Think about all those names, all those all those cities, all those streets and small towns and all those people. How many of them mean something more than simply a proper name? How many proper names are properly proper names, rather than what one critic of onomastics identified as “the place names found in ballads and folksongs…regularly functioning as poetic devices”?[1] For example:
I’ll look for you in old Honolulu
San Francisco, Ashtabula
Not only, on Blood on the Tracks, does Dylan manage to rhyme “Honolulu” with “Ashtabula,” but, stunningly, he finds two four-syllable city names to end the lines, each name made up of two trochees and three separate, matching pitches. But is this reason or rhyme? That is, are the cities necessary to the meaning of the verse, or does Dylan choose their names for their prosodical fit, to satisfy the meter and rhyme? Compare this name:
Crash on the levee, mama
Water’s gonna overflow
Swamp’s gonna rise
No boat’s gonna row
Now, you can train on down
To Williams Point
You can bust your feet
You can rock this joint
The “point-joint” rhyme is perfect, as is the meter (not to mention the idiolectal use of “train” as a verb). But where is Williams Point? Or which Williams Point is the speaker referring to? The most likely one is in Virginia, at the tip of a peninsula in Currioman Bay (the other tip of the peninsula is Asparagus Point). But there are other places called Williams Point. In fact, there are two more in the vicinity – one near Ocean City, Maryland, and another near Chincoteague, Virginia. All these Williams Points are at low elevation and close enough to the water to need a levee.
These place names seem to be both representative toponyms–the names associated with particular topography–and realistic places in the songs. They are what might be called onomastic pointers. Onomastics is the study of proper names: their origins, transformations, corruptions, and meanings. So, while riding on a train going east, a traveler might pass through Williams Point after the levee crashed somewhere nearby, or, alternatively, she could have been in Williams Point when the levee crashed. But it’s difficult to avoid the sense of an arbitrary toponym and a convenient rhyme. Still, how rigorously should we interrogate these names? Michel Grimaud (a scholar of onomastics), in a self-deprecating reflection on his (temporary) abandonment of the field of onomastics, suggests that “research in the potential symbolic meanings of literary names [is] unlikely to reflect the reader’s experience of the text; [is] all too often facile; and ordinarily fail[s] to be central to a study of the major aspects of a literary text, i.e., those which, as critics, we ought to concentrate on first.”[2] Although Grimaud reverses his negative opinion of onomastics, he first adds that “ways of arriving at the symbolic meaning of names [are] not only too easy, they [are] methodologically weak and unconvincing in most cases.”
Songs are not literary texts, or not only literary texts. I think we can agree that unlocking the symbolic meaning of names in songs isn’t always “too easy,” and despite Grimaud’s view, can be very revealing. When we hear “Tangled Up in Blue,” the proper names not only melt into the narrative but underscore the meaning of that elusive speaker’s journey:
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I happened to be employed
Workin’ for a while on a fishin’ boat
Right outside of Delacroix
The “employed-Delacroix” rhyme works well, slightly slanted, and the serendipity of a famous Louisiana port town adds color to the peripatetic narrative.[3] It’s difficult to call this an arbitrary toponym when it fits the story so well. But I’m not sure we can reach the same conclusion about the opening lines to “If You See Her, Say Hello”:
If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear.[4]
There is a temptation to resort to biography, in this case, by suggesting that this couplet refers to Dylan’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Sara, who, for reasons unexplained in the song, was living in Tangier, Morocco. If that were the case, the casual idiomatic rhyme, “I hear,” might seem appropriate. But, absent a definitive autobiographical voice, “Tangier” seems arbitrary and the rhyme somewhat facile – unless, perhaps, Dylan hopes listeners will augment the ruefulness of the verses with the remoteness and exoticism of a Moroccan escape. Even then, however, any supposedly exotic toponym might work: in Wallace Stevens’s words, “An apple serves as well as any skull.”[5]
Yet the use of “Tangier” is exactly what scholars of onomastics refer to as using a name to function connotatively, rather than denotatively, in a song, as, for example, part of “‘the stylized limbo’ of the ballad world.”[6] Interpreting Dylan’s names through the concept of a “ballad world” can be clarifying: what better than “stylized limbo” to describe lines like “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And it’s Eastertime too,” and “Don’t put on any airs / When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue.” The names and places might seem arbitrary – denotatively – but there’s nothing facile in them connotatively, nor is it too easy to interpret the names: they are indeed central to the listeners’ experience of the song. At times, the ballad world overlaps with other mythical worlds, as in “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)”:
Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’?
Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?
