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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Dylan’s Indeterminate Enjambments”

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“Dylan’s Indeterminate Enjambments.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Owen Boynton

Enjambment occurs in a poem when the syntax of a phrase is interrupted by the ending of a line. In some cases, we feel certain, as we round the corner of the line, that something else is needed; the syntax leaves us hanging. In other cases, we are surprised to find that the syntax of a line was not complete, so that, for instance, a verb finds an unexpected object. Bob Dylan makes much of the possibilities for surprise inherent in enjambment in the lines of his songs. It’s of course no simple matter to say what counts as a line in a song, since in performance, a line can be suggested by the vocal delivery as much as by the language, but Dylan’s insistence on rhyme as a feature of his song structures permits him to both suspend vowels and insert pauses with great variety from performance to performance against the awareness that the lines are marked, for the most part, by rhymes.

Dylan’s enjambments are most interesting to me when they generate something that is not quite fulfillment of an expectation that more is needed and also not quite the shock of surprise that more is being said. Instead, Dylan’s enjambments often hover between the two: we know, in some way, that something more should, syntactically, be offered, but the context and occasion of the phrasing also make it quite easy to feel that enough has been said, and that a phrase contained within a line makes self-sufficient sense even if syntactically insufficient. The colloquial register of the songs afford him opportunities to do this. One of the limits Dylan must overcome as a songwriter, and that some of his peers fail to recognize, is that rock songs, folk songs, and blues songs cannot accommodate a formal rhetoric and register without straining English; Latinate language, associated with both, does not fit nicely into the lyrical structure of songs. That is also probably why Dylan has recourse to Biblical English, which offers a source of phrasing that can take on great weight without the high style. But colloquial English, and the commitment to its conventions, allows Dylan other strengths. Christopher Ricks has written on present tense verbs and ephemerality in American English, demonstrating how much Dylan can make of these. Enjambments that are indeterminate – that depend on lines that both feel self-sufficient as units of sense and also prompt us to recognize their insufficiency syntactically – is another consequence of his commitment.

When Dylan wants conspicuous enjambments, the sort of lines that leave us hanging and feel ourselves to be hanging on the end, he gets them. From “Tombstone Blues”:

The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city fathers, they’re trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse

From “Fourth Time Around”:

I waited in the hallway, she went to get it, and I tried to make sense,
Out of that picture of you in your wheelchair that leaned up against
Her Jamaican rum
And when she did come

From “Red River Shore”:

Well, I sat by her side and for a while I tried
To make that girl my wife

We can easily see – and we are asked to hear, in the performances – how these enjambments are expressing something essential to the songs. In “Tombstone Blues,” the enjambment of “endorse” is an overflow of lyrics in the midst of a triplet, part of the abundance of verses that are set against the scarcity of a refrain that shows us mama without shoes. “Fourth Time Around” is about dependency and self-sufficiency, perhaps a response to, or flaunting theft from, the Beatles, and also about not the dependency that grows with intimacy, which Dylan wants none of; and so the lines are jarringly dependent, one upon the next, neither conceivably standing alone, even one verse leaning for support against the next. In “Red River Shore,” the interruption of the line-break after “tried” is the futility of the effort, which will soon be met in her words, when she tells the singer to go home and lead a quiet life.

In “I Want You,” we find these fairly clear enjambments, the enjambments that announce themselves at the end of a line by making us certain that more needs to be said, but we also find what I’ve called “indeterminate enjambments”:

The silver saxophones say I
Should refuse you

The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it’s not that way, I wasn’t born
To lose you

And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinking from my broken cup
And ask me to open up
The gate for you

She knows that I’m not afraid
To look at her

No I wasn’t very cute
To him, was I?

Ah, because time was on his side
    And because I
Want you, I want you

Only three are clear enjambments: “And because I / Want you”; “The silver saxophones say I / should refuse you”; and “I wasn’t born / To lose you.” Christopher Ricks has drawn attention to the nonchalance of the refrain: how naturally, breezily Dylan sings “I want you,” afloat over the swirling musical lines. But against the lightness of performance, the enjambments tug ever so slightly, and they tug each time on the “I,” so that we come to feel that the entire song turns not just upon the first-person but the uneasiness, awkwardness, of the first-person; it’s both very simple for Dylan to sing, “I want you,” but there is a self-conscious unease whenever the “I” triggers an enjambment; it’s not just dependency being expressed, as if “I” need to be continued and completed in my relationship with you (though there is that). It’s something else also: an uncertainty of how he stands in relation to her and in relation to his own wanting her.

I said there are only three clear cases of enjambment. The others are especially interesting because of how they contribute to the song: “I wasn’t very cute / To him, was I?” and “I wait for her to interrupt / Me drinking from my broken cup” and “And ask me to open up / The gate for you” and “She knows that I’m not afraid / To look at her.” In each of these cases, we might hear the first line as not being enjambed at all. And these are the sorts of cases that I’m going to pay attention to for the rest of my talk: the times when Dylan offers lines that might be or might not be enjambed: lines of indeterminate enjambment.

How does this work? When we hear “I wasn’t very cute,” we wonder “in whose eyes.” But at the same time, if someone says, “I wasn’t very cute,” it implies “to anyone” and so seems a moment of stark vulnerability – it’s a moment of potential embarrassment, which Dylan then resolves in “To him,” because that means he might still be cute “to her.” He asks her “was I,” since that is the sort of endearing question that demonstrates he does think he’s still cute to her.

When we hear “I wait for them to interrupt,” nothing more needs to be said, and the “me” does not feel like a necessary resolution: but “me drinking from my broken cup” is unexpected, since even if we knew they’d be interrupting him, we didn’t know the action they’d be interrupting. Dylan is playing a game here: he anticipates an interruption, but we don’t see it except in hindsight when we recognize where the rhyme and line-break fell in relation to the phrasing. And there’s a further game: the rhyme of “interrupt” finds completion in “cup,” so even as the phrasing is broken, the rhyme mends. On a very small scale, this emblematizes something much larger happening in this song, which is a tug-of-war between independence and incompletion, between being broken and whole, vulnerable and impervious to harm: it is a song that expresses both at once, and this indeterminacy of the situation is captured by the indeterminacy of enjambment.

This becomes especially clear in the next instance: “Ask me to open up” might easily stand on its own: open up, talk about yourself. But instead, it’s something physical – a gate – that he will open up. Again, the prospect of vulnerability, exposure, and embarrassment is admitted and let to stand and then foreclosed. It’s not surprising that Ricks likes the song so much – he wrote the best book on embarrassment and literature around. And this is a song that is about opening oneself up to the embarrassment of the direct statement, “I want you,” but that also tangles itself – burdens oneself, to go to the French root “embarrassed” – in the self-exposure that such a statement entails, no matter how nonchalant it tries to be.

Very briefly, it’s worth pointing out that we can hear it also in the last of my examples: “She knows that I’m not afraid | To look at her.” “Not afraid” might stand alone: not afraid at all, of anything. But then it dwindles into a posture of crouching anxiety: not afraid to look, but maybe afraid to do much else.

Dylan’s indeterminate enjambments repeatedly bring together two perspectives – making the point that there is more that needs to be said from one perspective, but from another perspective not more that needs to be said. It’s a deep ambiguity, suspending two contradictory judgments: more is needed; no more is needed. William Empson: “Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.”

The same thing happens in “Sooner or Later (One of us Must Know)” – the title gets at a related tension: what can be said aloud and what, being set in parentheses, cannot be. The full force of the effect is felt in the refrain of the song:

But sooner or later one of us must know
That you’re just doing what you’re supposed to do.
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you.

“Know” does not find a rhyme, but it finds its exact double – though I think the sense of the two words is interestingly distant, since it might be said that the first “know” refers to what she knows (she knows she’s doing what she’s supposed to do) and the second “know” to what he knows (that he tried). What’s fascinating here is the mix of perspectives: One of us must know, but which? And saying “One of us must know” is to suggest that both cannot or need not know, and also to occupy a detached perspective, making him a third party to the breakup; since he is the one saying what each one must know, he must be the one to know. But there’s knowing and there’s knowing (small k, big K as Dylan sneered at the poor reporter from Time Magazine), and so it might be that Dylan is saying, he knows that one of them really, at a profound level, know that she’s doing what she’s supposed to do, and this someone is her; he knows it, but doesn’t really accept it. It’s an astonishing representation of the fissures in self-knowledge that accompany break-ups.

 

And the uncertainty of the enjambment has a crucial part to play. Dylan not only echoes “know” in “know,” but he affirms the line break in the vocal, pausing after the word. Syntactically, we want to find out what it is that one of them must know… know what? And the “that” after the line-break is crucial syntactically: it completes “know.” But the joke or dig of the line is that he shouldn’t have to say, that “Sooner or later one of must know” is sufficient as a unit of sense for the person who does know: for that person, the verb doesn’t need completion. She knows she’s supposed to leave; he needs to spell it out for himself. He knows he did try to get close to her; he needs to spell it out for her. It’s all a matter of perspective whether the line stands on its own or whether it needs to be continued, whether more needs to be said, and this in a song that is about not understanding, not knowing, not wanting or needing to go on explaining, and that, somehow, in performance of the song, explains just that.

The trick in “Sooner or Later” depends on the “mental state” type of verb that requires a “that”-clause to follow it: I believe that, know that, fear that, etc. In two other songs from the 1960s, Dylan seizes on these verbs for his most interesting indeterminate enjambments. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” we have a few:

You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out

“Laugh about” what? But also, “laugh about” as a verb phrase like “hang about” or “gad about”: something that one does, here and there, implying that she was moving about as she laughed. The possibility of this meaning isn’t erased by the following line, either: “hangin’ out” is static. They are just sitting around, hanging out to dry, and she is running around them, encircling them with her laughter. And from the same song:

You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
     And say do you want to make a deal?

Dylan drops the “that” from after “realize” – but if there had been a “that,” not only would the rhyme have been scuttled, but he would have been giving us more than we needed. “Now you realize” leaves the “that you do in fact compromise” or “that you do in fact need to compromise” implicit. From our perspective, the listener – and from Dylan’s perspective, the sneerer – the verb says all that is needed: it contains what is realized. What’s wonderful in this case is that the song never does say that she realizes that she does need to compromise; that is not how the verb “realize” is resolved. Instead, she realizes something else entirely: “he’s not selling any alibis.” And that in and of itself can’t be taken to mean “you realize that you will need to compromise.” Instead, the lines mean something like, “you realize he’s not selling any ways for you not to have to compromise, and you are pulled into the nothingness of his eyes and made to ask if he wants to make a deal.” Why do it this way? Because the instant of realization that she will have to compromise doesn’t happen consciously; she is just pulled into the need to compromise without realizing what is happening. That makes her more pathetic somehow; she gives up her word without even fully realizing it.

One more example from the same song:

You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discovered that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
      After he took from you everything he could steal

“Ain’t it hard when you discovered that” asks to be completed…discovered what? But then “discovered that” is already enough: somehow, the strangeness of the imagery that has come before seems like it might be a hard enough discovery: “you didn’t discover did you” that he was carrying a Siamese cat on his shoulder? Or else the “that” can be felt to take in something more elusive and free-floating: it was hard to discover “all of that” situation you were in. Dylan needs to leave this line suspended as potentially self-sufficient because he doesn’t want it to simply find completion in the line that comes immediately next. Instead, “discovered that” finds completion, separately, in both of the lines that follow. She discovers a) that he wasn’t really where it’s at and, relatedly, but not identically, b) that after he took everything he could steal. The word “that” refers to more than one thing: it is a discovery of a whole pit of snakes that she finds herself in, and when I re-listen to the song, I hear the breadth and indeterminateness of its reach.

There’s a question in this sort of paper of how many instances I should provide. More are to be had. From “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” we again find enjambments expressing what it is to know and not know, or else to know more or less than one knows.

To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
    That not much is really sacred.

“It’s easy to see WHAT without looking too far?” But of course, we already see and know: he has already told us, and it’s so easy to see that you don’t need to be told. And in the same song:

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

“Forget” what? Well, this one is more complicated because of the tangle of syntax that precedes, “There is no answer fit to keep it in your mind,” “There is no answer fit to insure you do not quit keeping it in your mind and not forgetting”: there’s no answer that might not escape, and there’s no answer that might not, in escaping, cause you to forget…to forget what? The answer, for one; but the question also, since it is the question itself that is lit and most important; but also the premise of the question, which is neither an answer nor a question, but a ground for asking and answering: “that it is not he or she or them or it / that you belong to.” By suspending “not forget” as an indeterminate enjambment in the midst of so much other indeterminately coordinate syntax, the question of what is asked, what is answered, what is known and not known, is intensified; the phrasing lives what it describes.

In the opening verse of “Masters of War” Dylan offers an enjambment at the “know” verb quite differently by dropping the “that” for suggestive effect. This is a song with line-endings that do not follow the rhyme scheme, alone, but that follow the folk-ballad meter with a silent beat after a set number of beats in each line. The rhymes are present, but they do not operate alone in determining line-endings, and it would be foolish to look only to them:

You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

“I just want you to know” needs a “that,” but Dylan refuses: “I just want you to know” exactly what? Speaking with the “just” of justice in mind: Everything, more than he can say in the line that follows, but also what he does say in the line that follows. And at the same time not “I just want you to know that I can see through your masks,” but “I just want you to know AND I can see through your masks”: both things are true, but paralleled, as the first two lines are parallel descriptions of the masters of war. “I want you to know” and “I can see through” both challenge them in their hiding places, but differently: I want you to know suggests that they are hiding from knowledge; I can see through your masks suggests that they are hiding from the sight of others, and from themselves. In either case, the walls and desks are flimsy barriers, and with “I just want you to know” set in parallel to “I can see through your masks” – rather than continuous with it – we are invited to hear Dylan flinging the barriers out of the way in two movements, rather than one. He doesn’t want too clear an enjambment because the line needs to strike on its own, against those hiding.

Blonde on Blonde is the album with the most sophisticated and incessant play of enjambment. While it’s a risk of criticism to find something good because it contains a lot of the sort of thing we are looking for, whether a word or technique, the lyrics on this album really do something fascinating with enjambments, indeterminate and otherwise. Along with “I Want You,” the song that does the most with what might be enjambed and what an enjambment might be is “Just Like a Woman,” the full lyrics of which are before you:

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
      Everybody knows
      That baby’s got new clothes
      But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
                    Have fallen from her curls
             She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
          She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
           And she aches just like a woman
                   But she breaks
                         Just like a little girl
Queen Mary, she’s my friend
Yes, I believe I’ll go see her again
     Nobody has to guess
     That baby can’t be blessed
      Till she finally sees that she’s like all the rest
               With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls
           She takes just like a woman, yes
           She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
           And she aches just like a woman
          But she breaks
                    Just like a little girl
                   It was raining from the first
                   And I was dying there of thirst
                       So I came in here
                   And your long-time curse
                   Hurts
                   But what’s worse
                         Is this pain in here
                         I can’t stay in here
                         Ain’t it clear
                                              That
I just can’t fit
Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit
     When we meet again
     Introduced as friends
    Please don’t let on that you knew me when
              I was hungry and it was your world
         Ah, you fake just like a woman,
         You make love just like a woman, yes, you do
        Then you ache just like a woman
       But you break
              Just like a little girl

You can see at one glance the shape of the verses and bridge as they appear in the Ricks-Nemrow edition, and you can see, glancing again at what I’ve set in bold, how many of the enjambments turn on verbs of knowing. It’s less a break-up song than a breaking song, cruelly some have thought, but also with the awareness of the other person’s vulnerability; it is a song that depends on having another person in one’s sights and understanding alike, and the whiff of cruelty is occasioned by Dylan’s detachment from the situation. But there is an enormous exception to the detachment and that’s the bridge, where Dylan breaks, and breaks his line-endings in enjambments. His own vulnerability is the point here, especially when he asks not only her, but whoever is listening to the song: “Ain’t it clear?” That line is enjambed: ain’t what clear? But it also is enough: isn’t it so clear that I don’t need to say anything more? The mise-en-page, the setting of lines, in the Ricks-Nemrow edition is excellent in what it does next, allotting “That” its own indentation and its own line. So much turns on “that” and this setting on the page helps us see that with it, with his delivery of it, with its place almost as a bridge of its own, a second bridge between bridge and verse, Dylan creates a second enjambment on the heels of the first, so that “ain’t it clear” is resolved in a moment of further irresolution: evidently, it’s not clear enough, and something else IS needed, but we are still denied that something. Dylan doesn’t want to say, and when he does say, “I just can’t fit,” it draws attention to how the phrasing itself, the awkwardly isolated “that” also doesn’t really fit. And here, in this third verse where he exposes himself to the greatest vulnerability, he also turns from the first-person third-person relationship (I and she had been the axis up to now), and instead, for the first time, as Christopher Ricks noticed, introduces the second person. He sets his sights on her most directly here, but he also sets himself up most clearly to be seen.

