Steven Rings. What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan. University of Chicago Press, 2025. 360 pp.
Review by Jonathan Hodgers, Trinity College Dublin.
Here we have an important book about Bob Dylan: one that puts analysis of the music first. Steven Rings has antecedents in terms of monographs (which he acknowledges in his literature review), among them Starr, Hampton (at least partially), and Mellers (reluctantly),[1] but what he achieves here feels like an ambitious step forward in what remains a surprisingly spartan terrain of sustained musicological studies of Dylan. What Did You Hear? is not only an intervention in Dylan studies but also a persuasive demonstration of how his music can reward close, technically informed listening without sacrificing readability or critical range.
The book is split into three main sections: Dylan’s voice, his musical instruments, and a multi-chapter case study of Dylan’s many incarnations of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” This tripartite structure works well, allowing Rings to move from foundational questions of vocal style, through instrumental practice, toward a sustained analysis of a single song that functions as a kind of culmination of the preceding chapters.
Rings takes pains to ensure that his musical analysis is accessible, supporting it with thoughtfully designed musical notation. It is often possible to grasp the analytical point visually, even before engaging with the technical language. The provision of audio-visual examples via a dedicated website is extremely useful, especially for readers who may not read notation fluently. The pre-introductory section, “How to (Not Just) Read This Book,” which includes clear musical definitions, is helpful, as are the frequent micro-summaries (for example, at the end of chapter 4 when Rings sums up Dylan’s “speechward delivery” (114)), which help situate the reader.
Rings’s readings of songs are often tour de force demonstrations of his method. His discussion of Dylan’s version of Dave Van Ronk’s “House of the Rising Sun” is particularly insightful. Rings makes it clear that, despite the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Dylan’s use of the arrangement, Dylan does not simply steal it but transforms Van Ronk’s version through a more longitudinal shaping of the song’s arc (76). His analysis of how Dylan narrativizes the song’s lyrics—marrying semantics to vocal delivery—is both persuasive and enriching, illuminating the techniques that make the performance so effective. Crucially, these readings never feel forced, further testifying to how well Dylan’s work sustains, and even thrives under, close musicological scrutiny.
It is also intriguing to see Rings revisit the canonical moments of Dylan studies—the Manchester Free Trade Hall concert and Newport ’65, among others—through a rigorous application of music theory. Looked at anew, these fabled nights can be heard with fresh ears, as Rings brings into focus Dylan’s evolving vocal styles and performance strategies through a novel spectrum that tries to codify Dylan’s approaches across time. His willingness to argue, somewhat bravely, that Dylan’s folky strumming is musically retrograde at Newport (p. 145) exemplifies the book’s commitment to clear-eyed analysis over received wisdom. And as much as we get a “greatest hits” set featuring Newport ’65, etc., Rings does not neglect deep cuts; unofficially released material gets similar treatment, driving home the pervasiveness of Dylan’s musical invention, and how any given night’s set might yield yet more fascinating insights if only given the appropriate musicological attention (see especially his close reading of the Nara “Hard Rain” (297–300), a major Dylan performance languishing on two singles releases in 1994–95).[2]
Although Rings rightly keeps Dylan himself as the primary locus of analysis, he also writes sensitively about the role of collaborators. His discussion of Mike Bloomfield (throughout chapter six) and Donnie Herron (221–23), for instance, shows how a sideman can help integrate Dylan’s playing into a broader band dynamic, smoothing over excesses or jarring harmonic clashes. Such passages underscore the importance of musicians who act as moderators of Dylan’s more impulsive or idiosyncratic instincts (more on this later).
Equally important is Rings’s reluctance to force interpretation. He gets considerable mileage out of Dylan’s piano playing on “Time Passes Slowly,” (210–15) stressing that there is nothing necessarily intentional at work, only an aptness that rewards analysis. His gentle speculation—that Dylan may have preferred the chosen take precisely because the faltering technique produces a more productive synergy between words and music—is persuasive without being overstated.
