Somebody once said Frank Sinatra was the only singer of his time who understood the words he sang. Hyperbole? Probably, but more striking is how alien, even dated this statement sounds today. Now we’re saturated with singer-songwriters in all musical milieu, from revived grunge cafes to rap studios to myriad self-promotions on YouTube. “Covers” might be flourishing, but there’s also a preponderance of original songs sung by the songwriters. And – maybe optimistically – we tend to infer that all singers singing their own songs understand the words they themselves wrote better than “cover artists” ever could.
Is this inference baseless? Is it a hermeneutic delusion that would have Roland Barthes (“the birth of the reader is the death of the author”) and Hans-Georg Gadamer spinning in their graves? Here’s Gadamer in full throat:
Unlike the divine word, the human word is essentially incomplete. No human word can express our mind completely. But as the image of the mirror shows, this does not mean that the word as such is incomplete. The word reflects completely what the mind is thinking. Rather, the imperfection of the human mind consists in its never being completely present to itself but in being dispersed into thinking this or that. From this essential imperfection it follows that the human word is not one, like the divine word, but must necessarily be many words. Hence the variety of words does not in any way mean that the individual word has some remediable deficiency, in that it did not completely express what the mind is thinking; but because our intellect is imperfect – i.e., is not completely present to itself in what it knows – it needs the multiplicity of words. It does not really know what it knows.[1]
This might seem like intellectual woolly-headedness at its worst – when Gadamer tells us “our intellect…does not really know what it knows” we can’t help wanting to put on the brakes before we skid into total aporia. But Gadamer is making a valid point. In effect, he says, “Imagine a divine word; then compare that divine word to human speech.” The difference is that this “divine word” (if it could exist) would always be complete, while the “human word” is “essentially incomplete.” What Gadamer means, then, is that where the Deity needs one word only, we humans need multiple words to express a simple truth. And the upshot of that multiplicity is we cannot control the meaning of our speech, poetry, or prose – let alone songwriting, with the additional meaning-giver of music.
We don’t have to agree with Gadamer to acknowledge that writers, poets particularly, can’t know the multiplicity of meanings and resonances their language creates. And we can reasonably conclude that even songwriters themselves might not understand their own lyrics, or fully command the meaning of their utterances from performance to performance. For example, did these lines ever again mean the same thing they meant when written and recorded – if, in fact, they meant something then?
With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden
No one can answer this question, least of all Dylan, who, it must be said, has always acknowledged his limits as an interpreter of his own songs. Poets are notoriously untrustworthy readers of their own work, which is why criticism and commentary have been coevals of art in all cultures.
Nevertheless, even if we admit that poets can’t corral or stabilize the meaning of their lines, we continue to deem singer-songwriters transparently sincere in their performances, delivering an intended meaning without complications. But this is a romantic – even Romantic – ideal. It doesn’t stand up to hermeneutic scrutiny.
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Crucially, this Romantic ideal leads to the Diegetic Fallacy, too-frequent invader of Dylan commentary. In literary theory, the rhetorical term diegesis refers to narratives, especially about characters and their thoughts and actions. Songs are often narratives in which the speaker is embedded into the story or fabula. Marie-Laure Ryan describes embedded narratives as “any story-like representation produced in the mind of a character and reproduced in the mind of a reader.”[2] We might supplement this definition with “in the mind of a listener,” and ask ourselves who exactly is speaking when, for example, we listen to:
Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharaoh’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered
Or when we listen to this:
What was it you wanted
I ain’t keeping score
Are you the same person
That was here before?
Is it something important?
Maybe not
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again I forgot
Whatever you wanted
What could it be
Did somebody tell you
That you could get it from me
Is it something that comes natural
Is it easy to say
Why do you want it
Who are you anyway?
It seems obvious, from even the most superficial differences in tone and imagery, we can’t think of these two texts as produced by the same speaker. The portentous voice of “we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered” becomes a rallying cry, a shared experience of triumph. In contrast, the isolated, begrudging speaker who asks, none too politely, “What was it you wanted / I ain’t keeping score / Are you the same person / That was here before?” is miles apart from that righteous political speaker in “When the Ship Comes In.”
Neither speaker is Bob Dylan, obviously. It would be irrational to think Dylan is speaking, yet…yet…yet…Why do so many listeners, sometimes even critics who should know better, identify the speaker of the songs as Bob Dylan rather than as an embedded narrator? When this happens, narrated ethics, attitudes, and postures get all mixed up with the singer himself. Biographical facts coupled to audience expectations infiltrate diegetic fabulation. The consequent confusion, which I’ve termed the Diegetic Fallacy, distorts our understanding – and our appreciation – of all Dylan’s song lyrics.