And he does so most boldly in the final verse’s enjambment: “Please don’t let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world” reverses the procedure of the indeterminate enjambments we have seen: the first line definitely calls out for something more, and the second line completes the syntax. But the second line doesn’t just complete the syntax; it exceeds it. “I was hungry and it was your world” stands out as a confession and acknowledgement greater than “you knew me when” can contain. The previous line is eclipsed. What matters is no longer that she knew him when he was hungry, but that she knew that he was hungry and it was her world; she knew him at his most helpless. The line doesn’t just eclipse what comes immediately before, but the entire request that it rounds out: he is asking her not to let on what he now not only admits but confesses and cries to the heavens. We can and should hear that he remains exposed and vulnerable; the self-reproach still stings; he is not over and done with the past. And he didn’t need to say it; the enjambment leads him to turn a corner but what he finds there is a version of his past self that surprises even him. When he comes back to “She breaks / Just like a little girl,” there remains a smug triumph, and a cruel dig, but he has already shown himself to be broken too.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Rumplezimmerman, Alchemy, and Dylan’s Bidirectional European Influences”

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“Rumplezimmerman, Alchemy, and Dylan’s Bidirectional European Influences.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Jon Lasser, Texas State University

 

“If it hadn’t been for Bob Dylan wanting to be John Lennon and John Lennon wanting to be Bob Dylan, it wouldn’t have been cranked up to the level of literature that makes it OK for rock & roll to be taken seriously” (Steve Earle, 2022)

The well-known folk tale of Rumplestiltskin, collected by the Brothers Grimm in their 1812 Children’s and Household Tales, contains a number of elements that provide a useful framework for thinking about Bob Dylan’s methods, art, and influence. Interestingly, the origins of the story are much older than the nineteenth century, and similar tales can be found as far back as the first century CE in Roman Antiquities (and perhaps a tale known by the “Early Roman Kings”) (Anderson, 2000). Such tales were part of oral traditions all over Europe and beyond. As with all folk tales, many versions exist, but some common plot elements can be found across variants of the story.

Most versions involve an imp or devil who turns straw into gold in exchange for something precious (e.g., the first-born child is demanded in the Brothers Grimm editions). When the woman expresses her desire to keep her child, Rumplestiltskin refuses, unless she can guess his name (hence, the classification of such tales as “The Name of the Supernatural Helper”) (Hans-Jörg, 2004). Once the imp’s name is correctly guessed, he throws a fit. These stories typically feature:

• A name-guessing component

• A deal made with an imp/devil

• A tantrum following the guessing of the name

• A magical transformation of a raw material like straw into something precious like gold

There are a number of ways that Dylan’s life and art map onto this folk tale, including the name challenge. Guess my name: Robert Allen Zimmerman, Bob Dylan, Elston Gunnn, Blind Boy Grunt, Alias, Renaldo, Jack Frost, and Jack Fate are among the names and sobriquets Dylan has used (and he has reportedly used fake names, such as Justin Case, for hotel registries). The use of names and identities in flux appear in Dylan’s songs as well. For example, in Brownsville Girl, “the only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.” The uncertainty of the name suggests that one is, like a rolling stone, a complete unknown. Perhaps the unknown is the result of a deliberate effort to mix things up. In “Desolation Row,” Dylan sings of a long list of characters for whom he had to “rearrange their faces and give them all another name.”

Dylan’s playfulness with names, particularly his own set of aliases, may be part of the larger effort at rewriting and revising his own story, often impishly with journalists, with fabrications and truths co-mingled about leaving home and joining the circus, riding boxcars in Mexico with Big Joe Turner, and perhaps, as in the Rumplestiltskin story, making a deal with the devil to achieve musical success (Dylan confessed of a deal made with “the Chief Commander of this earth and the world we can’t see” to Ed Bradley in a 2004 interview on 60 Minutes). The parallel, of course, is imperfect, as Dylan at various times has played the imp/devil, or he who makes a deal with the imp/devil. After all, Dylan has shown that character substitutions are part of the process (consider how, in his film Renaldo and Clara, Bob Dylan is played by Ronnie Hawkins, Renaldo is played by Bob Dylan, Mrs. Dylan by Ronnie Blakely, and Clara by Sara Dylan). Names and faces have been rearranged again.

Perhaps these unconventional uses of identities have their roots in Dylan’s early experiences growing up in Minnesota. In the 2005 documentary No Direction Home, Dylan talks about traveling shows that came to Hibbing during his childhood:

Circuses came through. There were tent shows at the carny midways. And they had barkers. Got a horse with two heads! Got a chicken in there with a man’s face! Come see the girl-boy! It was just more rural back then. That’s what people did. You could see guys in blackface. George Washington in blackface… or Napoleon wearing blackface. Like, weird Shakespearean things. Stuff that didn’t really make any sense at the time. (Bob Dylan, 2005)

They didn’t make sense at the time (and by today’s standards are offensive), but perhaps they came into focus for Dylan later, as he felt free to write about Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, Romeo moaning to Cinderella, and Mack the Finger seeking advice from Louie the King.

As for impish tantrums in response to correct name guessing, one can look no further than Robert Shelton’s biography of Dylan. Shelton wrote that Dylan appeared to be quite upset and, much like Rumplestiltskin, “exploded with anger” when, early in his career, he discovered that a journalist in Newsweek revealed his given name (Robert Allen Zimmerman) and middle-class, Jewish origins in Minnesota that Dylan’s fanciful recreations of his origin story had previously obscured (Coleman, 2016).

But perhaps the most compelling comparison of Dylan to Rumplestiltskin is the transformation of straw to gold, or in the case of Dylan, the appropriation of source materials and transformation of those ingredients into his art (they’re called gold records, after all). Many scholars and critics have focused attention on Dylan’s use of material from other songs and books in his own work, and Dylanologists scour the internet for tips and clues about this borrowing. While cries of plagiarism garner much attention, most serious scholars understand that Dylan is not a college freshman copying essays to pass off as his own term papers (Polito, 2009). But something’s happening here, and thoughtful commentators offer some compelling explanations.

Richard Thomas calls Dylan’s appropriations a form of intertextuality, whereby Dylan creates something that’s more than the sum of its parts (Thomas, 2017). This argument suggests that Dylan isn’t hiding the fact that he’s using lines from other songs and books, but rather that he’s providing his listeners the opportunity to hear both the borrowed bits and new content at the same time, thereby elevating the experience. For example, when Dylan first performed “Masters of War,” listeners understood that the melody came from a folk tune of English origins, “Nottamun Town,” and could hear the source and what had been created from it simultaneously. This was no act of deception, for the straw he turned to gold was in plain sight. As Thomas put it, these borrowed bits from the past “provide the elements of his original songwriting, their traces visible but transformed in the process of his own songwriting” (p. 136).

Similarly, Falco has advanced the idea that Dylan’s methods of drawing from source material look less like theft and more like the art of imitatio used by Renaissance poets. Here we are to understand that invention requires an inventory, and that Dylan has been able to “manifest originality in the word’s literal sense, deriving from a source, or origo” (Falco, 2022, p. 8). To unpack this further, Falco uses Seneca’s apian metaphor, in which the method of imitatio is compared to bees’ method of selecting from the best flowers to make honey, which is something new, comprised of the flowers’ nectar and something of the bee. Like Rumpelstiltskin, Dylan turns straw to gold, or nectar to honey (liquid gold), using source material to make something new. In many cases, the “flowers” are songs, but much attention has also been focused on Dylan’s use of nectar from books.

Scott Warmuth has identified numerous instances of Dylan using lines from songs and books, particularly since 1997’s release of Time Out of Mind. Warmuth has looked not only at Dylan’s music, but also finds intertextuality in the book Chronicles, Vol. 1 and the film Masked and Anonymous. What’s noteworthy about Warmuth’s catalog of Dylan’s sources (the Pinterest page, “A Bob Dylan Bookshelf,” includes over ninety titles), is the vast range of materials that have been used (Falco calls the range “staggering,” and Dylan advises, in “Murder Most Foul,” “if you want to remember, you better write down the names.” Among the books Warmuth lists are Carl Sandberg’s collected poems, a travel guide to New Orleans, and a book of photographs from carnival sideshows (In Search of the Monkey Girl). The vast and perplexing array of source materials reflect what Andrea Cossu has called “Dylan’s ability to cross the boundary between high and popular culture (or to soften it)” (p. 235).

A review of the books that Dylan has sampled suggests that he’s omnivorous in his taste, or that he can find bits of language that suits his purposes in just about any printed source (and turn what may be regarded by some as mundane straw into gold). Much has been said about his appropriation of American folk, blues, and country music, and about his indelible mark on American music and culture, and indeed, Warmuth’s list reveals a great deal of American literature (and other, non-literary publications), both high and low. When praised with accolades, critics most often focus on Dylan’s use of and impact on American culture. For example, take Tom Piazza’s speech on the occasion of Dylan’s Kennedy Center award: “Bob Dylan has remained a quintessentially American artist in the largest sense, a true American original” and that Dylan’s work combined distinct “forms and genres (and) transmuted (them) into something both wholly his own and wholly in the American grain” (Piazza, 1997, emphasis mine). Note the similarity here to the apian metaphor, as Piazza is addressing, among other things, that Rumplestiltskinian alchemy discussed earlier, noting that Dylan’s “very activity of incorporating, coming to terms with, those multitudes of influence and utterance is itself somehow at the heart of the American ideal.” But to limit the analysis to American sources and influence would be to leave much straw on the table.

While the source material for Dylan’s alchemy seems to come from all over the world, European sources have remained a constant throughout his long career as an artist. What I aim to demonstrate here is that Dylan has not only drawn from a deep European well for inspiration, but that the gold he has spun from straw has become a well of inspiration for European artists and consumers of art. To be clear, the metaphor is imperfect: Dylan’s European sources should not be regarded as lowly straw, but are precious resources that he has used throughout his career precisely because they are valued.

Thomas (2017) observes that early Dylan compositions borrowed freely from a number of sources, many of which were European. “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from his 1962 ’ The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, contains both musical and lyrical elements from “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” a British folk song from the 1800s, and as mentioned earlier, “Masters of War,” from the same album, used the tune from “Nottamun Town,” which may have its origins in nineteenth century England.

On the cover of Freewheelin’ is the iconic photo of Dylan with then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who noted in her memoir that Dylan was interested in French Symbolist poets, and Dave Van Ronk had similar recollections (Thomas, 2017). As a Classics scholar, Thomas underscores the ways in which Dylan has utilized the works of Ovid, Homer, and Virgil.

More than ten years after Freewheelin’, Dylan name-checked French Symbolists in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”:

Situations have ended sad

Relationships have all been bad

Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud

On the same album, he referenced Dante in “Tangled Up in Blue” (Mai, 2021):

Then she opened up a book of poems

And handed it to me

Written by an Italian poet

From the thirteenth century

We can look beyond the songs for other European artists and thinkers, as they show up in Dylan’s first book, Tarantula, and include Kierkegaard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Shakespeare. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dylan, who addresses the question of why a songwriter and performer would be honored with a literature prize, points to his early experiences with literature as a student, citing Don Quixote, Tale of Two Cities, and Gulliver’s Travels as influences.

Using a method which appears to evolve over the course of his career, “Dylan…unites experimental romantic and modernistic traditions within the European ballad and American folk music” (Mai, 2017, p. 113). For example, a typed set of lyrics to the song “Farewell, Angelina” in the Bob Dylan Archive contains a handwritten note at the top of the document that reads, “Ewan McCall tune,” referring to Ewan MacColl, an English singer-songwriter born in 1915 (BD Archive, Box 34, Folder 07). Dylan’s note probably points to the song “Farewell to Tarwathie,” a whaling song written in Scotland in the nineteenth century and popularized by MacColl, from which “Farewell, Angelina” gets its music.

The point here is not to deny American source material, but to recognize how it was buttressed by a significant amount of European works. As Falco put it,

while American song seems to have provided Dylan with ample space for imitation (and emulation), the broader Western canon supplied him with the models for imagery and for the rhythms of a new vatic voice. The combination of Rimbaud and Mallarmé on one hand, with Whitman, Ginsberg, and the biblical translators on the other, helped him forge the riveting diction that characterizes his work at every stage. (p. 159)

So then, like a sponge (or a honey bee, or an alchemist imp), Dylan has relied heavily on European source material for borrowing, inspiration, influence, and imitatio as a methodology to produce new and unique works of art that are described as original and inventive. To what extent has this golden honey in turn become a source of inspiration, influence, and imitatio for European artists and thinkers?

In “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” a rambling tale is told about arriving on the Mayflower and declaring, “I think I’ll call it America!” Historian Sean Wilentz (2021) described the song as Dylan’s take on America as “a newfound land that is frantic, exasperating, jumbled, and irrational beyond the point of absurdity.” Time and place are jumbled, and in this version of America the narrator encounters a girl from France and an Englishman, who merely says “Fab.” Though our narrator arrives to the continent in the seventeenth century at the beginning of the song, he ends with an encounter from a visitor from the fifteenth century:

I asked the captain what his name was

And how come he didn’t drive a truck

He said his name was Columbus

I just said, “Good luck.”

This sign-off, from one who has just elaborated his sense of the American experience (informed, in part, by Europeans), essentially hands over his America to a European visitor/captain, as if to say, well, see what you can make of this. Good luck! Which raises the question, what have Europeans done with what Dylan has handed them?

Commentary about the British Invasion and Beatlemania in America have overshadowed the impact of Dylan’s creative output on Europe and European artists. Ray Coleman (2016), editor of Melody Maker, wrote that “1965 was the year Dylan conquered Britain, the year ‘Wind’ and ‘Times a-Changin” became favourites of the university students and the pop screamers.” Paul Jones (of the band Manfred Mann) told journalist Elizabeth Thompson that, “Dylan’s influence on the English pop scene was absolutely enormous… You can even look at the Beatles and see how much they were influenced” (Thompson, 2021).

In a letter to Dylan dated January 15th, 1964, British critic George Melly explained that he wanted to write a book about Bob Dylan that emphasized his influence: “Your effect on the Beatles, for example, has been enriching, and the same is true of Donovan. You have also had a liberating effect on many young poets. On the other hand, commercialised- Dylanism is depressing, but then commercialised anything is depressing.” (BD Archive, Box 37, Folder 01).