The book, however, is not just a musicological treatise; Rings is also deeply and impressively informed about Dylan in general. He paints to the corners as it were. He has a strong grasp of chronology and context, and the analysis is consistently grounded in a wide-ranging knowledge of Dylan’s recording history, performance practice, and critical reception. And although the book delivers on its promise to be about sound, it is full of illuminating references to poetry and lyrics, always framed in relation to musical and sonic questions. Rings’s discussion of the Highway 61 Revisited sleeve notes (52–53) is exemplary in this regard. He is also careful to interrogate and dismantle myths that accrue around the writing of certain songs. His treatment of “Hard Rain,” for instance, grounds speculation in the best available evidence, so that one never senses he is reaching or straining. His discussion of the likelihood that “Hard Rain” was written to be sung (3–4), is a model of cautious, evidence-based inference.
Rings also offers thoughtful commentary on cultural and social issues. He thinks deeply about Dylan’s relationship to, and indebtedness toward, Black culture, and keenly stresses that Dylan’s Jewishness should be factored into discussions of appropriation. To his credit, he does not get bogged down in appropriation debates (see page 22), instead handling racial and class issues with notable deftness. Rings also revisits the vexed concept of authenticity in this light (36). Related issues of genre and its racialized dimensions are handled with similar care (43–44). His discussion of the racial politics of the electric guitar—the Black coding of the instrument—vis-à-vis Newport ’65 is especially insightful (165–67). It is to Rings’s credit that he can balance acknowledgement and recognition of the sometimes-fraught racial politics that Dylan’s music represents, all the while crediting, where merited, Dylan’s creativity, sincerity, and prudence in navigating racial dynamics. A good example of Rings’s handling of this cluster of topics is his discussion of the gospel-era “Hard Rains” (292–94). He notes what Dylan gains from the Black musicians’ presence—how their recruitment confers legitimacy on his excursion into gospel music. He also notes Dylan’s affording space for the Black musicians at the beginning of the concerts and during solos, and the importance of their voices’ interaction in the song’s refrain. These carefully poised observations are a model of conscientious scholarship.
Such a diplomatic approach is a hallmark of the book. Rings sidesteps overt qualitative judgment, instead adopting a patient and sympathetic stance toward some of Dylan’s more eccentric performance choices, and preferring careful description of sonic features over evaluative pronouncement. On page 125, for example, Rings deftly discusses what audiences might be getting from Dylan’s sometimes perverse melodic detours in live performance, and how these variations affect the words. He acknowledges that these choices work for at least a portion of the audience, musing that they may create the feeling of witnessing something bespoke—an experience that reinforces the audience’s in-the-moment proximity to Dylan. This restraint serves the book well, given how contentious such judgments can be, and is evident again in his admirably measured discussion of latter-day “Hard Rains” on pages 304–05. One will not come away thinking that Rings did not give late-period performances a considered appraisal.
Another of Rings’s strengths lies in isolating moments of form-content alignment: those synergies in which Dylan’s vocals, music, and lyrics reinforce or mutually animate one another. He notes, for example, that Dylan’s melodic invention in “Jokerman” is perfect for a song about the nightingale’s tune (121). There are many such instances. One can be found in “The Girl from the North Country” discussion (157–58):
Chord x yearns for chord z, over and over, just as the song’s protagonist continually sends his thoughts northward, in worry and muted regret. It is telling that x yearns for z via an intermediary—chord y—just as the protagonist channels his nostalgia through his second-person interlocutor (the ‘you’ of the lyric).
While form-content alignment is a venerable criterion of musical quality, Rings’s analyses attest to the sophistication of Dylan’s vocals, showing how Dylan listens to his own language and responds intuitively, animating the words through musical choice or, at times, allowing the words to animate the music.
Although this evaluative underpinning has been addressed before—by Michael Gray and Christopher Ricks, among others—the musical terminology and sustained focus here reinforce and enrich those earlier insights, lending them greater precision and, arguably, opening them up to a new audience of musicologists. Rings does not merely describe musical features, illuminating though that would be; he goes on to explain their effects within the context of the song. We not only hear new things, but come to understand why so many ostensibly “simple” songs (a term Rings rightly treats with suspicion) work as they do, and how subtle choices embody deep artistry. An analysis of “The Times They Are a-Changin’” offers a fine example, where Rings expounds on the effects of the pauses in the chorus:
Dylan inserts one bar of extra strumming after line 1 but expands this to two after line 3. The result is an oddly unpredictable kind of momentum, a sense that the lyric is tumbling falteringly—but inevitably—forward. The effect is apt, given the song’s thematics of imminence (‘soon,’ ‘rapidly’) and delay, its push-pull temporality: “The slow one now will later be fast.” (33).