From the local present to the end-times, from the peaceful county road to the final battlefield, from tangible reality to the stylized limbo of myth. Dylan mixes the denotative name with the richly connotative one, a kind of onomastic polarization, The ballad world all but overwhelms the quotidian, except for the speaker’s sense of repetition: “Seems like I been down this way before / Is there any truth in that, señor?”
Few Dylan listeners could fail to associate the feeling of repetition with this spectacularly famous stanza:
Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again
(“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”)
The world-weary frustration of “Waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice,” which anticipates the line in “Señor,” occurs in a frame of three names: Grand Street, Mobile, and Memphis. The proper names are known places – Grand Street in downtown Manhattan (SoHo) – and the two magical-mystery cities tying together Gulf Coast Alabama with Beale Street and Elvis Presley. Does the denotative meaning of these names preclude a connotative association? Dylan clearly hasn’t chosen the names at random, and his manipulation of toponyms produces both a referential congruency and “demonstrate[es] persuasively how such names help to establish a mental ballad map that, albeit quite fictitious, maintains more than adequately the spatial relationships necessary to sustain a narrative.”[7] Before we’ve heard one note of the song, the title creates a mental ballad map and suggests the spatial relationships that will initiate a narrative. And, once again, Dylan uses names, denotatively, to polarize connotations:
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again
He even uses the word “end” at the end of the line, a nice bit of prosodical cheek. But the meaning of the lines is all about the names. David Atkinson has observed that “place names stripped at least in part of their denotative function can also serve as structural devices in ballad verse, creating sound patterns like…stanza endings … or providing refrain elements.”[8] The speaker is trapped inside “Mobeel” with the Memphis blues, and as everyone knows, the Memphis blues are either a longing to be in Memphis or the actual blues music that historically came through Memphis, Tennessee, and is now caging the speaker.
In discussing the American folk song, Walter Allen Read notes that “the Child ballads, upon their transit to America, offer remarkable onomastic evidence.” His example resonates for all Dylanistas: “In places where British names were retained,” Read reflects, “even these would seem exotic enough. What is the ‘North Countree’ to an American – even to one living in the North Country”?[9] This is almost too perfect a question to ask lifetime listeners of “Girl from the North Country” and “North Country Blues.” Until now I thought I knew very well where the North Country was:
Well, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Minnesota, the “fair” north country, where the winds hit that mysterious borderline, that liminal place and uncrossable threshold blocking the past: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way,” as Dylan puts it thirty years later in “Mississippi.” But Read’s “North Countree” observation adds a layer to Dylan’s song. The genealogy of “north country” tracks back through the British Isles and the Child ballads: just when we thought we had an unproblematic definition and a biographically secure place name, the legacy of North Country adds new meaning to the borderline.
One of the tasks of onomastics in ballad study is to untangle the aliases of, for example, a particular Child number. Regarding “Lord Randal,” for instance, W.F.H. Nicolaisen quotes Bertrand Bronson as calling the “variety of names for the protagonist ‘kaleidoscopic’ and [commenting] somewhat tongue-in-cheek that ‘a page could be filled with his aliases.’”[10] The notion of a ballad hero’s aliases, and Lord Randal’s in particular, is irresistibly provocative when thinking about Dylan. As Stephen Scobie’s superbly titled book Alias Bob Dylan implies, Dylan enjoys being an enigma where names are concerned–we could almost say onomastically. It’s well known that his character in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is somewhat coyly named Alias. But Dylan began using aliases long before Rudy Wurlitzer’s script. He changed his own name a couple of times as a young performer, and even after his establishment as Bob Dylan occasionally recorded using now familiar alter egos. But his most significant alias shattered the folk music world and reinvented lyrical language, adding brilliantly to the “kaleidoscopic” variety of Lord Randal’s aliases. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” replaces the pitifully doomed voice of the poisoned Scottish lover with a new, radically powerful “blue-eyed son.” The extraordinary supersession of the folk idiom by a speaker entrenched in current social experience speaking with utterly new, poetically striving lyrical combinations, presented the listening world with a redoubtable alias. Countless critics have acknowledged the emancipatory character of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” from the lyrical innovations to the reworked ballad standard. But I wonder how many of us have recognized that onomastics contributed heavily to Dylan’s revolutionizing folk music.
*
In his poem “To Larry Rivers,” Frank O’Hara compares the poet’s skills unfavorably to the painter’s:
And what poet ever sat down
in front of a Titian, pulled out
his verifying tablet and began
to drone? Don’t complain, my dear,
You do what I can only name.
