on his 1965 album Strangers And Cousins. Recorded live in Japan, the cover features Seeger playing an acoustic guitar, with each lyric followed by a spoken translation of the lyric by a Japanese translator. Seeger and Dylan had a close personal and professional relationship, with Dylan citing Seeger as a source of inspiration in both musical and political spheres. Additionally, they both participated in anti-war activism during the 50s and 60s, and Seeger shared many of the pacifist values expressed by Dylan in “Masters of War". The choice to cover the song in Japan links back to Seegers involvement with activism against Japanese-American internment camps. His activism led to an FBI investigation, and he was later placed on an FBI blacklist of "communist" entertainers. These issues also held significance in Seegers personal life; his wife,Toshi Seeger, was the daughter of a Japanese political exile fleeing statism in Shōwa Japan. Leon Russell's 1970 version retains Dylan's lyric but is sung to the melody of "The Star Spangled Banner." Hip hop group The Roots performed an epic 14-minute version of the song that was considered by critics to be the high point of a Dylan-tribute concert in 2007. In October 2020, Canadian rock band Billy Talent uploaded a cover of the song to YouTube, with a message from drummer, Aaron Solowoniuk, urging American viewers to vote in the 2020 United States presidential election. Themes In the album notes to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Nat Hentoff wrote that Dylan startled himself with this song, and quotes Dylan saying: "I've never written anything like that before. I don't sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn't help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out... a feeling of what can you do?" Critic Andy Gill described the song as "the bluntest condemnation in Dylan's songbook, a torrent of plain speaking pitched at a level that even the objects of its bile might understand it." Gill points out that when the song was published in Broadside magazine in February 1963, it was accompanied by drawings by Suze Rotolo, Dylan's girlfriend at the time, which depicted a man carving up the world with a knife and fork, while a hungry family forlornly looks on. According to Todd Harvey, in this song Dylan "allows the listener no opportunity to see the issue from the masters' eyes. 'I' and 'you' are clearly