Even though Dylan’s songs are almost exclusively written in English, he has made a significant impact on artists in European countries where English is not the primary language as well. In his intriguing dissertation, Alejandro Rodríguez de Jesús makes a compelling argument as to why Dylan’s early protest or “finger pointing” songs resonated strongly with singer-songwriters under Franco in Spain:

In the 60s and 70s, Spanish songwriters found in Dylan a character that was worth emulating, for some artistically and for others behaviorally. His lyrics opened the imagination of those who aimed to “tumbar la estaca” (overthrow the stake)… There were many who directly translated and interpreted his lyrics and others who were inspired by Dylan’s mastery of the metaphor and thus decided to compose and perform their songs in public. (p. 97)

Dylan’s influence has also been tremendous in Italy, as documented by Alessandro Carrera (2009) in his chapter, “Oh, The Streets of Rome” (from the edited volume, Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World). Carrera begins by stating that, “my purpose in this essay is to illustrate the impact Dylan had on Italy and the impact Italy had on Dylan” (p. 84). Curiously, Carrera’s focus on the former falls on Italians’ interest in translating Dylan:

Dylan has been an obvious influence on generations of Italian songwriters. In the 1960s, music and myth preceded the words, but the first Italian translation of his songs was published in 1971, even before Writings and Drawings was available in the United States.[1] Other translations have appeared since then, and each one has been a significant step in Dylan’s growing status in Italy. (p. 84-85)

Translation may not be the craft of turning straw to gold, but it’s a transformative art that, in the case of drafting Italian versions of Dylan’s songs, turns gold into something both old and new. Consider Carrera’s account of the challenges associated with translating the English Miss Lonely (“You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it”) from “Like a Rolling Stone” to Italian. Beyond the literal translation of the words lie the tone, the “slangy quality,” the translation of not only the words on the page, but also how they are sung, and the new meanings generated by translation. For example, should the Italian version of Miss Lonely be “Miss puzza-ar-naso,” (roughly Miss Snotty, or Miss Stiff Upper Lip, suggesting someone who “goes around as if smelling a bad odor under her nose” (p. 98)? Carrera ultimately settled with “Miss Malinconia” (Miss Melancholy) for his translation. But the fact that translators of Dylan care so deeply about bringing his body of work, including Chronicles, to Italian speaks volumes about his importance and influence there.

Another indicator of Dylan’s influence on European art and culture can be found in the partial list of honors, awards, and titles bestowed upon him by European entities. Consider:

Nobel Prize in Literature (2016) (Sweden)

Officier de la Legion d’honneur (2013) (France)

Prince of Asturias Award (2007) (Spain)

Honorary Doctorate of Music, St. Andrews University (2004) (Scotland)

Polar Music Prize (2000) (Sweden)

Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (1990) (France)

Officially, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” (Nobel Prize, 2016). Though Dylan certainly has created new expressions in an American context, his inventiveness and originality derived, in part, through his creative use of source materials, many European, and transformations into works that have, in turn, inspired and influenced Europeans and beyond.

Well over fifty years ago, a British fan named Hazel Archer, then a student at the University of Keele, wrote to Dylan about how they like to guess “what he’s getting at” in his songs (e.g., “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” was sparked off by the Kennedy assassination”). Archer must have realized that this work may never be complete, noting, “Oh well. In fifty years the academics will doubtless be analysing your lyrics with even less success!” Hazel Archer may very well have been correct.

 

Works Cited

Anderson, G. (2000). Fairytale in the ancient world. Routledge.

Archer, H. (1966). Letter to Bob Dylan. Letter to Bob Dylan. Box 42, Folder 10, The Bob Dylan

Archive, American Song Archives, Tulsa, OK.

Braun, D. (1972). Letter to Bob Dylan. Box 42, Folder 10, The Bob Dylan Archive, American

Song Archives, Tulsa, OK.

Carrera, A. (2009). Oh, the Streets of Rome: Dylan in Italy. In Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s

Road from Minnesota to the World, ed. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss (pp. 140-153).

University of Minnesota Press.

Coleman, E. (2016). Revisit our infamous 1963 profile of Bob Dylan. Retrieved from

https://www.newsweek.com/bob-dylans-75th-birthday-revisit-our-infamous-1963-profile-462801

Cossu, A. (2013). Poetry, politics, and America: Awards and the memorialization of Bob

Dylan. Celebrity Studies, 4, 235-237.

Dylan, B. (n.d.). “Farewell Angelina” (draft manuscript), Box 34, Folder 3, The Bob Dylan

Archive, American Song Archives, Tulsa, OK.

Earle, S. (2022). Keynote announcement: Steve Earle. Retrieved from

https://dylan.utulsa.edu/keynote-announcement-steve-earle/

Falco, R. (2022). No one to meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan.

The University of Alabama Press.

Mai, R. (2021). World literature. In J. Latham (Ed.), The World of Bob Dylan, (pp.158-168).

Cambridge University Press.

Melly, G. (1964). Letter to Bob Dylan. Box 37, Folder 1, The Bob Dylan Archive,

American Song Archives, Tulsa, OK.

Nobel Prize (2016). Retrieved from

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/summary/.

Piazza, T. (1997). Biographical Essay from the Kennedy Center Honors. Retrieved from

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/bob-dylan-biographical-essay-from-the-kennedy-center-honors/576/

Polito, R. (2009). Bob Dylan’s memory palace. In Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from

Minnesota to the World, ed. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss (pp. 140-153). University

of Minnesota Press.

Thomas, R. (2017). Why Bob Dylan Matters. Dey St.

Thompson, E. (2021). “I’m ready to get drunk now! Bob Dylan and his 1965 British Tour.

Retrieved from https://squaremile.com/culture/music/bob-dylan-british-tour-1965/

Uther, Hans-Jörg (2004). The Types of International Folktales: Animal tales,

tales of magic, religious tales, and realistic tales, with an introduction.

FF Communications. p. 285 – 286.

Wilentz, S. (2021). Bob Dylan, Historian. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved from

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2021/06/19/bob-dylan-historian/

 

[1] A letter in the Bob Dylan Archive from attorney David Braun to Dylan, dated May 17, 1972, reads, “Dear Bob: Someone in Italy has illegally printed a book of your lyrics under the title Bob Dylan’s Blues. Under our subpublishing agreement with your Italian publisher, we have the right to go after this person and stop the sale…”

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘Everybody Wants You to Be like Them:’ The Menippean Satire of Bob Dylan.”

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“‘Everybody Wants You to Be like Them:’” The Menippean Satire of Bob Dylan. World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Christopher Mitchell

 

In this presentation, I am going to explore the suggestion that we can listen to and read Bob Dylan’s body of work using Menippean satire as critical apparatus or a translation device. There are two pieces of recent criticism that make this suggestion, so in the spirit of a musical expeditionary, we will take a quick spin to see what this might look like in practice. We will start by reviewing the two pieces of criticism that make this suggestion. From there we will have a brief look at Menippean satire. Some of you know Menippean satire, and those of you who know Menippean satire know that it is a tricky, elusive concept, but once we have here a provisional sense of the concept in hand, we will look at possible routes through which we might navigate Dylan’s work. We’ll look at Chronicles, Vol. One, “Murder Most Foul,” “False Prophet,” and The Philosophy of Modern Song and the ways in which these works demonstrate an affinity with the characteristics or methods of Menippean satire. This affinity should make it possible to understand Dylan’s work as literary, without arguing for that work as literature. The intent is not to define Dylan’s work as Menippean satire but to understand that work on its own terms, terms that coincide with the methods of Menippean satire. I hope to underscore this affinity for Menippean satire and highlight the ways in which Dylan’s work confronts the boundaries of genre, literary or otherwise.

In their introduction to a 2019 collection entitled Polyvocal Bob Dylan, Josh Toth and Nduka Otiono present Dylan’s body of work as an example of the dialogic, Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of novelistic discourse, a category derived from Bakhtin’s formulation of Menippean satire. For Bakhtin, the dialogic stands in opposition to the monologic or poetic discourse, discourse that insists upon authority and unity. The dialogic or novelistic discourse accommodates or encourages heteroglossia, many voices. The monologic is a single authoritative voice; the dialogic is various voices arrayed in defiance of authority or unity. The most well-known aspect of Menippean satire is the mixing of genres or styles or voices. In the classical Menippean satires, this was the mixture of prose and verse – prosimetrum. This mixture of form or style has evolved into hybridity, mixtures of genres or voices, or, as Bakhtin has it, the dialogic. It is the dialogic aspect of Dylan’s work that Toth and Otiono enlarge upon. They proceed from Bakhtin’s observation that there are forces working “to overcome the heteroglossia of language,” forces that seek to create a “stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language.” Toth and Otiono argue that Dylan’s work functions “primarily, as a frustration of those various forces” (9-10).

In a 2021 paper, Scott Peeples proposes reading Melville’s Confidence Man concurrently with listening to Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. Peeples isolates an episode from the novel in which Frank and Charlie banter in an exchange of trust and duplicity, and Peeples compares that episode to the “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.” In that discussion, Peeples notes our tendency to describe The Confidence Man as a Menippean satire and then suggests that John Wesley Harding is a Menippean satire, too. Peeples invokes two characteristics of Menippean satire – thematic repetition and a lack of coherent narrative arc – but his observation is an aside, and he does not pursue the Menippean angle further.

Toth and Otiono’s observations about the dialogic might not necessarily entail understanding Dylan’s work as Menippean, and Peeples stops short of exploring the possibility of Dylan’s work as Menippean, but taken together these two avenues of inquiry provoke in us the desire to consider Dylan’s work or parts of it as Menippean satire.

The lineage of Menippean satire takes us from the proto-novels of Apocolocyntosis, The Golden Ass, Satyricon, and A True Story through to the anatomies of Boethius, Erasmus, and Burton, and then to well-known exemplars of the tradition: Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, Moby-Dick. It is possible to build a formidable reading list, but it is just as possible to sink into a swamp of definition. Let us skirt the swamp by considering here the handful of surviving Menippean satires. Apocolocyntosis and Satyricon are from the first century CE. Apocolocyntosis is the first Menippean satire to be preserved in its entirety. In this work, the Emperor Claudius, upon his death, approaches the gods and sues for apotheosis. He is refused and descends to Hades. Satyricon is not intact but is perhaps the most well-known Menippean satire. Here, a trio of scoundrels rattle around in various seaports, surviving a series of escapades, orgies mostly but also a shipwreck, and in the extended episode for which Satyricon is famous to the present day, they attend a long, debauched banquet hosted by Trimalchio. The Golden Ass and A True Story are from the second century CE. The Golden Ass involves magic, and A True Story involves a trip to the moon. One appraisal of Apocolocyntosis arrives at a short, useful Menippean checklist that encompasses all four of these works: “unreliable source, fantastic journey, serious interlude, and comic reprieve” (Relihan 77). We should also note the same critic’s assessment of Satyricon which notes that work’s “resistance to coherent interpretation.” These four works underwrite Peeples’ specification of a lack of coherent narrative arc and thematic repetition. In a discussion of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a different critic writes: “The satire of these works can be said to be ‘Menippean’ in the loose, non-technical sense that it is generically hybrid and stylistically mixed, combining the incompatible registers and genres of high and low culture in fantastical comic fictions and freewheeling, antinormative, even subversive criticism” (Duval 72). And if there is anything common to the works that end up being designated as Menippean, it would be that they are loose and non-technical.

Leaving it to Peeples to apply any or all of this to John Wesley Harding, we will begin with Chronicles. While Dylan’s account of his songwriting and performing travails in Chronicles does evoke these stories of visiting strange moonscapes and searching for magic and surviving shipwrecks, I would like to begin by highlighting a correspondence between Chronicles and Apocolocyntosis. While Dylan’s roaming in his autobiography is certainly not analogous to Claudius’s quest in Apocolocyntosis, we do get in the third section of Chronicles a weird inversion of Claudius’s plight: This episode is set within the period of Dylan’s tenure in Woodstock with his family. In the middle of this section, Dylan muses upon Melville’s fate; Dylan writes, “By the time of his death [Melville] was largely forgotten. I had assumed that when critics dismissed my work, the same thing would happen to me, that the public would forget about me” (123). Dylan is not dead, but he has just come away from his father’s funeral. He does not approach the gods, but he proceeds to a meeting with Archibald MacLeish (107). He does not seek apotheosis – if anything, he is seeking to reverse that process. While this inverted correspondence might be as strained as it is suggestive, the characterization of Apocolocyntosis and the other early Menippean works, the “unreliable source, fantastic journey, serious interlude, and comic reprieve,” appears to be equally applicable to Chronicles, which now seems more novelistic than autobiographical. We have the fantastic journey, the serious interludes, the comic reprieves, but those might all be features of an autobiography. Contemporary critics and readers were puzzled by Chronicles, which did not fulfill expectations of celebrity biography. And then the fourth item on that checklist, the unreliable source, became an issue. Scott Warmuth, in chronicling Dylan’s “magpie tendencies,” noted that Chronicles is “meticulously fabricated” (“Bob Charlatan” 71). To choose one example, the thick seafood stew episode on page 170 turns out to be a cryptographic exercise, melding a Hemingway short story and travel book about New Orleans. For some readers this was plagiarism, theft. Those readers felt betrayed; Dylan’s book did seem to provoke in those readers something very like Satyricon’s “resistance to coherent interpretation.” Yet if we are reading Chronicles with Menippean satire in the back of our minds, an unreliable narrator and this resistance to coherent interpretation seem more purposeful than vexing.

But Chronicles is a book, and Dylan is a performer, a recording artist. Let us listen to “Murder Most Foul” with the Menippean in mind: we hear a recitative performance that verges on the liturgical, a profusion of piano amid the bowed double bass and a violin. If here the length of the recording – sixteen minutes – and the somber, elegiac atmosphere were not oppressive enough, the narrative seems to be an account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy told by several voices, all sung by Dylan. There is the narrator: “President Kennedy was riding high / A good day to be living and a good day to die.” There seems to be Dylan himself: “Zapruder’s film, I’ve seen that before / Seen it thirty-three times, maybe more.” There is the president himself: “Got blood in my eyes, got blood in my ear / I’m never gonna make it to the New Frontier.” There are other voices: “Don’t worry Mr. President, help’s on the way / Your brothers are comin’, there’ll be hell to pay.” But the voices are not announced; we cannot see who is speaking; it is a collage; it is all Dylan’s voice; it is pianos and bass and violin; it is a very definition of heteroglossia. This mélange of voices supports Toth and Otiono’s dialogic understanding of Dylan’s work, but we have here also a dead man speaking from the afterlife, a president and the specter of apotheosis, yet another echo of Apocolocytosis. And again, with the strained and the suggestive, can it be entirely that coincidence that A True Story was an account of a trip to the moon, and this president is the one who urged us to go to the moon?

Rough and Rowdy Ways provides more affinities with the Menippean, but I would like to focus here on a second song, “False Prophet.” If we set aside for now the aspects of the narrator and the voicing of the arrangement, the most striking thing about “False Prophet” is the direct reference to Billy Emerson’s “If Lovin’ Is Believin’.” To some ears this would seem to be another instance of Dylan’s theft from earlier poets and musicians; to other ears this would seem to be another instance of Dylan’s continuing in the folk process; but in our current discussion we would see it as Menippean hybridity. Using Emerson’s record, Dylan anchors his own record in Memphis of 1954, in Sun Records, providing a reckoning point but also an underpinning of his work, as if his voice has been recorded over Billy Emerson’s, as if his work has been recorded over a reel of tape from the Memphis Recording Service, as if Billy Emerson’s voice bleeds through amid Dylan’s voice, or maybe as if Dylan’s voice bleeds through amid Emerson’s voice. If the question once was whether Dylan could sing, the question now would seem to be who is it that is singing? And even if we cannot say, we have in this profusion, this indeterminacy of voices, our Menippean prosimetrum.