Rings is particularly good at interrogating clichés. He carefully considers Dylan’s supposed nasal singing, arguing—on “Hard Rain,” at least—that the description is insufficient (31–32), despite how routinely commentators invoke it. Throughout, Rings dispels the idea that Dylan is a “bad” singer, or that he simply does not care about singing. He shows instead that Dylan deliberately employs chant- and speech-like delivery as part of a broader arsenal of vocal effects, and that discernible patterns emerge over time. Many fans will have intuited his singing’s quality already and do not need further convincing, but it is quite another thing to see it articulated so forcefully, with precise terminology, musical examples, and clear illustrations.
Related observations frequently produce genuine moments of recognition. The linkage Rings draws between Dylan’s harmonica playing and the accordion is especially adroit (186). He also connects insights across chapters, as when he links Dylan’s fixation on a riff in both voice and harmonica (188), showing how insistent repetition registers with an audience:
Here Dylan fixates on a four-note figure, which he plays no fewer than nineteen times, plus a few interspersed variants. Starting at about the eighth iteration, audience members cheer. This is another moment [sic] obstinate repetition, reminiscent of the repeated vocal ostinati discussed in chapter 5. In his harp playing, such ostinati almost always get a reaction from the audience, once they realize what is happening—that Dylan is burrowing into one figure, mining it for all it’s worth.
He returns again to a similar idea (“the iterative core”) on pages 243–45. Such connectivity deepens our understanding of how Dylan thinks musically across voice, harmonica, and form.
For me, one of the more striking moments in the book occurs when Rings recounts teaching Dylan’s and Van Ronk’s versions of “House of the Rising Sun” to students, and encountering discomfort grounded in questions of gendered and racial subject position (81). Some students, as Rings reports, struggled to engage fully with Dylan’s performance on the grounds that his subject position does not align with that of the song’s protagonist, who is understood as a wronged or victimized figure. One student likened Dylan and Van Ronk disputing the song to two white men pulling at the suffering lyric persona, while others expressed a preference for Joan Baez’s version, which they heard as marked by dignity and restraint rather than inward shame.
I found the episode disheartening, but also revealing. Taken at face value, such responses suggest an evaluative framework in which empathetic or affectively convincing performance is judged primarily through the lens of embodied identity. This, in turn, raises the question of whether it is ethically suspect for performers to inhabit perspectives other than their own when the in-song persona is understood as a “protected” identity, or otherwise construed as a victim—whether within the narrative context of the song itself, or by virtue of how that role is retrospectively interpreted in contemporary discourse. If followed to its logical conclusion, this position would cast doubt on the entire folk tradition, which has long depended on singers imaginatively occupying other lives and voices both past and present, and would raise particularly knotty problems for women singers navigating historically male-coded narratives. The students’ objections imply an intersectional power dynamic: the problem appears to lie not in the act of vocal impersonation per se, but in men singing from the perspective of a power-deprived woman, rather than the reverse. Again, we are having to reverse-engineer some tacit assumptions: that lyrical personas are victims of inappropriate inhabitants; that these concerns color evaluative judgment; and that the listener should be vigilant as to the positionality of who is singing to see how worthy they are of the role. One upshot appears to be that more proximate interpreters apparently enjoy greater performative latitude: Van Ronk’s and Dylan’s creativity merits less praise than Baez’s version, which better empowers the persona.
At the same time, Rings’s anecdote offers a valuable snapshot of how some members of Gen Z receive and assess Dylan’s work, and perhaps older popular music more broadly, in tertiary education. It underscores a potential obstacle to contemporary engagement with Dylan: not musical difficulty or historical distance, but a shift in the criteria by which sincerity, legitimacy, and emotional truth are evaluated. To Rings’s credit, he does not leave these objections unanswered. Rather, he responds to his students’ concerns, articulating how Dylan’s performance can still be understood as disclosing a kind of musical or expressive truth without collapsing questions of empathy into those of identity:
You have to believe, that is, in a fiction. Joan Baez is not a “rake and a ramblin’ boy.” Bob Dylan is not a woman ruined by sexual exploitation and violence. But in the moment of aesthetic encounter, the coordinates and conditions of belief shift. We regularly speak of a “suspension of disbelief” when discussing theater, opera, or film. Is song that different? … We are very used to suspending disbelief when hearing a singer deliver a story they never could have lived. … We are never really in doubt that we are hearing Bob Dylan or Joan Baez sing, not the actual characters they impersonate. But their singing may carry a ring of truth. Or—to borrow another felicitous musical metaphor—their sounds may strike a chord in us. What resonates is a plausible emotional truth. (82–83)
The episode ultimately enriches the book, not only by foregrounding a live pedagogical challenge, but by modeling how such challenges might be addressed with patience, clarity, and critical generosity.