The culprit responsible for this distortion is the inference of sincerity common to singer-songwriters. From Joan Baez to Dylan to Fred Neil, Peter La Farge (“The Ballad of Ira Hayes”), and Joni Mitchell, the identity of the writing with the performance offered a refreshing genuineness, a belief that the singer could identify with the lyrics. Sinatra might have made “My Way” his own, although the song was written for Liza Minelli, but his colonization of the song deliberately traded on his reputation, his public persona, to add “identity” to the lyrics and authority to his delivery.
During the singer-songwriter era, however, Sinatra’s back-formed sincerity withered in comparison to “real” identities. Songs like Dylan’s “My Back Pages” or “Bob Dylan’s Dream” seemed intentionally to introduce an autobiographical element. It’s no wonder then that listeners identified that same “Bob Dylan” saying “I’ll stand by your grave until I’m sure that you’re dead,” or even “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl.” And Dylan was not alone as a misconstrued speaker: Compare, for example, the frankly autobiographical language of Joan Baez singing “Diamonds and Rust,” with lyrics thinly disguising the early Dylan-Baez relationship:
Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling all around
And snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there
The absoluteness of that last line, right after the qualifier “Speaking strictly for me,” brings it all back home to a fundamentally, nostalgically personal level. Joanie’s sincerity is unquestionable.
A comparably palpable sincerity also exists in Joni Mitchell’s postlapsarian paean, “Woodstock”:
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, “Where are you going?”
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s Farm
I’m gonna join in a rock and roll band
I’m gonna camp out on the land
I’m gonna try and get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Clearly a present speaker – the one who wrote and is singing the song – wants to “get [herself] / Back to the garden.” There is a paradigm shift from Sinatra’s “My Way” to “Woodstock” – which, ironically, is what Woodstock was all about (even if it was short lived).
But how can we trust this paradigm shift when we recall Gadamer’s words? If our sense of singer-songwriters’ complete understanding of their own songs is a Romantic ideal responsible for an inflated belief in their personal sincerity, is it still misguided to claim their superiority to Sinatra-era vocalists who sang the words of others? Were the singers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s just performers tout court, lacking in the sincerity we think we hear in performers who write and perform their own songs?
It’s pretty to think so – but we’re probably fooling ourselves. The very term singer songwriter inaccurately privileges speech over writing, as though the vocal expression of a song preceded its composition. Ordinarily we might not think of singing a song as speech per se. But identifying the songwriter and the singer as a single voice characterizes the song as a form of speech: this identity of song and speech dovetails with the idea of singers’ unique sincerity in performing songs they wrote.
Now it’s Jacques Derrida’s turn to spin in his grave. According to Derrida, writing has as much claim to presence as speech, which means that, like speech, writing is always incomplete. Songwriter-singers, from this (deconstructed) perspective, might have only as much control over meaning, sincerity, and conscious understanding as other vocalists. Understanding-the-words is not definitively the privilege of songwriters who sing their own songs, nor, by the same token, is sincerity.
Could Frank O’Hara, for instance, have felt what he felt and remembered the experience of Billie Holiday if the singer hadn’t shared some kind of nous, some evidence of sapient delivery? Without at least some understanding of the animating impulse behind Billie’s performances, could O’Hara have delivered his own extraordinary performance?
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
This is from “The Day Lady Died,” published in Lunch Poems (1964) but marking an earlier date. The poem begins “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday / three days after Bastille day, yes / it is 1959.” July 17, three days after the anniversary of the French Revolution. The detail is purposeful and typically cryptic, something to etch the date into the reader’s memory as it’s etched into the speaker’s: the Revolution has begun, soon to be followed by the Reign of Terror (la Terreur) and public executions. Later in the poem this unexpected detail clashes with O’Hara’s idea of agelessness and empathy. The lines “practically going to sleep with quandariness” and “everyone and I stopped breathing” frame a unique tribute to the singer, extending “quandariness” into a kind of permanent stasis, stunned wonderment, when everyone stops breathing in sync with the now dead Billie Holiday.