Once attuned to these aspects of Dylan’s work and this affinity for aspects of Menippean satire, we hear these strains of the dialogic, of digression, of the negotiability of the narrator’s voice, of the distortion or confusion of fact and fabrication, as a single driving activity. In The Philosophy of Modern Song, we are presented with sixty-six chapters about sixty-six records. One of the first things we notice is Dylan’s extensive use of the second person. The effect of this upon the reader is that You is in the song, and You is listening to the song. We have here another instance of method that Toth and Otiono remark upon in their discussion of Dylan’s Nobel lecture performance: “All the while, he shifts between first, second, and third person – placing (and confusing) himself and his listener in the heart of the action” (6). This scrambling of identity is familiar to us. We might have first noticed it in the various iterations of “Tangled Up in Blue”; we might have come to it lately in “Murder Most Foul.” If The Philosophy of Modern Song seems like a jukebox of sorts, we are familiar with that, too, most likely in the form of Theme Time Radio Hour, and we realize that the book is less a jukebox than a spinning of a radio dial. And once we have made that short hop, we hear it too in the Sun Pie episode from Chronicles. Dylan and his wife are tooling through Louisiana on their motorcycle when they stop at “an obscure roadside place, a gaunt shack,” a chimerical emporium “run by an old-timer named Sun Pie.” Some of the details in this extended vignette catch our eye: “There were iron works around the entryway” (203), but in the wake of this discussion, we now hear a radio “from beyond a wall and the sound was coming through in static.” Throughout this episode, the radio plays a constant, familiar soundtrack, “Do You Want to Know a Secret” by the Beatles, “I’m Leaving It Up to You” by Dale and Grace, “Sea of Love” by some local singer. We are reminded now of the role of the radio station in “Murder Most Foul”: the assassinated president phoning in requests, but before he begins his litany of songs he wants to hear, it is again the Beatles who alert us to the presence of the radio. A short while after the Beatles, the president (or someone in the car) says, “Turn the radio on, don’t touch the dials.” In the very next section of the song, we witness the assassination, the sacrifice, and immediately following that we catch snippets of song, “What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say?” A couple of lines after that “Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues.” Dylan compounds heteroglossia with glossolalia. From that point the song is given over to the president’s requests, the dead man’s Philosophy of Modern Song, interspersed with snippets of dialogue from that Lincoln Continental. The voices of the characters, the voicings of the music, the voices of the records playing over the radio, all of this is cacophony to the ears of listeners and readers expecting veracity, authority, unity. But the cacophony, or as Toth and Otiono would have it, the polyphony, is exactly the point.

Howard Weinbrot, in his effort to define the Menippean, stipulates a method wherein the satirist sets “a work against its own approximate genre” (6-7). The very idea of someone setting “a work against its own approximate genre” puts us in mind of Dylan going electric or Dylan making John Wesley Harding or Dylan making Self-Portrait or Dylan making Slow Train Coming. Certainly, Dylan has never been confined by genre, whether we are talking about the distinction between folk music and rock and roll or the differences between Dylan’s songs, recordings, performances, and books and his movies, radio show, paintings, sculpture, whiskey, and television commercial for women’s undergarments. But it is here that we arrive at the purpose of Menippean satire, that it is satire, that it has a target, specified by Weinbrot to be a “threatening false orthodoxy,” a “danger to the world” (298). Eugene Kirk writes, “Menippean satire was essentially concerned with right learning or right belief. That theme often called for ridicule or caricature of some sham-intellectual or theological fraud” (xi). Menippean satire ridicules “the pretensions of authoritative claims to wisdom” (Marenbon).

It seems that Dylan knows that Meaning is hardly the issue. The “threatening false orthodoxy” that Dylan is attacking would be the expectation of meaning, the expectation of authority, of unity, of a “finite or hegemonic” form, a strictly policed line between “mercurial performance and the fixity of print” (Toth and Otiono 4). Toth and Otiono underscore this in their discussion of the polyvocal Dylan, that his work is “confronting the exhaustion (or restrictiveness) of literary forms as such” (5), but their enthusiasm for Dylan as an exemplar of the dialogic can be yoked to Peeples’ observation about thematic repetition and a lack of coherent narrative arc. In this direction we can use the Menippean to hear in Dylan’s work that thematic repetition, hear those radios playing through the walls, “the country music station plays soft,” through the text, through the voices, through the static.

 

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota P, 1984.

Duval, Edwin M. “Rabelais and French Renaissance Satire.” Quintero 70-85.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles, Vol. 1. Simon and Schuster, 2004.

– – – . The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon and Schuster, 2022.

– – – . Rough and Rowdy Ways. Columbia, 2020.

Emerson, Billy. “If Lovin’ Is Believin’.” Sun Records, 1954.

Kirk, Eugene P. Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism. New York:

Garland, 1980.

Marenbon, John, “Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/boethius/>.

Peeples, Scott. “Listening to ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ While Reading The

Confidence Man.” Leviathan, vol. 23, no. 2, 2021, pp. 73-81.

Relihan, Joel C. Ancient Menippean Satire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Toth, Josh, and Nduka Otiono. “Introduction: The Foreign Sounds of Dylan’s Literary Art.”

Polyvocal Bob Dylan, Nduka Otiono and Josh Toth, eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2019,

pp. 1-19.

Warmuth, Scott. “Bob Charlatan: Deconstructing Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One.”

New Haven Review, No. 6, 2010, pp. 70-83.

Weinbrot, Howard D. Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth

Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “My Generation Destroyed: Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in Witness”

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“My Generation Destroyed: Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in Witness.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Stevan M. Weine, University of Illinois, Chicago

 

Seeing and not seeing atrocities permeate Bob Dylan’s protest songs:

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
(“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”)

Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?
(“Blowin in the Wind”)

But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
(“Masters of War”)

The far reach of Dylan’s sight is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s introduction to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which focuses on the poet’s remarkable ways of seeing:

This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poems. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own.

Say you are the twenty-year-old songwriter Bob Dylan, and you want to write about civil rights and war, but in songs which do not resemble sermons. You could find much to love in “Howl,” which captures the brutality of the times but also the possibilities for new insights, and does so in fabulous long lines which somehow manage to embolden listeners.

“Howl” achieves this because of how Ginsberg occupies the position of a witness to a destructive force and the damage it has done. “Howl” famously begins: “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” This stunning declaration calls for a whole new world of storytelling, which Ginsberg fills in the poem’s 112 long lines with an extensive catalog of madness through the intimate details of personal experiences among his generation:

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

This particular line refers to Ginsberg’s 1948 visions, a key transformative event in the poet’s life. Yet the madness in “Howl” is for the most part not the poet’s own. He witnessed it among others, including friends and family:

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

This madness is shared in intense and precise apocalyptic language which convinces the reader that nothing is avoided and everything is claimed. The pulsating language of commitment to extremity, would be modified by Dylan and find its way into his protest songs:

A bullet from the back of a bush / Took Medgar Evers’ blood
(“Only a Pawn in Their Game”)

Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon / Somebody better investigate soon
(“Oxford Town”)

You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
(“Masters of War”)

When writers and critics examine Allen Ginsberg’s influence on Bob Dylan, they tend to focus on Dylan’s pivot away from topical songs and towards subjectivity in and extending into his mid-60’s electric trilogy. When unbound by the topical constrictions of protest songs, Dylan embraced Ginsberg’s free verse poetry and surrealistic long lines – which are also very present in “Howl.”

Unmentioned is how Ginsberg’s influence on Dylan’s songwriting, and Dylan’s creative working with what he took from Ginsberg, very likely began even earlier than 1964, which was just after they first met. Influence is hard to prove, and it is rarely a matter of a single influence, but in my study, I find signs of Ginsberg at work in Dylan’s protest songs of the early 1960s.

Before arriving in New York City in 1961, Dylan read the Beat writers, who signaled to Dylan “a new type of human existence.” Dylan steeped himself in the “street ideologies” of Corso and Kerouac, and the “jail poems” of Ray Bremser who he mentioned in his “11 Outlined Epitaphs” along with “the love songs of Allen Ginsberg,” which Dylan adored.

I sought to understand how Dylan drew from Ginsberg’s poems of madness, especially “Howl” but also “America” and “Kaddish,” and reworked them in different directions so as to confront racism, violence, and war in his protest songs.

*

Let’s clarify one important distinction. In 1961, when Dylan visited Greystone Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey, which he renamed “Gravestone,” he came with his guitar to meet his idol Woody Guthrie.

This cannot be compared to Ginsberg, who as a nine-year-old took the bus on weekends with his father to see his seriously mentally ill mother Naomi between her damaging treatments of insulin, metrazol, and electroshock therapies.

Decades later, in 2004’s Chronicles, Vol. 1, Dylan confessed that upon first arriving in Greenwich Village in 1961, he “shucked everyone” by replacing his placid Midwest upbringing with farcical hard knocks origin stories.

Dylan was the grandson of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms in Ukraine. The Minnesota winters were long and cold, but as far as we know he had an unremarkable middle class childhood with no known adverse or traumatic experiences of his own. Yet as Dylan later testified in “Blind Willie McTell”, he fully absorbed the blues and all its adversity and suffering.

We know well that for many people, experiencing social adversities and traumatic life events can have a major, distinctive impact on their brain, behavior, communications, identity, relationships, and worldview. Even witnessing violence to another can be a traumatic experience. We also know for some, these kinds of experiences can become the focus of artistic work, as they were for Allen Ginsberg and many other artists.

What if you don’t have any of those experiences to draw upon yourself from the life you have lived? Then you must go find and engage them, as Dylan did, through listening to the radio and recorded or live music, and through reading, including Ginsberg and the Beats.

Dylan also absorbed folk ballads (“No More Auction Block”) and literature (All Quiet on the Western Front he called a “horror story” in his Nobel Prize lecture) gaining access to murder, loss, injustice, and war. The intense and genuine qualities of his absorption were necessary for his writing brilliant original songs protesting injustice and atrocity.

In Chronicles, Dylan revealed that for much of his songwriting career, his imagined landscape was the Civil War and post-Civil War. At The New York Times’ offices in the early 1960s, he combed through microfilm copies of newspapers published from 1855 to 1865: “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone.” He worked at internalizing a world of slavery, racism, and hate-driven murders.

*

Like several other notable twentieth century artists and thinkers before him, Allen Ginsberg derived inspiration and techniques from his encounters with mental illness and psychiatric treatment. Beginning in his childhood, Ginsberg was exposed to his mother’s serious mental illness and damaging psychiatric treatments, which for him was highly traumatic. As a young adult he faced his own mental health problems and inpatient psychiatric treatment and psychotherapy. He also had a close-up view of madness and its mixed outcomes among his friends, such as Carl Solomon, a fellow patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and many others documented in “Howl.”

Drawing from these life experiences, Ginsberg’s poetry enlivened, explored, and elaborated a madness which for him became more than a mental illness, but a disruptive and potentially redemptive life force. Madness encompassed many experiences, including hardship, suffering, ecstasy, visions, inspiration, liberation, valued knowledge, deviancy, derangement, sexuality, freedom, and more. Through his poetry and countercultural leadership, Ginsberg offered himself as a witness to both the liberatory and destructive powers of madness.

By doing the work of an artist, he reworked his troubled family and personal history, and the madness of others and society, into powerful literary works which broke into the public consciousness. Dylan took notice of and admired how Ginsberg had broken into popular culture.

Dylan praised “Ginsbergian language” and especially “Howl,” “America,” and “Kaddish.” What is Ginsbergian language and why does it matter to Dylan? Did Ginsbergian language help Dylan to write songs about this world of racism, violence, and war?

*

From the very first words of “Howl,” Ginsberg is a witness who “saw” firsthand what happened with madness. But for Ginsberg, this madness is not always a bad outcome, as it could also be linked with some of the “best minds.” The act of destruction may have caused the madness, or may be a reaction to it, or may be the madness itself. Further, madness is far more than individual mental illness. It can also be social, cultural, and political processes which manifest in oppression, displacement, hatred, warfare, heartlessness, blindness, and fascism. All are possible and these so-called best minds of the generation destroyed by madness clearly have Ginsberg’s attention and sympathy.

Ginsberg invites his readers to join him in this empathetic though highly ambivalent endorsement of the best minds. Readers chant along in solidarity – “Carl Solmon I’m with you in Rockland” – and with him share victorious visions (“where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs”).

As readers, Ginsberg encourages us to ask: Can you grasp this madness which society generates and then seeks to destroy? Can you free yourself from the institutions engineered to entrap and destroy your soul? Can you identify with and learn from those who are trying to free themselves? Ginsberg asks us to see how his generation is being destroyed, yet shows us how from this confrontation emerges new awareness, perspectives, and insights which could be keys to a more hopeful future.

Ginsberg’s engagement with and questioning of madness makes “Howl” a powerful liberating experience for so many readers. He invites us to: Join in acknowledging that this madness of our generation is a major force of change in our world.

*

When in 1963 Ginsberg first heard Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at a friend’s party, he cried, saying he knew a torch had been passed. I can appreciate why.

“Hard Rain” builds on “Howl”’s poetic acts of witnessing the ongoing destruction of the speaker’s generation due to madness with fantastical observations of a feared future apocalyptic landscape. Dylan’s song certainly sounds much like “Howl” in places, with many of its long lines bolstered by anaphora and alliteration, and juxtaposing opposing characteristics, as in:

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken

and

I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
(“A Hard Rain’s)

In “A Hard Rain’s,” the “blue eyed boy” tells the listener about all the frightening places he’s gone and all the destruction he’s seen, depicted with startling beauty and language. He witnesses planetary destruction (“dead oceans” … “sad forests”), personal dangers (“sharp swords” and “wild wolves”), and communication breakdowns (“tongues were all broken” and “nobody listening”). He sees multiple fatalities as in a “dead pony,” “one person starving,” “a poet who died in the gutter,” and a “young woman whose body was burning.”

Yet as in “Howl,” Dylan is not defeated, and in the final verse, he commits to being an active and engaged witness of all that he has seen and taken in: “And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it / And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it.”

In “Howl,” Ginsberg goes further in explaining his artistic method (“trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus”); whereas in “Hard Rain,” Dylan dispenses with methodological explanations and simply exudes confidence and purpose: “I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” His audience was folkies not poets, and the folkies cheered.

But how did Dylan come to know about the apocalyptic? It could be from bearing direct witness, or secondhand from poems, songs, or stories he heard or read, or it could be from just knowing his own lyrics so well.

In “Hard Rain,” Dylan sets the song up in such a way that he doesn’t really have to explain in order to possess at least some of the necessary legitimacy of the witness. A good magic trick to use if, unlike Ginsberg, you weren’t a direct witness. For the listener, what matters is the truth of the song and Dylan certainly got that right.

*

In “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the singer is neither a victim of nor a direct witness to any specific act of violence or injustice. Yet he knows enough to ask questions that matter in a world of rampant oppression, injustice, and war. He questions the lack of acknowledgement or effective actions to put an end to war, to slavery, to unnecessary suffering, or to unjust death:

Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?

He possesses the knowledge and moral urgency of a witness without explicitly confirming the circumstances of his witnessing and instead shifts the focus to the listeners’ own capacities for witnessing.

He invites the listener, with the intimacy one would use to approach a friend, to reach out and find the answers. The song asks the listener to look into their own mind, and to look at the world. At the same time, however, the answers are both painfully obvious yet difficult to grasp.

Dylan takes the ambivalence and uncertainty of Ginsberg’s witnessing madness in “Howl” (e.g. does madness make them the best minds of our generation?) and in “Blowin’ in the Wind” makes the listener own the ambivalence and take responsibility for finding the answers. Instead of being committed to a life of passive acceptance of atrocities near and far, Dylan gives listeners permission to live a life of engagement – observing, documenting, reflecting, knowing, and acting.

Dylan is not simply protesting, but is a witness to witnessing, or disrupted or failed witnessing, to turning your head and not seeing. His songs address those atrocities which exist amidst the mundane. He pleads with his listeners to keep listening.

Indeed, there’s also a howl of protest within “Blowin’ in the Wind,” if the listener can hear it. But instead of being about madness, it’s about war, civil rights, and oppression which were central in the minds of the youth in the early 1960s. What’s more, the widespread lack of acknowledgement or refusal to see atrocities could itself be called a madness, and thus can also be traced back to “Howl.”

In “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan invites the listener to join a community or generation which is united by their knowing and sharing important questions and answers. This was a younger generation that had to decide where they stood on the Vietnam war and civil rights. Should they accept or reject the older generation’s values, priorities, and institutions? Or should they try to build a new America, and a more peaceful and equitable world?

*

“Blowin’ in the Wind” asks the listener to do the work which Ginsberg said was needed to keep the country on the right path in his poem “America” which declares in its final line:

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

In other words, it may take a queer eye to find alternative perspectives, to think outside of the box, to do the work of building a new community and country.

In “America,” Ginsberg talks directly to the country personified, humorously and critically observing his own mind, and even imagining: “It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.” He calls out the prejudices, small-mindedness, nationalism, and greed, as well as the hopes and demands which he and America share:

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.