Rings draws on a rich and wide-ranging body of secondary literature. He lifts terminologies, concepts, and analytical frames from a host of fields and puts them to edifying use. He convincingly mobilizes thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu (20), with sociological theory brought into dialogue with Dylan’s music and art. Rings draws on musical philosophy as well, making good use of Brian Kane (42), including a vernacular adaptation of Kane’s model for thinking about the voice. Roland Barthes appears (154), as does Adriana Cavarero (54), Harold Bloom (60), and more expected poststructuralist touchstones (53). Elsewhere, there are passing references to Schenkerian theory and Bach (343), signaling both depth and catholicity of musical knowledge without allowing such frameworks to divert the analysis. Footnotes are a treasure trove: Rings uses them for scholarly housekeeping but also as spaces for illuminating asides, such as his discussion of the preservation of Dylan’s recorded legacy in lossless formats (327n20).
More generally, despite the breadth of his reading, Rings is modest about the limits of his expertise. He is careful not to overclaim familiarity with figures such as Deleuze (16), even while making deft and judicious use of Deleuzian ideas where helpful. Rings is equally careful in how he handles analogy and influence. His linkage of Dylan to Schoenberg (98–99), for example, is framed explicitly as an illuminating analogy rather than as a claim of direct lineage or inheritance:
For, some of [Dylan’s] vocal delivery bears more than a passing resemblance to [Schoenberg’s] Sprechstimme, which literally means “speech song.” … In [“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” and “Million Dollar Bash”], Dylan’s voice swoops up … only to fall away again just as quickly—a parabolic lunge. These lunges are reminiscent of … Sprechstimme both in their contour and in their loose tethering to the music’s underlying pitch structure. [Yet we] shouldn’t push the comparison to Sprechstimme too hard. Delightful as it is to hear Dylan himself make the comparison in [Theme Time Radio Hour], there is no obvious lineage from Schoenberg to him, nor should we rush to create one, in a search for high-cultural prestige.
This intellectual restraint—knowing when and how much to draw from theory—adds considerably to the book’s credibility and critical poise.
This ability to use theory in an accessible manner speaks to another strength of the book: Rings has a literary sensibility. Despite dealing with dense material, the prose is remarkably readable and full of evocative turns of phrase. He writes with a strong sense of place, helping us see and feel the environments in which Dylan worked. Take, for example, his scene-setting at the start of the book:
We begin with a sound. It is not a musical sound per se, but it is rhythmic: the tapping of typewriter hammers against paper. It is a late-summer evening in 1962, and the tap–tap–tap emerges from a room above the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village. Bob Dylan is at the machine, hunting and pecking. (1-2)
And on the following page:
Let’s tune our ears, then, back to that room above the Gaslight. What do we hear? A clacking typewriter and a conversation. But if we listen closer, might we also hear a faint music? To do so, we have to listen past the “music” of the typewriter, and indeed past all of the other sounds vibrating in the room’s stuffy, late-summer air.
Rings also deploys figurative language—
“topping out in a knot of tension” (79)
“pitches are not aspirated but bored into” (79)
“Dylan offers two quick lines […] that have the effect of a pitcher winding up” (84)
“It is matter of fact, moving along with the meter like a train passenger commenting on the scenes passing by through the window” (96)
“It accepts the generic resetting from folk to country like a skin graft.” (272)
—that renders musical processes vivid and tactile. At times he is also funny, as in his detailed explanation of the well-behaved melodic foundations of “Make You Feel My Love,” (127) capped with the dry observation that “No wonder many Dylan fans don’t like the song.” He uses anecdotes judiciously, inviting the reader to pause over their implications, as with the Paxton anecdote that opens the book (p. 1):
After commenting on the text’s “wild imagery,” Paxton asks, “Are you gonna, you know, put music to it?”