O’Hara’s poem and his preternatural sensibility, though hardly proof positive, help make the case that Holiday, like Sinatra, understood the words. But doubts remain when we compare singer-songwriters to other singers. Can we say Ella Fitzgerald, whose voice had no peer, understood the words she sang the way Frank and Billie understood theirs? What about Bing Crosby (a favorite of Dylan’s), whose jazzy baritone changed the course of popular music before Sinatra even showed up? Crosby’s winking sense of humor insinuates itself into his performances, but not with much depth. The list could go on, and it’s well worth listening closely and asking the question of, say, Billy Eckstine, Doris Day (before Hollywood), Tony Bennett, Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly, and, unavoidably, Judy Garland. I’ve heard Garland called “the greatest performer of the 20th century,” another bit of hyperbole, probably suggested by an interested party. Her popularity was bolstered by her very public decline from beloved child star (born somewhere over the rainbow) to drug-addled crooner. But did her undeniable emotional suffering translate to genuine lyric intelligence, to the kind of sapience O’Hara seems to intuit?
Perhaps the most interesting figure of the era – even earlier than Crosby – is Fred Astaire. Though not even remembered as much of a singer these days, Astaire was Cole Porter’s first choice to sing his songs. And Cole Porter, as a friend of mine once observed, is the best poet Yale ever produced. Would he have favored a singer who didn’t understand the words?
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But the past is prologue, as the homicidal Antonio says in The Tempest. Or, to echo Hamlet:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.
Hamlet is alone when he makes this promise, but – appropriately when compared to our present relationship with Sinatra-era singers – he’s responding to a ghost.
The past for us is not even prologue. It’s more like an ectoplasmic phantom. Since the rise of singer-songwriters in the 60s and their colonization of the popular music scene, the insinuation that the singer might not understand the words would strike most contemporary listeners as contradictory and insulting. And I’m using the word “colonization” advisedly, with all its resonance of Columbus (Colón), the first encounters, and myriad predations against the newly colonized. The rout of the professional songwriters of the Aldon music teams at 1650 Broadway, who included such later singer-songwriting luminaries as Carol King and Neil Diamond, along with the utter demolition of Tin Pan Alley, testify to the overwhelming force of the recording artists who wrote and performed their own songs. Significantly, the overriding motif of the revolution was sincerity, foundationed deep, and based largely on the singers’ personal identity with the composition of the music.
As is well known, Dylan was the enfant terrible of the New Order, first among equals aux barricades. His arrival on the Greenwich Village scene and his Columbia recording contract – there’s that word Columbus again – arguably with even greater effect than the Beatles and the British Invasion, threatened to disenfranchise the ventriloquizing songwriters of Tin Pan Alley. With a staggering display of arrogance from a 21-year-old – who, by his own admission, had only been writing songs for a few years – Dylan boldly calls out those uptown songwriters in the spoken introduction to “Bob Dylan’s Blues” on Freewheelin’. Using his ironical Iron Range twang, he says, “Unlike most of the songs nowadays bein’ written in Tin Pan Alley – that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays – this, this is a song, this wasn’t written up there, this was written somewhere down in the United States.” The battle lines were drawn: “folk songs” could not be mass-produced in Tin Pan Alley song factories. Full stop. Dylan’s resistance to the established music culture, his Woody- (or Wobblie-) like stance, was not lost on fans who were hungry for the real experience, the natural experience, a return to the folk purity of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Merle Travis, Doc Watson, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Nor would the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, or Fred Neil have been ungrateful for Columbia’s marketing of a stylistic and philosophical distinction they’d been trying to popularize for years.
In the subsequent agon, Dylan and many of his cohort not only survived against all odds but superseded the song-factories among the record-buying public. Sinatra’s generation, who matched performative brilliance with superior musical sophistication, continued to hold mainstream media prominence. Yet the subculture juggernaut, swarming over the charts, branded them as artificial and impure.
In contrast – facile though it may seem now – the songwriters who wrote their own tunes and sang their own lyrics brought a longed-for genuineness to music, a promise that they understood the words sung in every stanza because they wrote the words themselves. It’s easy now to object that singers like W.C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Mississippi John Hurt, and so on, wrote, sang, and recorded their own songs long before the 60s rise of the singer-songwriters. But these musicians flew far below the radar of popular music, and not simply because many of them were Black – after all, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Nat Cole, among others, made their mark during more or less the same era. Despite being the root of jazz, however, the acoustic blues repertoire was considered primitive, underproduced, and coarsely executed. The powerful music business elites dismissed the acoustic performers as provincial country pickers and ignored them. The result of this neglect is now the stuff of legends. Notoriously, many of the recordings we have of these early singer songwriters are the product, not of studio sessions, but of folklorists’ research with single mikes and reel-to-reel machines in Southern hotel-rooms. (Robert Johnson’s most important songs were recorded in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio.) A few artists managed to get studio time and better production values, but the record distribution was meager, and the disks were soon remaindered, along with the singers themselves.