This fluidity between self and society is a key dimension of “Howl” and “Kaddish,” where madness is presented not just as an individual mental health problem, but as a social diagnosis, in a world inflamed by fascism, war, mass migration, the Cold War, nuclearism, and civil strife. Ginsberg’s mother Naomi, a Jewish immigrant woman from the Russian Pale, and many others were driven to madness by the conflicts, deprivations, violence, and failed institutions of modernity. If not for better luck, Dylan’s own paternal grandmother, Anna Zimmerman, may have ended up dying in a psychiatric hospital like Naomi, crushed by history.

In “Howl” and especially “Kaddish” we hear about Naomi’s politically focused paranoid delusions (“who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism”). Ginsberg’s “America” frames this in the language of the country’s political paranoia, with its “Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.”

This ridiculous paranoid rant was a template for “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” with the singer “lookin’ everywhere for them gol-darned Reds / I got up in the mornin’ ’n’ looked under my bed / Looked in the sink, behind the door / Looked in the glove compartment of my car.”

In “America,” Ginsberg imagines a path back from madness by doing creative work from a position which embraces both madness and queerness. To escape the prism of paranoia, Dylan deploys humor and sarcasm, a well-developed, hilarious, and underappreciated strategy.

In subsequent songs in the electric trilogy, such as “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and in press conferences with preposterously dumb and square journalists, Dylan would further unfurl his queer, absurdist, and mad assault on the unthinking paranoid reasoning of the times.

*

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” details the circumstances of one hate driven attack, the attacker, the miscarriage of justice, and the failure and hypocrisy of the criminal justice system to serve as a just witness.

The song’s propulsive rhythm and the internal rhymes and repetition, starting with the assailant’s own name, William Zanzinger, are positively Ginsbergian, and even punctuated by a few who’s reminiscent of “Howl”:

Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage,
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table,
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table,
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level,
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle.

The protagonist victim is an innocent woman, as was Naomi Ginsberg in “Kaddish.” The chorus shines a light on the lack of honesty and the distancing from, and avoidance or neglect of responsibility, in which many just stand around doing nothing in the aftermath of such attacks.

But you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for
Your tears.

Again, the singer is a witness to the witnessing or its cruel disfigurement or failure, on top of being a witness to the attack itself. Perhaps this nuanced layering of witnessing is one attribute that helps make it one of Dylan’s greatest protest songs.

The song is not nearly as hopeful as “Blowin in the Wind,” but need it be? In calling out the common shortcomings in individual and societal responses to hate driven attacks, “Hattie Ca roll” is courageous and emboldening: Dylan renders the ambivalence with which “Howl” approaches madness into different sociocultural mechanisms for minimizing a horrendous crime. It proffers a complete rejection of the self-serving evasion which holds up the denying witness into some kind of victim.

Ginsberg’s other great poem of madness, “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg” figures far less explicitly in Dylan’s protest songs, but one senses its presence in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” which is unique among Dylan’s protest songs by focusing on a woman. The poem is also present in 1976’s “Hurricane,” which tells the story of decades of unjust imprisonment – “While Ruben sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell / An innocent man in a living hell” – which brings to mind Naomi in her locked ward at Pilgrim State. However, in “Hurricane,” the emotions are less of mourning, and more of anger over yet another racial injustice.

*

Dylan’s protest songs portray an upside-down world reminiscent of the scrambled circumstances of “best minds destroyed,” where the best minds may actually be the “mad ones.” In On the Road, Kerouac writes, ““The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.” Mad to bear witness rather than be blind.

In “Masters of War”, Dylan takes aim at the U.S. military industrial complex, including those who build arms but “hide behind walls” or “masks.” Though he is young and unlearned, he knows things the smart and experienced ones do not. As an upstart, he is claiming he is nonetheless one of the best minds.

In “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” the leaders of the poor whites were manipulate them into hatred for Black people, one of the oldest games in town. But the songwriter knows better.

In “The Times They are A-Changin’,” change is going to upend the existing order:

The loser now will be later to win,
The slow one now will later be fast
The first one now will later be last.

Dylan is prophesizing change, warning leaders and parents to get out of the way while finger pointing, almost scolding. He sounds preachy like the Dylan of Slow Train Coming and the other Christian albums, yet without evoking Jesus or mercy. One suspects that by now, Dylan himself was growing weary of this posture for embodying too much of the judgmental tone of the older generations he was trying to shrug off.

*

In “Howl,” Ginsberg was not only fighting for social and political change, but he also had named a mystical enemy. In the poem’s Part II, Ginsberg rails against Moloch, the Canaanite fire demon, as embodied in armies, madhouses, and oppressive institutions. Ginsberg bears witness to the destruction Moloch wreaks, and to its embodiment in destructive states of mind, which he recognizes even in himself. He celebrates Moloch’s overturning through “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! Ecstasies!” of the “Mad Generation” which has the quality of the queer overturning of the politics of heteronormativity.

Here it is relevant to mention something I learned in researching my recent book, Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness and discussed with Ginsberg himself when I discovered papers for a key event which was not yet public knowledge: at age 22, Ginsberg signed consent for his mother’s prefrontal lobotomy. In other words, he himself bought into the then conventional mentality which said this was the right thing to do. Thus, Ginsberg’s protesting Moloch was also tempered by the humility that he was little better than others in terms of his vulnerability to participating in its destructiveness.

If Ginsberg is the poetic witness to madness and its liberatory and destructive potential, Dylan is the songwriter bearing moral witness to the possibilities and limitations of a society marked by racism, violence, and war. Both Ginsberg and Dylan want us to see, but Dylan also wants us to acknowledge our penchant for not seeing, and to take corrective actions. He lets each listener know that it is up to them to clarify what they stand for or against regarding these key political and moral issues which divide society.

Finally, let us also note that Dylan became a witness to experiences of violence and destruction which he accessed through journalism and art, not personal traumatic experiences. Thus, he demonstrates that direct experiences of violence are not necessary in order to serve as a powerful artistic witness, and to shine a light on the challenges of that witnessing.

*

Dylan didn’t keep writing protest songs, just as Ginsberg did not write about madness for all that long. By the end of 1963, Dylan disavowed protest songs. At the March on Washington he said, “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ‘cause I don’t write protest songs…I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.”

In December 1963, he said: “There’s no Black and white, Left and Right to me anymore, there’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

It was Ginsberg’s model of vision inspired transformation which helped set Dylan free from the folkies, and connected him evermore with Rimbaud, the Beats, and literary legitimacy. Ginsberg, bound to his own traumatic autobiographical narrative, was never able to sever the ties that bound him to his mother, his muse, through a transformation of madness. He could shift from a focus on madness to a focus on changing consciousness. He could travel the world and expand his perspective on death. He could become a teacher, like his father Louis Ginsberg. But he could never leave behind Allen Ginsberg in the more radical ways that Dylan could separate from himself.

As an artist, Dylan has been unbound to any such narrative. Dylan disappeared and reinvented himself far more wholesale, as we have experienced over the decades. Being unbound to his own autobiographical narrative, deeply empathic towards historical traumas, especially the ravages of the Civil War, being able to inhabit stories and songs in an unusually intense way, became bedrocks for Dylan’s creative journey.

*

In 1977, Ginsberg said “When you get old is when all your dreams come true, if you have the right dreams. When I was younger, I always wanted to go out on a rock ’n’ roll tour.” He got to join Dylan, his artistic heir, on the Rolling Thunder Revue. This is the stuff of Beat and rock ‘n’ roll legends, but the glimmer of celebrities should not outshine the coming together of the darker themes I have discussed here.

Rolling Thunder featured some of the most powerful live performances ever of the protest songs written fifteen years earlier, now in loud full band versions, plus a new protest song, “Hurricane,” and Ginsberg reciting his poetry, including an emotional reading of “Kaddish” at a mah-jongg tournament at the Seacrest Hotel.

On the long and independent creative journeys of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, this crossing of paths in New England theaters brought forth the many sides of madness, the horrors of war, and the terror of hate-based violence, and also offered the consolation and critical reflection of the witness, in poetry and song.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘God Said to Abraham’: Can Bob Dylan Help Us (Re-)Read the Bible?”

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“‘God Said to Abraham’: Can Bob Dylan Help Us (Re-)Read the Bible?” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Jeffrey S. Lamp, Oral Roberts University

 

Framing the present discussion

To fans of Bob Dylan the words are familiar, perhaps more familiar than the biblical text from which the opening verse of “Highway 61” finds its inspiration.

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”[1]

Compare this to the passage in Genesis 22:1–3, a portion of the story known in both Jewish and Christian circles as the “Aqedah,” or “Binding,” of Isaac, and the degree to which Dylan interprets the story becomes quite evident.

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.[2]

To the casual observer, there are a number of differences between the two accounts that become even more evident when the sonics of the song are taken into account. The song opens with a circus-like sound, a siren whistle confronting the listener at the beginning of the song and between verses. Dylan’s vocal performance contributes to the absurdist humor of the song that intensifies lyrically with each succeeding verse. Clearly Dylan’s reception of the biblical story is not the stuff of serious academic biblical commentary. Or is it?

Interpretations of the song are legion, each detail having been scoured for its significance. The present discussion will not contribute to this body of thought, but rather ask another question, one that directs our attention to the reverse order in which such investigations proceed. Rather than ask, “What does Bob Dylan do with Genesis 22:1–3 in his song ‘Highway 61’?,” we will ask, “Is there any way in which Dylan’s use of the passage helps us as Bible readers see this passage afresh, with new eyes, freed from the perhaps cherished vague reminiscences of the passage that often cloud our perception of what the passage is really saying?”

In more recent biblical studies, the methodology of “reception exegesis” has become more widespread as a hermeneutical tool of biblical interpreters.[3] In contrast with its more well- known sibling, “reception history,” reception exegesis asks whether a particular reception of a biblical passage, especially in popular media or artistic receptions of biblical passages, may drive us back to the biblical texts themselves to see if those receptions offer insights that might relieve us from over-familiarity with passages and lead us to a fresh appraisal of the biblical texts in their own contexts. In this discussion, then, we will bypass the typical discussions of the history of interpretation, which ask how more theological, academic, or liturgical treatments of biblical texts have unfolded, and of reception history, which expand the discussion to see how other more popular and artistic treatments have appropriated biblical texts. Rather, we will focus on reception exegesis, and ask whether or not these more artistic treatments might direct us back to the texts in such a way as to ask new questions of familiar passages and perhaps yield new insights into those passages.

So for the purpose at hand, does Dylan’s use of Genesis 22:1–3 in “Highway 61” help us understand the Aqedah better? The contention of this paper is that Genesis 22:1–3 has a history of interpretation that fairly consistently understands Abraham’s response to God in a positive light, as a response that demonstrates an extraordinary degree of faithful obedience. This is true in both Jewish and Christian theological circles up to the present day. But there has been a minority, though persistent, point of view that sees this more traditional, positive history of interpretation as deficient, as concealing a deeper biblical appraisal of the episode. And in the words of the first verse of “Highway 61” Bob Dylan’s reception of Genesis 22:1–3 opens up a fresh (re-)reading of the passage.

 

A tale of two tellings

Whatever Dylan’s intentions for including this biblical episode into his song, the listener is immediately confronted with a couple of sonic sensations as the song begins. As noted earlier, the music has a circus-like feel to it, highlighted by the sound of a siren whistle. The effect here is comedic, giving a sense of playfulness to the song. Then Dylan begins singing, assaulting the listener with his acerbic vocalization of the opening line, “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’” Right away Dylan plays his hand. The opening verse will provide his commentary on the biblical episode in surreal and absurd tones. This is clearly not the reverence with which the Bible is often approached, especially as concerns this passage. God is shown as making a very stark demand – “Kill me a son!” Using the diminutive “Abe,” Dylan presents Abraham’s response not in the tone with which he typically responds to God in biblical texts with such words as, “Here am I.” No, Abe responds incredulously, “Man, you must be putting me on.” When God confirms he is quite serious about this demand, Abe protests, “What?” Here Dylan depicts God as threatening retribution should Abe not comply, to which Abe finally responds in resignation, “Where do you want this killing done?” With God’s answer of “Highway 61,” Dylan’s interpretation comes to a close.

To say there are discrepancies in the two accounts is understatement. One gets the sense that Dylan has serious issues with this biblical story as evidenced in his terse, unnuanced presentation of it. Something is just not right with this story. Dylan’s performance of the opening verse, apart from lyrical considerations, betrays a sense of absurdity in the whole scene. To be sure, many modern thinkers have shared such an opinion of this passage on a variety of grounds. Common to many such reactions to the story is the ethical objection of a deity demanding the sacrifice of a human being’s child. Does this not amount to a power play from one party over another party to commit a heinous act of child abuse?

Making the passage all the more perplexing is the subsequent traditional interpretations of both Jewish and Christian commentators that laud Abraham’s unquestioning obedience to God’s command. Abraham becomes the prototype of absolute obedience. Moreover, Isaac, in his unquestioning acceptance of his father’s plan to sacrifice him becomes the exemplar of submission to the divine will. In fact, in his submission Isaac becomes both the prototype for Jewish martyrs, especially in the Maccabean Revolt, and the template for Jesus’ own sacrifice of himself in submission to God’s will.[4]

Bob Dylan is not among those who take this traditional tack. There is something wrong here. And Dylan’s interpretation, in these few words, highlights several issues that make the traditional interpretation unpalatable to many, and in doing so, opens us up to other possible interpretations. We will take a look at these features of Dylan’s interpretation in light of a recent monograph by Christian Old Testament scholar J. Richard Middleton on the Aqedah titled Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God.

Middleton’s examination of the Aqedah proceeds by looking first at the positive evaluation of Abraham’s actions in the passage in ancient Jewish and Christian sources. The tyranny of such interpretations was so complete that in the early centuries of the Common Era Jewish Rabbis issued prohibitions against any type of protest against the actions of God, an attitude also reflected in early Christian writings.[5] Middleton’s point of departure for his study is an appeal to Scripture itself. This is strategically vital for Middleton’s argument that there is another approach possible in assessing what is going on in Genesis 22. He takes a reverential approach to God, taking seriously the dynamics of the divine-human relationship, but arguing that Scripture is replete with examples of those who contested with God. He takes this approach by addressing some current Jewish and Christian assertions that negative assessments of the Aqedah proceed from modern sensibilities that were simply not in play in the timeframe of both the Aqedah and subsequent ancient interpreters.[6] Agreeing with these sentiments, Middleton sets out to provide a fresh reading of the Aqedah by reading it in its scriptural context, both in terms of the larger narrative of Abraham found in Genesis and in connection with another biblical book, Job. And we will see that Middleton’s reading is the type of reading that is suggested by hearing Dylan’s words in the opening verse of “Highway 61.”

The first line of the song, in which God demands Abraham kill his son, is Dylan’s casting of the line in Genesis 22:2: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” Dylan’s framing is that of an imperative, a demand. But Middleton notes that English translations such as the one offered here obscure an important detail. God’s command is tempered somewhat by the presence of the Hebrew particle na’, which in this usage should be rendered as something like, “please,” framing the statement more as an entreaty than an outright command.[7] As most English translations, which omit this word entirely, read, it is a less stark presentation of the way Dylan frames the command, but it is essentially the same kind of command as Dylan presents it. But here the Hebrew text offers a clue that might challenge us to reassess what is going on in this passage.

On a related note, Dylan’s characterization of Isaac as “a son” is a blunting of how God describes Isaac to Abraham in Genesis 22:2. God commands Abraham to take, please, “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love” and go offer him as a burnt offering. In the biblical text the son is identified by his name, Isaac, with the qualifiers that he is Abraham’s son, his only son, and that Isaac is a son whom Abraham loves. These qualifiers might seem unnecessary, but they serve to show Abraham’s relationship to Isaac. He is not just “a son”; God describes the relationship as close and intimate. Middleton sees here a clue that suggests this episode is not just a test to demonstrate Abraham’s obedience.[8]

The second line of the song is perhaps Dylan’s greatest challenge to reread the story: “Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’” As Middleton’s book title suggests, the greatest scandal of the passage is that Abraham is silent at this request. In the whole episode in Genesis, Abraham never verbally addresses God about the request. Dylan shows Abe as actually responding verbally to God’s demand. Not only that, Abe is shown questioning God’s request in terms that indicate that Abe is not on the same page as God here. Why is this such a scandalous observation?

