This is a fantastic song, and i'm in a song for thursday suggesting mood

can you tell me when this song first came out?? There is a carton of beer resting on this!!!

That summer, Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in 12 years, championing the cause of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter who he believed had been wrongfully imprisoned for a triple homicide in Paterson, New Jersey (an eponymous 1971 tribute to George Jackson, a Black Panther who was killed in prison, sank almost unnoticed). After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", a presentation sympathetic to Carter's claims of innocence. Despite its length, the song was released as a single, peaking at #31 on the Billboard Chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. The tour was something different: a varied evening of entertainment featuring many performers drawn mostly from the resurgent Greenwich Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett; Steven Soles; David Mansfield; former Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn; Scarlet Rivera, a violin player Dylan discovered while she was walking down the street to a rehearsal, her violin case hanging on her back; and a reunion with Joan Baez. Joni Mitchell added herself to the Revue in November, and poet Allen Ginsberg accompanied the troupe, staging scenes for the film Dylan was simultaneously shooting. Sam Shepard, who would later achieve some fame as a playwright and actor, traveled along as a sort of informal chronicler.

from WikiPedia; it would seem to be 1975. Good Luck.

though the hippy generation tried to get Dylan to spearhead the anti-war revolution he declined (got that from the TV documentary). But for some reason the whole Rubin Carter thing got to him and he was inspired to write this song and speak out about it. Just a note, the Wikipedia site you mentioned rocks for background info on stuff like that.

Also BTW you guys in the states need some more singers and movie stars to keep speaking up to stop the modern day Viet Nam in Iraq. Either that or start hitting the streets in mass to protest