That all changed, of course, when rock ‘n roll took center stage and the blues became the basis of popular music. The lost singer-songwriters of the 30s and 40s were lionized and those still living were tracked down from the Appalachians to the Mississippi Delta. The project of rediscovery and renaissance came up like a groundswell. Not only twelve-bar blues, but the English and Scottish ballads, many drawn from their American mountain versions, began showing up in folksingers’ repertoires – viz. the paradigm-shift of “Hard Rain” from the repurposed Lord Randal. New possibilities opened up for songwriters, and – without hyperbole – for musical culture itself when mostly white twenty-something “songwriter-singers” wrote themselves into the songs they wove from prior blues and ballads.
They “wipe[d] away all trivial fond records,” making the songs they wrote and sang inflexible benchmarks of genuineness and sincerity. But all was not peace and love. In the first half of the 60s, the acoustic performers, eschewing showbiz insincerity and loud pounding music, squared off against the rock ’n’ roll performers and the noisy staginess of their bands. It’s easy to forget the contempt the folkies felt for rock ’n’ roll: Dylan himself mocked rock singers in “Talkin’ World War III Blues”:
Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player –
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”
That was in 1963. Two years later, in July 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, he unleashed an electric set with The Butterfield Blues Band as his backing group. He was booed off the stage. Although he returned that night and played a few acoustic favorites to mollify the audience, the die had been cast. As Clinton Heylin puts it, “Dylan was no longer the sole property of folkies… and they weren’t amused.”[3] Dylan fans know the dénouement of this over-scrutinized drama all too well: in concert after concert on his 1966 tour, after he “went electric,” audiences booed and regarded Dylan as a traitor.
But a traitor to what exactly? Is it even possible nowadays to remember the depth of commitment to folk music, let alone recall the force of the hostility among the self-declaredly betrayed?
It remains a phenomenon of that phenomenal period in music history that so many fans (not to mention other folk performers) had so much invested in preserving what they heard as folk music’s sincerity. What they saw as Dylan’s turncoat action threatened the insularity of the folk movement and undermined any claim to sincerity or purity that Dylan might have had. Few people at the time recognized how Dylan’s experimental electric tour advanced the sincerity and lyric power of folk music in the cantons of popular music. There was too much heat at the time, and not enough light. One would have to do more than merely remember the dug-in positions of the Second Folk movement. One would have to recall the apostolic devotion of the folkies to Dylan’s music, to his inimitable voice, to his pared-down sincerity—all of which seemed to be lost in the new electric language. The sea of boos were an attack on Dylan’s loss of straightforwardness, his abandonment of the socio-political stance represented by acoustic music, and his apparent capitulation to the same record-industry standards he himself had helped overthrow.
This bizarrely violent reaction to a musician of all people was the direct result of the Diegetic Fallacy. Fans, critics, and even skeptical fellow folk musicians had mistaken the fabula for reality. They only heard the narrative intermittently, or misjudged its speaker for the singer. Ryan explains Seymour Chapman’s characterization of a fabula as a discourse that is made to be believed:
For a discourse to evoke a fabula, it must bring a universe to life and convey to the reader the sense that at the center of the universe resides an actual or real world, a realm of factual states and events, whose chronological succession determines a history. This world is inhabited by intelligent beings who produce a variety of mental representations, such as beliefs, wishes, projections, intents, obligations, dreams, and fantasies.[4]
Think about songs as fabula, each of them bringing to life a separate universe, a new world of “factual states and events.” Allow this world to be “inhabited by intelligent beings” – by different speakers in every song – producing an array of “beliefs, wishes, projections, intents, obligations, dreams, and fantasies.”
Now let Dylan’s songs be inhabited by this variety of intelligent beings and ask who is speaking in, say, “All Along the Watchtower,” “Sara,” “To Ramona,” “My Back Pages,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “License to Kill,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Mississippi,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”
And keep asking five or six hundred times.
[1] Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, Continuum Publishing, 1994), 425.
[2] Laure-Marie Ryan, “Embedded Narratives and Tellability,” Style 20.3 (1986), 320.
[3] Clinton Heylin, Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall: A Historical View of the Big Boo (New York: Lesser Gods, 2016), 16.
[4] Ryan, 320.