Two episodes earlier in the story of Abraham illustrate the issue. First, in Genesis 18, God has determined to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and to tell Abraham of his plan to do so. Once he has been told of God’s plan, Abraham enters into an extended discussion with God highlighting God’s mercy and justice and that surely God would not destroy the city were there to be righteous people present in those cities (vv. 23–33). So Abraham asks God if he would spare the city were there to be 50 righteous people there. God responds that he will not destroy it for the sake of 50. This pattern repeats with Abraham asking about 45, 40, 30, 20, and finally 10. God responds after each request that he would not destroy the city. Abraham seems content with God’s concession of 10 righteous, and the discussion ends with God and Abraham parting ways. Why Abraham did not go further is a question the author of Genesis does not answer. This detail will detain us later. For now, it is noteworthy that Abraham would intercede on behalf of hypothetically righteous strangers and not for his own son.

A similar incident occurs in Genesis 21 regarding Ishmael, Abraham’s son born of Hagar, a slave of Abraham’s wife Sarah. In Genesis 16, after God had promised an heir to the couple in their old age and 10 years having passed with Sarah having no children, Sarah pressured Abraham to have a child through Hagar. In Genesis 17, when God again affirms that Sarah would bear Abraham a son, Abraham beseeches God to let Ishmael be his heir given the ages of Abraham and Sarah (vv. 18, 20). God again promises an heir will be born through Sarah (v. 15–16, 19). Once Isaac is born and has grown some, she sees Isaac and Ishmael playing with each other and becomes angered, urging Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Abraham is distressed at this request (21:8–10). And though the text does not show Abraham interceding for this mother and child at this point, as he did in ch. 17, God comes to reassure Abraham that even though the great nation promised to Abraham would come through Isaac, Ishmael would also become a great nation (Gen 21:12–13). The point here is that Abraham is shown displaying love and concern for his son Ishmael, emotions that Abraham is not depicted as experiencing in the text of Genesis 22:1–3. Dylan’s Abe is shown having at least enough concern for Isaac that he questions God’s demand. Again, in the biblical account Abraham is silent.

Another detail in Dylan’s telling, connected to his depiction of an Abe that engages God on this matter, is that Abe solicits from God the location of this killing. In the Genesis account, God tells Abraham that he is sending him to the land of Moriah to sacrifice Isaac on “one of the mountains that I shall show you.” But God in Dylan’s account says the location is Highway 61. Brian Walsh succinctly describes the significance of Highway 61 in the context of the song, musical history, and Dylan’s career:

All through the song the invitation is to Highway 61, and while no one in the song ever goes there, it is consistently a site of murder, sorrow, betrayal, even of a third world war. This is the blues highway, where Robert Johnson made his bargain with the Devil; the route up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Chicago for African American migration, and from Duluth to the blues for Bob Dylan.[9]

Highway 61 is a location of hardship, despair, the stuff of the blues. There is no redemption, no hope, here. In the Bible, however, Moriah, specifically the mountain on which the “sacrifice” of Isaac was enacted, is a place that is identified as the eventual location of Solomon’s temple (2 Chron 3:1), the symbol of God’s presence with Israel. It is the place of worship, of hope. In Dylan’s portrayal, however, the location of the killing is not a place of “sacrifice,” a term laden with implications of restored relationship between God and human beings. It is simply one of a series of instances where despair is found.

At virtually every point, though there are similarities between Genesis 22:1–3 and the first verse of “Highway 61,” Dylan’s telling of the event challenges the positive evaluation of the episode in Jewish and Christian traditions. Dylan’s verse depicts the command for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in ways that highlight the absurdity of the scene. Middleton, for his part, agrees with Dylan’s sentiment and seeks for clues in the text that suggest another way to read the passage, one that itself challenges the positive interpretive hegemony of traditional understandings of the passage, doing so in terms that take seriously the biblical context of the passage. At this stage, we see that Middleton thinks that the passage in context itself suggests another way to read it. The next section of this paper will look at what Middleton thinks the passage might suggest Abraham should have done when God confronts him with this demand.

 

What should Abraham have done?

Dylan, for his part, shows us what the answer is: Abraham should have done as Abe did and challenge God’s request. Of course, Dylan recognizes that in reality his Abe apparently does as Abraham did in Genesis 22. That is just how the story goes. But in Dylan’s telling, Abe at least goes down swinging. Not so in Genesis. And Middleton, for his part, agrees. Abraham should have challenged God. Whereas Dylan does not explicitly state the grounds on which Abe questions God, implicitly he does so because something just sounds wrong here. Again, Middleton agrees, but he will go on to explain why and how Abraham should have questioned God, and he finds the grounds in the Bible itself.

Middleton argues that the Genesis text is signaling in the details we have recounted here that God may have indeed been testing Abraham, but not in the sense traditionally affirmed.[10] After all, the Genesis passage opens with the words, “After these things God tested Abraham” (Gen 22:1). Middleton affirms that yes, indeed, there is a test here. But unlike the history of interpretation asserts, the test is not whether Abraham would exhibit absolute, unquestioned obedience to the divine will. Rather, the test is whether Abraham would rightly discern what kind of God his God truly is.[11] If Abraham is going to follow God faithfully, he must know who this God is. Up to this point in the narrative of Abraham, God has provided opportunities for Abraham to discern this, but Abraham has fallen short of right discernment. The two episodes we observed above attest to this. First, God had promised Abraham an heir through whom all families on earth would be blessed (Gen 17:19; cf. 12:2; 15:4), but Abraham acquiesced to his wife Sarah’s demand that he father a child through Hagar. In this, Abraham chose to ignore God’s promise and choose another way, a way that introduced huge ramifications for both his family and the history of his descendants. Second, Abraham did indeed challenge God’s stated plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, appealing to God’s mercy and justice in gaining concessions that God would not destroy the cities were there to be found a requisite number of righteous inhabitants. Abraham “negotiates” down to 10 as the standard, rightly assessing that God is indeed merciful and just, but then inexplicably stops there and does not dare to lower the number to 1![12] So Abraham here does exhibit a right discernment on who his God is, but fails to assess the extent to which this God is merciful and just.

Fast forward to Genesis 22, and God apparently has decided to give Abraham one final, ultimate test. Would Abraham rightly discern God’s character? The most extreme test is presented, the sacrifice of his only son, the one through whom God would fulfill his promise to Abraham to become a nation as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore. And here, Abraham is silent! And this even after God has provided hints as to how Abraham should respond. God affirms Abraham loves Isaac, and has even framed his request with the word “please.” Yet Abraham proceeds without question to fulfill God’s request. He goes so far as to raise the knife above Isaac to kill him, and at this stage God, through an angel, stops him and has him sacrifice a ram that has been trapped in a thicket (Gen 22:9–13). The New Testament provides a positive take on this scene, attributing to Abraham a belief that God could raise the dead were he to have killed Isaac (Heb 11:17–19). And in Genesis, God affirms that he will fulfill his promises to Abraham because he showed that he would not spare his only son (Gen 22:15–18). Thus the positive assessment of the episode in Jewish and Christian traditions.

So does Abraham pass the test? Middleton acknowledges that Abraham passed the test of unquestioned obedience, but also states that this is not a quality that God actually asks of his followers.[13] The Aqedah itself, in its concluding verse, gives a clue that passing this type of test actually proved extremely costly. In Genesis 22:19, it states, “So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham lived at Beer- sheba.” No mention is made that Isaac came back down the mountain with him. There appears to be a breach in the relationship between Abraham and Isaac. But this is not all.

Indeed, as Genesis 23:1–2 indicates, when Sarah died, Abraham went from his home in Beer-Sheba to the place where Sarah died, Hebron.[14] Many believe that this indicates that Abraham and Sarah were estranged. To be sure, the circumstances of their marriage seem strained as indicated by the whole drama concerning Sarah and Hagar as well as the fact that the text of Genesis does not indicate that Abraham conferred with Sarah beforehand about his plan to sacrifice Isaac. Moreover, Isaac seems to have been living apart from Abraham, in the Negeb (Gen 24:62), at the time Abraham secured a wife for him. And the remainder of the story of Abraham’s descendants in Genesis shows all sorts of familial discord, with the sibling rivalry between Isaac’s sons Esau and Jacob in part fostered by Isaac’s wife, Rebekah (Gen 27:1–40), and the strife between the sons of Jacob, the key event being the selling of Joseph into slavery by his brothers (Gen 37:12–36).[15]

Middleton suggests that this is related to Abraham’s failure to discern what kind of God his God is.[16] Middleton points to Genesis 18:19, where Abraham is told that he must pass on to his descendants what kind of God this God is. So what kind of God does Isaac see in Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice Isaac? Could the lessons learned in Moriah have shaped the subsequent history of Isaac and in turn Jacob?[17]

Of course, we cannot know what the course of events might have been had Abraham challenged God. That is not how the story worked out. But here we see Middleton looking at the biblical context of the Aqedah to offer a rereading of the episode. He does not offer his alternative from the perspective of modern sensibilities; he looks to the text for clues for an alternative understanding of the passage.

There is another level of biblical context to which Middleton appeals. It is not enough to suggest Abraham should have done something other than he did. What might Abraham have done? Of course, as we have indicated, he could have done something he already did, which is to question God as he did regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here Middleton examines at length various scriptural evidence that God appreciates, indeed encourages, those who will challenge him in covenantal relationship. He examines a category of psalms known as “lament” psalms, in which complaints are raised to God over the suffering that the people of God are experiencing in an attitude of trust in God’s faithfulness to his covenant.[18] Moses offers passionate intercession on behalf of the Israelites after God has vowed to destroy them for their unfaithfulness.[19] Most dramatic is Job’s lengthy questioning of God in light of his personal suffering.[20] The appeal to Job is most poignant in this respect because in Jewish tradition there is a connection made between the stories of Abraham and Job (Jubilees 17– 18).[21] Middleton suggests that the book of Job may serve as a corrective to Abraham’s behavior in the Aqedah, showing that protest of one who trusts in God is appropriate.[22] Though God does chastise Job for the actual substance of some of his complaint questioning God’s justice (Job 38–39), he does indicate that Job’s tack is nevertheless valid, as indicated in Job 40–41, and that ultimately Job has spoken correctly (Job 42:7). These biblical examples constitute what Middleton calls “vigorous prayer” as the response of the faithful to God in times of personal suffering and distress.[23]

The great Jewish thinker Elie Wiesel perhaps sums up best what Middleton is arguing in his response to a question as to whether it is even appropriate anymore to talk about God in light of the horrors of Auschwitz:

I do not believe that we can talk about God; we can only – as Kafka said – talk to God. It depends on who is talking. What I try to do is speak to God. Even when I speak against God, I speak to God. And even if I am angry at God, I try to show God my anger. But even that is a profession, not a denial of God.

One of the most serious questions I have confronted over the years is whether one can still believe in God after Auschwitz. It was not easy to keep faith. Nevertheless, I can say that, despite all the difficulties and obstacles, I have never abandoned God. I had tremendous problems with God, and still do. Therefore, I protest against God. Sometimes I bring God before the bench. Nevertheless, everything I do is done from within faith and not from outside. If one believes in God one can say anything to God. One can be angry at God, one can praise God, one can demand things of God. Above all, one can demand justice of God.[24]

It is not enough to state that Abraham should have done something else. There needs to be some justification to suggest such. Middleton’s approach is to show that Abraham should have done so – indeed had previously done so – in light of the biblical context in which his story occurs. Middleton has persuasively suggested that the biblical context of Abraham’s own story and the larger context of the Bible has provided ample justification for his argument. And in arguing this way, Middleton has shown that Dylan was on to something in his take on the story.

 

Conclusion

Reading the Bible from within a long tradition of interpretation can dull our senses to the biblical texts themselves as we have become familiar, even overfamiliar, with what we have received. Sometimes something comes along that jars us as recipients of those traditions, presenting us with takes that drive us back to the texts to read them once again, and in that process, the stimuli that brought us back to the texts help us see something new. Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61” does just that with the familiar story of the Aqedah.

In our study here we compared the presentations of Dylan and Genesis to identify points of divergence that cause us to re-examine the biblical story in its own context. In this process, we engaged J. Richard Middleton’s provocative study of the Aqedah and in it found a reading of the text that broke from traditional interpretations of the story and did so in terms that resonated with Dylan’s depiction. Interestingly, in his book Middleton never referenced “Highway 61.”[25] We simply identified Middleton’s reading as one that might eventuate if one started with Dylan’s presentation and read the biblical text in that light. Middleton’s study, placing the Aqedah as it does within its larger biblical context, shows that tradition does not always exhaust interpretive possibilities. Sometimes we just need a push to make us look at familiar stories anew.

Maybe Isaac is not the only one sent to die on “Highway 61.” Maybe interpretive tyrannies go there to die as well.

 

Works Cited

Cohen, Leonard, “The Story of Isaac.” Track 2 on Songs from a Room.

Columbia Records, 1969.

Cohen, Leonard, “You Want It Darker.” Track 1 on You Want It Darker.

Columbia Records, 2016.

Dylan, Bob, “Highway 61.” Track 7 on Highway 61 Revisited. Warner Bros., 1965.

Ellis, Nicholas J. “The Reception of Jobraham Narratives in Jewish Thought.” In Authoritative

Texts and Reception History: Aspects and Approaches, edited by Dan Batovici and Kristin de

Troyer, 214–40. Leiden: Brill, 2016

Kalmenson, Mendel. “Where Was Abraham at the Time of Sarah’s Death?” Chabad.org,

https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/1579612/jewish/Where-Was-Abraham-at-the-Time-of-Sarahs-Death.htm.

Lamp, Jeffrey S. Reading Green: Tactical Considerations for Reading the Bible Ecologically.

New York: Peter Lang, 2017.

Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child

Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Middleton, J. Richard. Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How

to Talk Back to God. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021.

Moberly, R. W. L. “Abraham and God in Genesis 22.” In The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A

Study of Abraham and Jesus, 71–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Schuster, Ekkehard, and Reinhold Boschert-Kimmig. Hope against Hope: Johann Baptist Metz

and Elie Wiesel Speak Out on the Holocaust. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999.

van Bekkum, Wout Jac. “The Aqedah and Its Interpretations in Midrash and Piyyut.” In The

Sacrifice of Isaac: The Aqedah (Genesis 22) and Its Interpretations, edited by Edward

Noort and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, 86–95. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2002.

Walsh, Brian. “Taking Abraham to Highway 61.” Canadian-American Theological Review 11

(2022): 7–11.

 

[1] Bob Dylan, “Highway 61,” track 7 on Highway 61 Revisited, Warner Bros., 1965.

[2] Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

[3] For a summary of reception exegesis, see Jeffrey S. Lamp, Reading Green: Tactical Considerations for Reading the Bible Ecologically (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 77–81, and the literature cited there.

[4] J. Richard Middleton, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 137–40, 142–44, 148–49, 160–63; Wout Jac. van Bekkum, “The Aqedah and Its Interpretations in Midrash and Piyyut,” in The Sacrifice of Isaac: The Aqedah (Genesis 22) and Its Interpretations, eds. Edward Noort and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2002), 86–95.

[5] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 147–49.

[6] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 140–44. See also Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); R. W. L. Moberly, “Abraham and God in Genesis 22,” in The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71–131.

[7] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 154. Middleton places this in his own translation of the passage (167).

[8] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 171–73. Middleton suggests that the duration of the trip to Moriah may have given Abraham time to meditate on his feelings for Isaac and thus be motivated to intercede for him (176).

[9] Brian Walsh, “Taking Abraham to Highway 61,” Canadian-American Theological Review 11 (2022): 8.

[10] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 181.

[11] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 197.

[12] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 203.

[13] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 197.