He said, “Well, you think I should?” And I said “Yeah. I mean, ‘cause otherwise it’s just something to go in some literary quarterly or something, but this way, you know, you’ll have a song out of it.” So the next night . . . he got up [at the Gaslight] and he sang this new song called “It’s a Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”
Rings takes this moment as a productive jumping off point for the book:
The asymmetry between words and music in Paxton’s anecdote thus passes almost without notice. But we will begin by pausing over it, by making audible that which the anecdote mutes. For this is a book about Dylan’s sounds. We cannot fully understand the origin of “Hard Rain,” or indeed much else about Dylan, without taking the full measure of those sounds.
The ease by which attention to words supersedes discussion of sound speaks to the perennial difficulties in studying Dylan and popular music more generally. With the former, authoritative scores for full-band material do not exist; while some acoustic material is well-served by official publications, piano-vocal-guitar reductions are not always reliable. Engaging precisely with what Dylan and his musicians are playing often requires highly developed aural skills, sometimes supplemented by emerging technologies such as pitch-isolation tools and MIDI extraction. Rings himself has used spectrographic analysis before for another (excellent) publication analyzing “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”[3] These technologies remain imperfect but are improving, and they might boost access for those less versed in musicological analyses. Rings’s work offers ideal standards to strive for in this context.
That Rings is able to combine lyrical analysis with staff notation, musical excerpts, and visual aids at all (even from such marginalized material as Renaldo and Clara) is a significant achievement. It should serve as a model not only for Dylan studies but for audiovisual scholarship more broadly.
What Did You Hear? is a compelling, generous, and methodologically rigorous book. It demonstrates, again and again, that Dylan’s work not only survives close musical scrutiny but actively rewards it. By placing sound at the center of analysis—without neglecting lyrics, history, or culture—Rings offers an exciting model for ways Dylan scholarship might continue to expand. It is fascinating, in this light, to hear Rings observe in chapter nine that “Hard Rain” is “a fusion of influences drawn from diverse literary and musical traditions, spanning centuries and continents, Old World and New, high and low” (240). The formulation serves not only as a succinct characterization of Dylan’s song, but also, inadvertently, as an apt summation of Rings’s own achievement in crafting this superlative book. Not only does it make Dylan’s work more attractive to musicologists, but it also speaks across disciplinary boundaries, inviting scholars and listeners alike to hear familiar material anew. What Did You Hear? functions as a major contribution to Dylan scholarship and a persuasive proof of concept: that careful, technically informed listening can deepen, rather than diminish, the richness of his music.
Works Cited
Björner, Olof. ‘Still On The Road: 1994 Spring Sessions’. About Bob – Olof’s Files.
Accessed 9 January 2026. https://bobserve.com/olof/DSN14790%20-%201994%20Spring%20Sessions.htm.
Hampton, Timothy. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work. Zone Books, 2020.
Harvey, Todd. The Formative Dylan: Transmission and Stylistic Influences, 1961-1963.
American Folk Music and Musicians Series 7. Scarecrow Press, 2001.
Mellers, Wilfrid. A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Rings, Steven. ‘A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),”
1964–2009’. Music Theory Online, vol. 19, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1–39.
Starr, Larry. Listening to Bob Dylan. Music in American Life. University of Illinois Press, 2021.
[1] Larry Starr, Listening to Bob Dylan, Music in American Life (University of Illinois Press, 2021); Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (Zone Books, 2020); Wilfrid Mellers, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (Oxford University Press, 1985); to these, one might add Todd Harvey, The Formative Dylan: Transmission and Stylistic Influences, 1961-1963, American Folk Music and Musicians Series 7 (Scarecrow Press, 2001), which is cited elsewhere by Rings.
[2] Olof Björner, ‘Still On The Road: 1994 Spring Sessions’, About Bob – Olof’s Files, accessed 9 January 2026, https://bobserve.com/olof/DSN14790%20-%201994%20Spring%20Sessions.htm.
[3] Steven Rings, ‘A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” 1964–2009’, Music Theory Online, vol 19, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1–39.
