American folk music revival the UK, protesting the British testing of the H-bomb in 1958, as well as by the ever-proliferating arms race and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Young singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, had been signed and recorded for Columbia by producer John Hammond in 1961. Dylan's record enjoyed some popularity among Greenwich Village folk-music enthusiasts, but he was "discovered" by an immensely larger audience when a pop-folk-music group, Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with a cover of his song "Blowin' in the Wind". Peter, Paul & Mary also brought Pete Seeger and the Weavers' "If I
Blowin' in the Wind version of the song also spent five weeks atop the easy listening chart. The critic Andy Gill wrote, Dylan performed the song for the first time on television in the UK in January 1963, when he appeared in the BBC television play "Madhouse on Castle Street". He also performed the song during his first national US television appearance, filmed in March 1963, a performance made available in 2005 on the DVD release of Martin Scorsese's PBS television documentary on Dylan, "No Direction Home". An allegation that the song was written by a high-school student named Lorre Wyatt and subsequently purchased