[14] In Jewish rabbinic tradition, there are attempts to cast these details in such a way as to circumvent the implications of the biblical text and to show that Abraham and Sarah lived together at the time of her death. See Mendel Kalmenson, “Where Was Abraham at the Time of Sarah’s Death?” Chabad.org,

https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/1579612/jewish/Where-Was-Abraham-at-the-Time-of-Sarahs-Death.htm.

[15] Genesis 25–50 rehearse the story of Jacob and his sons, highlighting many instances of family dysfunction (Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 208–9).

[16] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 197, 203–6.

[17] Middleton (Abraham’s Silence, 209–11) addresses these questions in a rather dismal tone. He argues that Gen 31:42, 53 show how Isaac is understood in connection with God, with God characterized as the “God of Abraham,” whereas God is characterized as the “fear of Isaac” (213).

[18] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, ch. 1.

[19] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, ch. 2.

[20] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, chs. 3–4.

[21] So close has been the connection between Abraham and Job that Nicholas J. Ellis coined the term “Jobraham” to illustrate it (Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 183). See Nicholas J. Ellis, “The Reception of Jobraham Narratives in Jewish Thought,” in Authoritative Texts and Reception History: Aspects and Approaches, eds. Dan Batovici and Kristin de Troyer (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 214–40.

[22] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 167, 183–90. Middleton even calls Job a “subversive sequel” to the Aqedah (189).

[23] Middleton, Abraham’s Silence, 63.

[24] Ekkehard Schuster and Reinhold Boschert-Kimmig, Hope against Hope: Johann Baptist Metz and Elie Wiesel Speak Out on the Holocaust (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999), 91–92.

[25] He did, however, mention a Leonard Cohen song, “The Story of Isaac” (track 2 on Songs from a Room, Columbia Records, 1969), that critiqued American fathers sending their sons to the Vietnam War. Middleton (Abraham’s Silence, 144) notes that the Aqedah was used as a justification for fathers in Israel to send their sons to war in the Six-Day War (1967). Middleton also cites a later Cohen song, “You Want It Darker” (track 1 on You Want It Darker, Columbia Records, 2016), that uses the Aqedah to frame a prayer to God.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘Dollitics’ and ‘Dylantics’: Folk Music and the Political Rhetoric of Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan”

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Other Issues

“‘Dollitics’ and ‘Dylantics’: Folk Music and the Political Rhetoric of Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Christine Hand Jones

 

Today, I want to talk about Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton. Now, these two may seem like a strange pairing. Indeed, Dolly Parton said that she met Dylan “a few times” but “never felt any warmth,” thinking she might have “offended him.” She said, “I love his music but he’s a weird buckaroo” (Manzoor). So why talk about the two of them together today? Well, to help show you, let’s play a little game called “Dolly or Dylan.” I’ll show you a quote and your job is simple: tell me – is it from Dolly or Dylan? (See answers in footnotes).

 

1) It’s a rich man’s game / No matter what they call it / And you spend your life / Putting money in his wallet[1]

2) Well, he hands you a nickel, and he hands you a dime / And he asks you with a grin, if you’re havin’ a good time / Then he fines you every time you slam the door[2]

3) Your breath is sweet, your eyes are like two jewels in the sky / Your back is straight, your hair is smooth on the pillow where you lie.[3]

4) Your beauty is beyond compare / With flaming locks of auburn hair / With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green / Your smile is like a breath of spring / Your voice is soft like summer rain.[4]

5) Well a long winter’s wait from the window I watched / My friends they couldn’t have been kinder / And my schooling was cut as I quit in the spring / To marry John Thomas, a miner[5]

6) Well, the winter came and the snow did fall / and the night was cold and still / And the rags we wore were not enough / and Joe he caught the chill[6]

7) “…Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book…All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from ‘Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain’ to ‘Keep on the Sunny Side.’ You can find all my philosophy in those old songs.”[7]

8) “…those old songs were the ones we heard the most. So it’s just embedded in me and it’s the easiest thing in the world. That’s the stuff that comes out of me the easiest.”[8]

9) “I don’t do politics. I’m an entertainer.”[9]

10) “I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world.”[10]

The point of these comparisons is not just to show that these two artists have a lot in common, but that they have two important things in common: 1) Both Dolly and Dylan have maintained political ambiguity throughout their careers, even while making meaningful statements about social justice, and 2) Both Dolly and Dylan’s music is deeply rooted in the folk tradition.

The folk tradition, as each of these artists has embraced it, thrives on storytelling and resists harsh categorizations. In a folk song, the mysteries of human love, sorrow, and hatred take center stage. Folk songs tell stories of their time and place that cannot help but reflect a political context, yet the driving force of the folk song is not broad categories but minute details. And what I want to argue today is that there is a relationship between folk music and this unique ability on the part of both artists to simultaneously make important “political” statements in their songs while also coloring outside of all political party lines. Folk music is universal; folk storytelling is particular. Together, these folk song traits shaped both artists’ approach to politics.

Now it may seem odd to say that folk music could lead to political ambiguity. Thanks to the role of folk music in the social movements of the sixties, “folk” and “political” may almost seem synonymous. But despite his early ties to the socialist leanings of the folk revival and his involvement with the Civil Rights movement, Bob Dylan has stood apart from his folk music peers by refusing to declare political allegiances. In a room full of Dylan fans, I don’t need to recount all the ways Dylan has resisted political categorization, but here’s a little taste of his political evasiveness in “I Shall Be Free No. 10” from Another Side of Bob Dylan: “Now, I’m liberal, but to a degree / I want everybody to be free / But if you think that I’ll let Barry Goldwater / Move in next door and marry my daughter / You must think I’m crazy! / I wouldn’t let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.”

Dolly Parton, too, has remained steadfastly ambiguous about politics. Dolly’s political ambiguity is reflected in the love that her fans from all political persuasions express for her, and she protects that love by outright refusing to take a side. Those who know her best have a word for it: “Dollitics.” Her relative and bodyguard, Brian Seaver, spoke of Dolly’s political evasions to Jad Abumrad, host of the 2019 podcast, “Dolly Parton’s America,” saying “It’s verbal judo. She’s the best interviewee on the planet. Nobody does interviews like Dolly. I’m very outspoken politically, but I try not to talk Dollitics at all.”

So Dolly protects her fans and her brand by refusing to make overt political statements, yet at the same time, she has written songs that raise awareness of social issues, particularly regarding the lives of women. Even as her song “9-5” was embraced as a political anthem in the fight for women’s and labor rights, Dolly herself resisted the term feminism. Shortly after the film, 9-5, was released, she told Rolling Stone, “A lot of people thought it was going to be women’s lib; I wouldn’t have been involved if I’d thought it was gonna’ be a sermon of some sort. Not that I’m not for rights for everybody, I’m just sayin’ I didn’t want to get involved in a political thing” (qtd in Hamessley 132, from Flippo, “Dolly Parton,” Rolling Stone 40). In 2016, however, Dolly said that she was “proud to be part of” 9-5‘s message of “preaching…equal pay for equal work” (qtd in Hamessley 132). Lydia Hamessley comments saying, “Despite her reluctance to define her beliefs as feminist, Dolly is committed to women’s rights even though she always contextualizes this within the rights of all people” (132). This commitment to a universal message of inclusion apart from politics has characterized Dolly’s stance on women’s rights as well as her statements on marriage equality and her response to the Black Lives Matter movement, when she said, “Of course Black Lives Matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones?” (qtd in Domonoske).

So both of these artists resist political labels, while at the same time writing songs of social importance that call their audience to compassion and understanding for their fellow man, and I believe that reading Dolly Parton alongside Bob Dylan helps to make sense of that seeming paradox for these two artists. Read side-by-side, the common factor here is each artist’s deep commitment to folk music as the foundation of all their work.

Let’s talk about folk music first, with a little snippet from the aforementioned “I Shall Be Free No. 10.” As the song continues, Dylan makes a meta-reference to the music itself: “Now you’re probably wondering by now / Just what this song is all about / What’s probably got you baffled more / Is what this thing here is for.” “It’s nothing / It’s something I learned over in England.” Here, Dylan’s humorous reference to a British folk heritage undermines any faith one may have had in the music’s deeper significance. But the music, of course, is significant.

In Dylan’s Greenwich village folk scene, folk music was connected to “songs of persuasion,” which R. Serge Denisoff defines as “propaganda songs,” in which the folk instruments and style provided a simple vehicle for the lyrics (6). But of course, the music is never merely a vehicle. At a basic level, the simplicity of folk styles conveyed the message of an unpretentious music – a music of the people, not of the elite. So, even when the music was meant to take a backseat to the lyrics, the music mattered. This idea of music as a way to carry political ideas forms the framework for Ilias Ben Mna’s analysis of “country music with anti-oppressive themes,” which he says “can serve as a mass-accessible vehicle” for “poignant and subversive commentary” (Ben Mna 1-2). He counts Parton’s “9-5” as an example, noting that with its folk-influenced melody, “Dolly Parton’s anthem provides a gateway…directing the rural and urban poor against a patriarchal capitalism” (Ben Mna 12). So on one level, folk and country music conveys social and political messages effectively, simply because it is accessible and relatable.

But on another level, folk music communicates effectively because folk melodies are cross-cultural and universal. Because folk music is often modal, the melodies revolve around a five-note pentatonic major or minor scale, a scale that occurs in every mode (do, re, mi, so, la). Some music scholars see in the “complementary and mutually dependent” folk melodies a communal alternative to the hierarchy, dominance, and hustle culture of capitalism (Shepherd 109), asserting that “pentatonic tunes…are not trying, like Western man, to ‘get somewhere’ but live in an existential present, affirming an identity with nature, even with the cosmos” (Mellers 32). Furthermore, the pentatonic scale can be considered the most “natural” scale because it comes “most directly from…the fifths and fourths of the [natural] harmonic series” (Mellers 32). From this perspective, the foundation of folk music is not just “for the people”; it’s derived from nature itself. Pentatonic scales immediately establish a deep musical connection that cuts across time and geography in a way that other musical styles simply cannot.

But if folk music has this kind of power, what makes Dylan or Dolly special? Dolly’s reliance on modes and the “old world” sound set her apart from her country counterparts, but Dylan’s use of modes was hardly unique in his 60s folk circles. Why wouldn’t every song based on a folk tune move the listener as Dylan’s and Dolly’s have? To answer that, we need to look at the lyrical content of folk songs and at how both Dylan and Dolly maintain a connection to folk tradition in their writing that prioritizes storytelling over sermonizing.

Of the types of old-world songs that influenced both Dolly and Dylan, ballads are at the top of the list. We know that Dylan was highly influenced by ballads. He stole/borrowed some of their melodies outright and he has talked at length about the effect of these songs on his life. To name only one example, Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” is based on the murder ballad, “Pretty Polly.” Likewise, Dolly borrowed the melody for “Little Sparrow” from the folk tune “Wayfarin’ Stranger,” and its subject matter from the ballad, “Come all ye fair and tender maidens.” Dolly learned the old ballads from her mother, who used to sing them. In Dolly’s words, “Mama told us that’s how people used to carry the news, they used to write it in songs, carry it from village to village… A lot of the stuff in those old-world songs were true stories that happened” (qtd in Hamessley 68).

Lydia Hamessley describes ballads as “stories of a far-off time…filled with the supernatural, fantastical settings, bravery and deceit, and love gone wrong, often in tragic, violent, and even gory ways” (67). Speaking of violence and gore, the murder ballad — a ballad that, you guessed it, tells the story of a murder, deserves its own mention for how it influenced both writers. Frank Mehring explains, “With their origins in seventeenth century Europe, murder ballads have become part of American folk music pronounced in the hillbilly music, Appalachian and…blues traditions” (Mehring 108). Importantly, a large number of these murder ballads describe women being murdered, usually by a lover, and often in situations involving pregnancy or suspected cheating. “Pretty Polly” is a great example – Polly is led off to a lonesome place by her lover just so he can kill her. These ballads demonstrate what Frank Mehring calls ‘“inherently ‘intermedial powers’” that “penetrate both public and political spheres, offering creative and self-reflexive responses to social realities” (108). In other words, a murder ballad is never just about recounting grisly details of a killing but is a way for for the singers and listeners to reflect on important social issues – for example, with Dylan, racism or poverty. And if you want a wonderful, concise discussion of murder ballads and Bob Dylan, I strongly recommend the recent episode of Laura Tenschert’s “Definitely Dylan” podcast, where she does a deep dive through Dylan’s early murder ballads. Finally, Hamessley explains that ballads are “usually sung…in a dispassionate way with little to no moralizing. The fine grain of ballads is in the dialogue and descriptions of actions, not in explaining motives or exploring emotions” (67). Hamessley’s last point is worth reiterating: ballads are not about morals or motives, but details and descriptions. So although other songwriters in the 60s folk revival scene were influenced by ballads, where they used their songs to moralize, Dylan and Dolly manage to avoid that trap.

One of Dylan’s earliest attempts at a murder ballad, “The Death of Emmett Till,” shows the fledgling songwriter still finding his way, with the heavy-handed moral: “But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give / We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.” Two years after he wrote it, he called it a “bullshit song,” saying his “reasons and motives behind it were phony” (qtd in Heylin 87-88). Dylan later moved past such sermonizing, eventually outpacing his topical-songwriting peers by moving to the heart of the stories of the marginalized and avoiding the more overt, even propagandist tactics of his fellow songwriters.

One such example is “Oxford Town,” written in response to a Broadside competition to write about James Meredith’s enrollment in the University of Mississippi (Heylin 131). Betsey Bowden calls Phil Ochs’ song on the topic “inflammatory journalism,” “a musical editorial,” in contrast with Dylan’s “Oxford Town,” which “uses topicality as a springboard for artistic complexity in performance and for political effectiveness” (13). The key to that complexity and effectiveness is the song’s storytelling, which provides specific details of the Oxford Town experience and allows the narrative to remain unresolved.

Time and again in Dylan’s ballads, he allows a story’s details to speak louder than a predetermined message. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” modeled after the ballad, “Lord Randal,” takes “show don’t tell” to a whole new level with its barrage of vivid, sometimes disturbing images. The harrowing “Ballad of Hollis Brown” delivers no moral in its story of Brown’s mass family murder/suicide. “North Country Blues” issues no condemnation for the deserting husband or sympathy for the jilted wife. Instead, the details immerse the listener in the story and allow the listener to decide. And in songs that do have a moral of some sort, the villain is not an individual so much as it is broken society, as in “Only a Pawn in their Game,” or a failed justice system, as in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol.” And this list only scratches the surface – we lack the time to go into “Dear Landlord,” “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” or “Hurricane,” but in all of Dylan’s ballads, he tells the stories of the marginalized, he pushes the boundaries of the narrative form, he leaves things unresolved, he identifies with the “villains” or the “other,” and he repeatedly shows his audience, “I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide” (“With God on Our Side”).

Dolly, too, resists stereotypes and simple portrayals or solutions in her ballads. She tells complex, often dark stories that let the listener in on the real lives inside. In “Daddy’s Moonshine Still,” “Joshua,” and “Robert,” she “invoke[s] negative stereotypical images of Appalachia, such as the moonshiner, the mountain hermit, or incest,” but, Lydia Hamessley explains, “Dolly does not move into parody or ridicule in them” (58). Instead, Dolly uses the ballad to sympathize and humanize these figures.

Even Dolly’s mega-hit, “Jolene,” which strays from the typical ballad formula, succeeds largely because of the ways it borrows from balladry. It uses that “old world” modal harmony to tell a story. The song’s account of Jolene, with her “flaming…hair,” “ivory skin” and “emerald” eyes evokes the lush descriptions of women from traditional ballads. But what makes “Jolene” stand out is the way it strays from the country music formula of the “other woman” song. Unlike Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City,” “Jolene” is not a song about getting revenge or sitting at home crying while the husband cheats. The narrator of “Jolene” takes the situation into her own hands, treats the cheating woman like a fellow human being, and has a talk with her, woman-to-woman. Dolly preserves the humanity of both the cheating woman and the cheated-on narrator, even as the ambiguous ending leaves the tale forever unresolved.

