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From Leslie Griffiths, Methodist Minister:听听听听听听听

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There鈥檚 a petition going around asking for support for Bob Dylan to be admitted to the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. It鈥檚 fifty years since he made his first recordings there. He was admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 but there seems resistance to putting him in the company of Elvis and Johnny Cash and the others. What an irony that a man widely recognized as one of the most influential folk singers of all time should have got into the Pantheon of Nobel Prize Winners for Literature, the Hall of Fame for great writers, before gaining entry to the Nashville Nirvana.

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Bob Dylan鈥檚 been on my horizon for the whole of my adult life. My obsession with the Beatles in the 1960s was rudely disturbed by his album called John Wesley Harding. I鈥檇 just begun my studies to become a Methodist Minister and was getting deeper and deeper into the thinking of John Wesley, the founding father of Methodism; so this was a title that demanded my attention. I soon discovered that Dylan鈥檚 John Wesley was a gun-totin鈥� Texan with a reputation for shooting people dead in their tracks. Yet he鈥檚 a man described as a friend of the poor never known to hurt an honest man, always known to lend a helping hand. So I found myself attracted to this album with its spare music, accessible lyrics, and a deep compassion which seemed to drip references to the Bible. I love the songs about the poor immigrant, the lonesome hobo and the drifter鈥檚 escape. 鈥淥utcasts of men, to you I call, harlots and publicans and thieves. His open arms embrace you all, Sinners alone his grace receives.鈥� That鈥檚 what my Wesley studies were teaching me. And it was the same humane note I kept hearing from these tracks on the John Wesley Harding album. That鈥檚 the music they should have played during last evening鈥檚 presidential debate in Las Vegas 鈥� with its message of a Love that鈥檚 blowing in the wind that reaches everyone, especially those rejected by the strong and powerful.