I don’t doubt O’Hara wants to pay tribute to Rivers. Still I wonder, and I wonder. Even here, where O’Hara seems determined to subordinate poetic to painterly competence, the use of a proper name emerges with unexpected consequences. O’Hara was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, so his choice of an artist to cite as an example should carry some weight – which makes Titian an interesting choice, even if sixteenth-century painting would not have been on display at MoMA. O’Hara, who earned a Harvard degree in English after a stint in the Navy, was not trained as an art historian. Although he was renowned for his eye for modern and contemporary art, I expect he’d also have been aware of the historical controversy surrounding the identification of “true” Titians. Too many of the so-called “Titians” in circulation, though produced in Titian’s Venetian workshop, were completed – or completely painted – by workshop assistants. In art history circles, the proper name “Titian” is almost a code word for “unnamable” – which gives special resonance to O’Hara’s curious phrase “verifying tablet” to refer to the poet’s notebook. The phrase strikes an odd note in a poem not apparently about verification and therefore seems to sow doubt. Maybe the act of copying a Titian and verifying one’s model, because “a Titian” might not necessarily be by Titian, ultimately puts the painter on shakier ground even than the poet who “can only name.” Maybe, O’Hara implies, it’s all in the name, or naming.
A poet’s use of proper names can puzzle or inspire, amuse or carry ominous portent. Poetry and onomastics can overlap in tandem with prosody and meaning. What seem serendipitous intersections often reveal poetic skills measured by the capacity to manipulate meter, rhyme effectively but not facilely, to augment meaning, and to give doggerel a wide berth. In “Mississippi” Dylan writes, “All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime / Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme.” The parallel between reason and rhyme is striking, as if the speaker (or Dylan) credits rhyme with the same authority as reason. Possibly, Dylan is remembering Shakespeare’s As You Like It with these lines:
ORLANDO Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe
I love.
ROSALIND, ⌜as Ganymede⌝ Me believe it? You may as
soon make her that you love believe it, which I
warrant she is apter to do than to confess she does.
That is one of the points in the which women still
give the lie to their consciences. But, in good sooth,
are you he that hangs the verses on the trees
wherein Rosalind is so admired?
ORLANDO I swear to thee, youth, by the white hand of
Rosalind, I am that he, that unfortunate he.
ROSALIND, ⌜as Ganymede⌝ But are you so much in love
as your rhymes speak?
ORLANDO Neither rhyme nor reason can express how
much.[11]
Orlando speaks his line about “rhyme nor reason” to Rosalind disguised as Ganymede – in other words, to an alias. This sort of absent identity, a name that screens a name, might have piqued Dylan’s interest if in fact his line in “Mississippi” recalls As You Like It. And the hidden “Rosalind” could be an important namesake in the song.
It remains counterintuitive to compare reason and rhyme metaphysically, unless we were to give rhyme the power of portent, of casting charms (“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”[12]). Typically, reason, deductive thinking, and contemplation all represent a different kind or degree of rationality than rhyme, whose attributes have traditionally been aural/musical pleasure and memory aid. Yet the inference of the line in “Mississippi” is that there might be a flaw in that conventionally hierarchical division.
This possibility resonates in one of Dylan’s meditations on naming later in the song, with another Shakespearean link.
Well, the devil’s in the alley, mule’s in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all
I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed
Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
Hidden in these extraordinary lines is a meditation on naming, joined to a chapeau to a literary precursor. Let’s begin by thinking back and linking this alley, with the devil in it, to another alley containing the most famous poet of all time:
Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well
(“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”)
The devil has replaced Shakespeare in the alley, and the unwelcome and unnamed French girl becomes, in the later song, Rosie, whose name is repeated twice in two lines: “I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said / I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed.” The name Rosie at first seems arbitrary, as if any trochaic name would do, especially since Rosie doesn’t play a further narrative role in the song. The speaker might have been “thinkin’ about the things Annie said,” or “dreaming about sleeping in Sara’s bed.” But I don’t think Rosie is arbitrary. On the contrary, I think Dylan is making a subtle bid to engage Shakespeare’s best-known onomastic remark, uttered by Juliet from her balcony: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet 2.2.46-47). If we reach back to Shakespeare in the alley, “Rosie” becomes a kind of onomastic inevitability, standing for all women’s names and none, challenging the value of naming in the very act of repurposing Shakespeare’s rose.
