WWIII Blues" addresses the subject of nuclear annihilation with humor. In the song, the protagonist dreams he is in WWIII and goes to a doctor to find out what this means. He tells him about the dream. In the end, it turns out the doctor, as well as everybody else, has been having the same dream. (Sound familiar? Have you been having some bad dreams lately?)
The lyrics quoted above include a misquote of Abraham Lincoln. What Lincoln actually said was (and I'm sure you know this one), "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Perhaps you've heard a version of this quote in Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up"?
When Dylan performed the song on Halloween in 1964 at Philharmonic Hall in New York City, he attributed the quote to Carl Sandburg instead of Abraham Lincoln! As it turns out, it was Carl Sandburg, poet and Lincoln scholar, who cited the quote in A Lincoln Album: Readings by Carl Sandburg in 1957. Dylan was a known admirer of Sandburg and had visited him around the time that he was performing "Talkin' WWIII Blues."
The story of the quote becomes more interesting. Sandburg credited an Illinois lawyer, Milton Hay, with first revealing the Lincoln quote back in 1894. Hay says he heard Lincoln say it when they both had offices in Springfield. Hay mentioned the quote in a speech he gave in 1894 and several newspapers published the speech. And that's how it became known and popular.
And there you have it. Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!
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