against the expectation of singing protest songs. (The farm in the title is viewed as a pun on Silas McGee's farm in Mississippi, where Dylan made his famous appearance during a civil rights rally.) Many in the audience took it as a slap in the face. Boos rose up amid the cheering, and the booing continued into Dylan's next song, the now-classic "Like a Rolling Stone." Music writer Greil Marcus described the scene:

There was anger, there was fury, there was applause, there was stunned silence, but there was a great sense of betrayal. As if something precious and delicate was being dashed to the ground and stomped. As if the delicate flower of folk music, the priceless heritage of impoverished black farmers and destitute white miners, was beingmocked by a dandy, with a garish noisy electric guitar, who was going to make huge amounts of money as a pop star by exploiting what he found from these poor people.

The controversial "electric" performance was the last of three Dylan appearances at the Newport festival. His first time there was in 1963, when he was an obscure young singer, little known outside of Greenwich Village. He appeared at the festival as a guest of Joan Baez, who was far better known and had recently appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Baez introduced Dylan to audiences around the country and encouraged him to write politically committed folk songs. But by the 1964 festival Dylan had already caught up to Baez, in terms of fame, and by 1965