And Rosie could also be a a nickname for Rosalind – either the invisible Rosalind from the “Neither reason nor rhyme” passage in As You Like It or the (also invisible) Rosaline who rejects Romeo at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet. The loss of Rosaline causes Romeo to say, pertinently to a discussion of names, “Tut, I have lost myself. I am not here. / This is not Romeo.” But I think we can go even further. The balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, or at least Juliet’s speech, is predominantly about identity. She explains the family situation to Romeo and effectively un-names him:
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face. O, be some other name
Belonging to a man.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And, for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Explaining that his name is her enemy, Juliet offers all of herself to a nameless “Romeo.” But what is a nameless Romeo, a figure who has “doffed” his name, other than a figure Dylan imagines “Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees / Feeling like a stranger nobody sees”? The song corkscrews back from the devil to Shakespeare, from Rosie to that “other word” that would smell as sweet, from title to nameless lover, from identity to invisibility. The balcony scene continues into a kind of onomastic aporia: Romeo claims to be “new baptized” as someone who “never will be Romeo”; Juliet asks, reasonably, “What man art thou…bescreened at night?”; and Romeo responds “By a name / I know not how to tell thee who I am.”
Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, one-ups everyone in the exploration of naming, and all within a few lines. From “a rose by any other word” to Romeo’s namelessness, his “bescreened” identity, is effectively a clinic in onomastics. It is possible that Dylan senses this Shakespearean tour de force and uses the name Rosie before reducing his speaker to “a stranger nobody sees.” Perhaps, if this is a tribute to the balcony scene, he hopes to sweep his own early writing (“Stuck Inside of Mobile”) and the later “Mississippi” into an onomastic genealogy.
*
In Dylan’s songs, sometimes names really are denotative alone, meaning nothing more than they appear to mean. Other times the names seem haphazard, or unimportant cum names:
There’s a note left in the bottle
You can give it to Estelle
She’s the one you been wonderin’ about
But there’s really nothin’ much to tell
We both heard voices for awhile
The rest is history
Somebody’s got to cry some tears
I guess it must be up to me
Reason or rhyme? Is Estelle merely a metrical convenience, an iambic foot with an easy rhyme? Or is there more to her name? The note in the bottle could be a metaphor for the very idea of metaphor, a message “carried over” across the water from an unknown place that ends up with Estelle. But the enigma of the note seems to melt into the narrative itself. As in “Tangled Up in Blue,” the speakers seem to shift from outside – “She’s the one you been wonderin’ about” – to inside – “We both heard voices” and “Somebody’s got to cry some tears / I guess it must be up to me.” The second-person singular dissolves into the first-person plural (a combination of the “I’ narrator and Estelle?), which ends in the “up to me” refrain.
Yet, even while acting the narrative juggler, Dylan manages an onomastic coup, giving reason to believe that the name Estelle is more than just convenient prosody. It turns out that it isn’t prosody but translation that leads to the turning of the key. “Estelle” derives from “star” in Latin and Italian (stella).[13] The name is an anglicized or faux French version of “star,” which takes an alert listener back to the crucial second stanza of the song:
If I’d a’ thought about it
I never woulda done it
I guess I woulda let it slide
If I’d a’ paid attention
To what others were thinkin’
But I was just too stubborn
To ever be governed
By enforced insanity
Someone had to reach for the risin’ star
I guess it was up to me.
The “risin’ star” in stanza two is a proleptic reference to Estelle. It links the driven ambitious spirit of the song’s opening narrative to the “star” who, after a dizzying spiral of episodes in the intervening stanzas, gets the message in the bottle. We must work out for ourselves what it means that reaching for the rising star leads to an enigma in a bottle, and, ultimately, to the tragedy or sad event for which “Somebody’s got to cry some tears.” But that’s hermeneutics, not onomastics. The name “Estelle” in “Up to Me” does all a proper name can do in a song. It carries us into the stylized limbo of the narrative because when the “stubborn” speaker says, “The heart inside me woulda died,” the hearts inside us live the ballad myth.
I must go on, I can’t go on – to quote a phrase. Dylan’s proper names seem to multiply geometrically as I think through the albums, the songs, the decades: New York town, Kingsport Town, Santa Fe, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Santa Fe. These are real cities, and real topoi in the songs’ narratives, but should we hear them connotatively as well as denotatively? Surely we experience “the stylized limbo of the ballad world” in each of these proper names as Dylan deploys them in the lyrics. Add to those such naming as “(Positively) 4th Street,” a song in which the street itself never appears, rendering the title part of a ballad myth. Similarly, think of “Spanish Harlem Incident” which begins “Gypsy gal, the hands of Harlem / Cannot hold you to its heat”: again, the place is real enough, though in the early 60s Spanish Harlem, just south of Harlem on the east side of Manhattan, would have been a dangerous neighborhood and the “Gypsy gal” wouldn’t have been a Roma “gal,” but Dylan’s romantic Hispanic “wildcat” (probably straight out of West Side Story). The entire atmosphere of the song is connotative. The song transforms the denotative “Spanish Harlem” itself into a toponym from a ballad world.
Inevitably, if we think about the Gypsy gal we recall that other, more important figure from “Went to See the Gypsy.” Critical opinion seems to have settled on identifying the unnamed gypsy as Elvis Presley. There is no solid evidence for this in the song, except maybe the lines “He did it in Las Vegas / And he can do it here.” But it’s irresistible to speculate on a meeting in the “big hotel” of the two rock idols face to face – though in utterly unspectacular circumstances:
His room was dark and crowded
Lights were low and dim
“How are you?” he said to me
I said it back to him
No fireworks of recognition. But, while we might not be treated to an exciting meeting between the “Gypsy” and the enigmatic “I,” the song ends with a tease:
the gypsy was gone
And that pretty dancing girl
She could not be found
So I watched the sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town
Guess what town he’s talking about. The absence of the name fills out the ballad myth: the “Minnesota town” doesn’t provide a definite qualification so much as a plausible set of biographical or autobiographical identities. Again, it’s all about the use and manipulation of proper names: Las Vegas, the Gypsy, Minnesota.
It’s impossible to be exhaustive, but I hope these few examples will spark thinking about the sheer onomastic range in the songs, and moreover of Dylan’s poetic aims in using names as often and as pointedly as he does. But don’t let the question of whether his onomastic choices are meant as “reason or rhyme” keep you up all night leaning on the windowsill. Reason and rhyme, or rationality and mystical charm, are overlapping phenomena in the stylized limbo of the ballad world. The denotative meaning of proper names quickly develops a connotative meaning, deepening and expanding the narrative of every song until it’s impossible to separate the name itself from the limbo of the myth. We live inside the myth of 4th Street to “know [positively] what a drag it is to see you,” just as we believe rationally as believers inside the myth that “In Paterson that’s just the way things go.” But are 4th Street and Paterson toponyms, metaphors, or metonyms: places, analogies for those kinds of places, or contiguities substituting for the real name?
Raphael Falco
[1] David Atkinson, “Toponymy of the Child Ballads: Problems of Representation in Written and Oral Texts,” Folklore 120 (December 2009): 254. Atkinson cites W.F.H. Nicolaisen, “‘As I cam’ in by Ythanside’: On the Function of Place Names in the Greig–Duncan Folk Song Collection.” In Emily Lyle: The Persistent Scholar, ed. Frances J. Fischer and Sigrid Rieuwerts BASIS, vol. 5 ( Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007), 231-40, 231.
[2] Michel Grimaud, “Whither Literary Onomastics? “Prufrock” Revisited,” Names 41.1 (March 1993): 5-6.
[3] On More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 14, the song omits this passage: instead Dylan sings “So he drifted down to LA / Where he reckoned to try his luck / Workin’ for a while in an airplane plant / Loading cargo onto a truck.” I think the “employed-Delacroix” rhyme is stronger than the “luck-truck” rhyme, although the use of “LA” as a kind of spondee is interesting.
[4] Although the quoted lines are the most familiar, appearing on the original album and also on More Blood, More Tracks, the Official Dylan website has these opening lines: “If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier / It’s the city ’cross the water, not too far from here.” Less personal, though more metaphorically suggestive.
[5] “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” stanza IV, line 5.
[6] Atkinson, 254, again citing Nicolaisen.
[7] Atkinson, 255, who cites W.F.H. Nicolaisen, “‘There Was a Lord in Ambertown’: Fictitious Place Names in the Ballad Landscape.” In Narrative Folksong: New Directions, Essays in Appreciation of W. Edson Richmond, ed. Carol L. Edwards and Kathleen E. B. Manley (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1985), 71-81..
[8] Atkinson, 254.
[9] Allen Walker Read, “The Onomastic World of the American Folksong,” in Names/ Northeast, 1984, 1.
[10] W.F.H. Nicolaisen, “The genealogy of ‘Lord Randal’; Onomastic Evidence and Dissemination,” Lore and Language 12 (1994): 159-72. He is quoting Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads Vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 191.
[11] As You Like It, 3.2. 392-406.
[12] Macbeth, 4.1, the three witches together.
[13] Vide, Philip Sidney’s famous sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella [Star-lover and Star]. I’m not suggesting Dylan knew Sidney’s work – although critics have credited him with having read far obscurer works – I think the song supports his association of stella with Estelle.