Dolly applies the same sensitivity and humanity to her many other ballads, songs that often delve into the difficult lives of women and do not shy away from such controversial topics as unwed pregnancy, suicide, and abortion. Dolly has called these her “sad-ass songs” – and she has a lot of them. But more than being merely sentimental, these ballads “reflect the complexity of women’s lives without seeming to take an overt political stand” (Hamessley 131).

“Daddy Come and Get Me” is a prime example of a “sad-ass song” that sheds light on unjust circumstances. In it, a woman calls for her father to come get her out of a mental institution that her husband put her in just “to get [her] out of his way” so that he could have an affair. Dolly wrote the song with her aunt Dorothy Jo, and it was based on more than one true story of people they knew. Dolly says, “It was a situation that nobody knew how to handle” (Parton, Songteller 87). In Dolly’s song, we never learn how the situation is handled. We do not know if the father ever comes for his wrongly institutionalized daughter; we are left only with her “looking out through…iron bars.”

In another song about the plight of women, “Down from Dover,” Dolly paints the sad picture of a jilted, pregnant young woman through poignant details:

I know this dress I’m wearing doesn’t hide the secret
I have tried concealing
When he left he promised me he’d be back
By the time it was revealing
The sun behind a cloud just casts the crawling shadow
Over the fields of clover
And time is running out for me I wish
That he would hurry down from Dover

In true “sad-ass song” fashion, the baby dies at the end of the song, and the woman is left alone. Dolly needs no sermon on the sexual double-standard for men and women; she simply lets the details give the message.

Another particularly moving song is Dolly’s “The Bridge.” Like so many of Dolly’s other sad ballads, this one is modal – Mixolydian – and it unfolds its story of love through specific, lovely details of the moon and the meadow, so that the last verse and chorus come as a shock:

Tonight, while standing on the bridge
My heart is beating wild
To think that you could leave me here
With our unborn child
My feet are moving slowly
Closer to the edge
Here is where it started
And here is where I’ll end it…

In some live performances, Dolly finishes the line and the slant rhyme with “…on the bridge,” but the official recording leaves the ending unresolved. All these sad songs bear a direct relationship to the sad ballads that Dolly grew up hearing and singing. “It was so lonesome when Mama would sing,” Dolly says (Hammesley 68). Nowhere is that sadness more acute than in the subgenre of folk songs known as murder ballads.

Though most of Dolly’s sad songs were not precisely murder ballads, their focus on women’s lives, particularly on women who find themselves in the same situations as the unlucky women in the old ballads, allows Dolly to rewrite the endings of those traditional songs and provide women with some empowerment, or if not power, at least pity. “The Bridge” is a great example. Its suspenseful narrative structure and haunting music leads Lydia Hamessley to call the song “as gripping as a murder ballad” (148). Thus Dolly takes the usual expectations from murder ballads and subverts them to focus on the female experience. In the murder ballad “J.J. Sneed,” which she wrote with her aunt Dorothy Jo, a jilted woman is the one who does the killing:

The good old days are over as we stand here in the rain.
J.J., I’m gonna shoot you now I hope you’ll feel no pain.
I hear hoofbeats of the horses and the posse’s on my trail.
I guess I’ll join you soon, but for now, J.J., farewell

Hamessley notes that in this song and others like it, “Dolly modeled ways for women to flip established gender scripts and reimagine their own participation from a place of power and authority” (139).

By reversing gender roles in murder ballads, Dolly Parton continued the tradition of Black, female blues singers like Victoria Spivey, who made a career out of singing murder ballads, which Frank Mehring says “functioned as a musical outlet to carve out a role that was far from the stereotype of the passive female victim” (114). So for Dolly Parton, as for other female songwriters who came before her, traditional folk music tropes provided a framework to challenge the patriarchy while dressing that challenge in the guise of a good story.

In the “Dollitics” episode of the Dolly Parton’s America podcast, host Jad Abumrad tries to get Dolly to speak out against President Trump or to at least make a definitive statement about him, but she refuses. Finally, she says, “Why don’t we pray for the President? If we’re having all these problems, let’s just… why don’t we just pray for Mr. President?” Growing up as I did in an evangelical subculture where “praying for the president” was code for very different things depending on whether that president was a Democrat or a Republican, my initial response to such a phrase is skepticism, but Dolly’s history bears witness to her sincerity. And it made me think of another quote about the president, this time from Bob Dylan: “Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” (“It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”). These may seem like very different sentiments, but they both express an important truth: the President is human too. Perhaps it is naive to think that folk songs can help us to better see one another in our common humanity, but Dylan and Dolly’s work, steeped in the storytelling traditions of the folk ballad, gives me hope that there may be a way for us to view one another in our universality and our particularity.

 

Works Cited

Abumrad, Jad. “Dollitics.” Dolly Parton’s America, NPR, 12 Nov. 2019. NPR,

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/765024913/dolly-parton-s-america.

Adams, Char. “Dolly Parton Explains That Controversial Emmys Moment with 9 to 5 Costars

Jane Fonda & Lily Tomlin.” People Magazine, 3 Oct. 2017,

people.com/tv/dolly-parton-emmys-jane-fonda-lily-tomlin/.

Ben Mna, Ilias. “This Country Ain’t Low-The Country Music of Dolly Parton and Johnny

Cash as a Form of Redistributive Politics.” Arts (Basel), vol. 12, no. 1, 2023, p. 17–,

https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010017.

Bowden, Betsy. Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan. Bloomington: Indiana

UP, 1982.

Denisoff, R. Serge. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. University of

Illinois Press, 1971.

Domonoske, Camila. “‘Of Course Black Lives Matter,’ Dolly Parton Tells Billboard.” NPR,

14 Aug. 2020, http://www.npr.org/2020/08/14/902506007/of-course-black-lives-matter-dolly-

parton-tells-billboard.

“The Folk and the Rock.” Newsweek, vol. 66, no. 12, Sep 20, 1965, pp. 88, 90. ProQuest,

http://proxy.libraries.smu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/folk-

rock/docview/1883519506/se-2.

Hamessley, Lydia R. Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton. University of

Illinois Press, 2020.

Heylin, Clinton. Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan 1957-1973.

Chicago, IL: Chicago Press, 2009.

Manzoor, Sarfraz. “Dolly Parton: ‘I’m a Working Girl. I like Waking up Early and Going to

the 24-Hour Supermarket with My Husband’: An Unforgettable Audience with Dolly

Parton.” Daily Mail Online, 27 Apr. 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-

2611594/Dolly-Parton-Im-working-girl-I-like-waking-early-going-24-hour-

supermarket-husband-An-unforgettable-audience-Dolly-Parton.html.

Mehring, Frank. “Murder on Record Ballads about Love, Death, and the Deep South.” Lied

Und Populäre Kultur, vol. 66, 2021, pp. 107-123.

ProQuest,http://proxy.libraries.smu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-

journals/murder-on-record-ballads-about-love-death-deep/docview/2653591262/se-2.

Mellers, Wilfrid. A Darker Shade of Pale: a Backdrop to Bob Dylan.

London: Faber and Faber, 1984.

Pareles, Jon. “Interview with Jon Pareles, The New York Times, September 28, 1997.” Dylan on

Dylan: The Essential Interviews, edited by Jonathan Cott, Hodder, London, UK,

2007, pp. 391–396.

Parton, Dolly. Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. Chronicle Books, 2020.

Shepherd, John. Music as Social Text. Polity Press, 1991.

Tenschert, Laura. “’Her heart blood did flow’: Bob Dylan’s Murder Ballads of the Early

1960s,” 17 May 2023, Definitely Dylan, www.definitelydylan.com/podcasts

 

[1] Dolly Parton, “9-5”

[2] Bob Dylan, “Maggie’s Farm”

[3] Dylan, “One More Cup of Coffee”

[4] Dolly, “Jolene”

[5] Dylan, “North Country Blues”

[6] Dolly, “Gypsy Joe and Me”

[7] Dylan, Interview with Jon Pareles, The New York Times, September 28, 1997

[8] Dolly, in Sarah Liss, “Blond Ambition: Country Treasure Dolly Parton Comes Alive,” CBC News, Nov. 9, 2009, quoted in Hamessley, 66-67

[9] Dolly, quoted in Adams, Char. “Dolly Parton Explains That Controversial Emmys Moment with 9 to 5 Costars Jane Fonda & Lily Tomlin.” People Magazine, October 3, 2017

[10] Dylan, quoted in “The Folk and the Rock.” Newsweek, September 20, 1965, 88.

August 26, 2023 by
,

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “How Long Can We Falsify and Deny What Is Real: Bob Dylan Is the Funniest Person Alive, and Why We Need to Talk About It”

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Other Issues

“How Long Can We Falsify and Deny What Is Real: Bob Dylan Is the Funniest Person Alive, and Why We Need to Talk About It.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Harrison Hewitt

 

I’d just like to say before I start that it’s one of the pleasures of my life to be able to be in this room with you people today – to talk about Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, who wrote “Desolation Row.” “Desolation Row,” which is my favorite song. I’ve said if “Desolation Row” were the only song on Highway 61 Revisited, Highway 61 Revisited would still be my favorite album. If “Desolation Row” were the only song Bob Dylan had ever written, Bob Dylan would still be my favorite artist. That’s how much I love “Desolation Row.”

If you listen to the earliest live performances of “Desolation Row,” there’s something interesting that happens and that is that the audience reacts like it’s Def Comedy Jam in 1992 and Bob Dylan is Bernie Mac. The crowd reacts like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard in their lives. They’re losing it after almost every line, and Dylan – far from being unsettled – is loving it. Not physically possible, I suppose, but you can hear him smiling.

Anyway, what’s my point with this? Good question. I hope I remember. Here it is: Dylan has played “Desolation Row” well-nigh 600 times. And it’s only in those early performances that the audience reacted this way. What changed? The song didn’t change. Okay, that’s not exactly true; in later years Dylan would omit certain verses – most notably the verse about the mermaids because, as Allen Ginsberg relayed, Dylan came to view the imagery in that verse as “dopey.” But the point is the essential character of “Desolation Row” has not changed. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying “Desolation Row” is “Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh, here I am at Camp Granada.” It’s not a novelty song, it’s not a comedy song. I listen to “Desolation Row” every day and have for many, many years. It takes me up, down; makes me hot, makes me cold; makes me light, makes me heavy. Like Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row” is many things. But one of the things it is, is funny. And that’s the aspect that’s been lost, at least insomuch as you won’t hear an audience laugh at the funny lines anymore, the way they did when both the song and its author were young.

This, to me, is a metaphor for Bob Dylan’s career. There are surprisingly few explorations of Dylan’s sense of humor, and the ones there are tend to focus heavily – if not exclusively – on early Dylan. The implication being that at a certain point Dylan dropped the comedic side of his character and became a figure of great seriousness. Is that true? Did Dylan change, or is it the response to Dylan that changed?

I would submit it’s the latter. And I would explain it like this: If you go to a show and you hear something you think is funny and other people are laughing, you’ll be happy to join in. But if you go to a show that people say is super serious and important, even if something strikes you funny, you don’t want to be the one person who laughs because you’ll look like a goof. You’ll seem juvenile, shallow, like you don’t really understand or appreciate the gravity of what’s happening. In other words, the more Dylan was built up by the culture as a figure of great importance, the less folks were willing to admit that he’s funny, or even to recognize that fact.

It can also be a way of inflating oneself. If Dylan is this flesh and blood fella who’s cracking wise, then that can be easily appreciated. But if I elevate Dylan to be an artist who is so profound and so pure as to be untouchable, or at least to be somebody who can only be handled with white gloves – then I seem smarter for “getting” him. The more serious and important Dylan is, the more serious and important is the person who claims to understand and appreciate his work.

Well, I am not an important person, and I don’t care about being perceived that way. I’m quite happy to paddle around in the shallow end of the pool. And I encourage others to join me! Because it’s fun. Bob Dylan is a fun person. Bob Dylan is a funny person. Some would say Bob Dylan is the funniest person.

But why take my word for it. Let’s go to the quotes!

In 1965, Bob Dylan did an interview with the great Nat Hentoff, may he rest in peace, for Playboy magazine. The audio of this interview is out there, and it’s pretty straight. That is not the interview that appeared in the pages of Playboy. Here’s Nat Hentoff telling the tale:

There were two interviews. The first was really an almost unusually straight interview. As I recall, it was a quite sober, almost historical, biographical account, a lot of opinion, a certain amount of his – you know [Dylan] can’t avoid being sardonically funny, but just a straight interview. The galleys were sent to him and I don’t recall him making more than two changes of no significance. Then the final set came to him after they messed with it [at the Playboy offices] in Chicago. I don’t know what they did but I think they put some words in his mouth. They fooled around with it. I got a call and he was furious. I said, “Look, tell them to go to hell. Tell them you don’t want it to run.” And he said, “No, I got a better idea. I’m gonna make one up.” … He made up an interview. I helped, I must say. Some of the good straight lines are mine, but all the really funny stuff is his. It was run with absolutely no indication it was a put-on. I remember I saw him two or three times in the month or two after and he’d say, “Hey, when’s it coming out, when’s it coming out?” He thought it was a really funny caper, which it was.

 

Perhaps the most famous part of this put-on interview is when Hentoff asked Dylan what made him decide to go the rock ‘n’ roll route. Dylan responded:

Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a thirteen-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this thirteen-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

Hentoff: And that’s how you became a rock ‘n’ roll singer?

Dylan: No, that’s how I got tuberculosis.

This interview fits squarely in the early period when it’s understood and accepted that Dylan could be funny, but I would argue that this spirit of playfulness, of Dylan approaching interviews as capers – is something that’s never left him.

And this is the part of the talk where I find myself struggling, because there is so much material I could include I don’t even know where to begin. If you print out every interview Dylan’s done, it’s about 1500 pages, depending on font size and spacing. And you can just about pick any one of those pages at random and you’re gonna find something funny.

In 1976, Dylan did an interview with Neil Hickey for TV Guide – one of our greatest periodicals – and Dylan was asked what kind of music he listens to… what records does he play for his own amusement?

Dylan said: “Personally, I like sound-effects records. Sometimes late at night, I get a mint julep and just sit there and listen to sound effects. I’m surprised more of them aren’t on the charts. If I had my own label, that’s what I’d record.”

In 1984, Dylan did a really long interview with Bert Kleinman, a career retrospective-type deal, that was cut up and formed the basis of a radio special called Dylan on Dylan. Also in the room was Artie Mogull, who as an executive at Witmark Music signed Dylan to a publishing deal back in 1962. Dylan is cutting loose the whole time, it’s great fun.

At one point he goes:

People say, well isn’t it great to be able to do what you do? Well, you know, yeah, it is to a degree; but you forget that touring performers, anybody that’s an artist, that’s out touring, that’s playing live from town to town night after night – you think that’s easy, it’s not easy! You think that people are having a ball? I mean, people talk to you on the phone: “What’re you doing?” “Oh, I’m in, uh, Schenectady.” “Oh yeah, well you’re having a great time, you know, I’m stuck here… in Orlando.”

My favorite Dylan interviews are the unofficial ones. The tapes of Dylan talking to reporters for print pieces, for example. The kind of interviews that weren’t done to be broadcast, so Dylan’s not doing his performative speaking voice, he’s just talking. You get a sense of the actual guy – in the moments between the moments.

In fact, somewhere along the line of that Dylan on Dylan deal, Dylan is so funny that Kleinman says to him: “You’ve been smiling a lot and laughing a lot here. You don’t do that much on stage. But you say you really enjoy yourself. You look so serious.”

Dylan goes: “Well, the songs take you through different trips, you see. I mean, how you gonna sing ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ or ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ or ‘With God on Our Side,’ or ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ or ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ or ‘License to Kill,’ or ‘Shot of Love,’ or ‘Poison Love’ – any of that. How can you sing that with a smile on your face? It would be kind of hypocritical.”

Joni Mitchell told a great story, in an interview she did with Dave DiMartino for Mojo in 1998. She was talking about the Great Music Experience, this big concert in Japan that both she and Dylan played in 1994.

She said: “[Dylan] called me up just before we went over and he said, ‘I forgot how to sing – but I remember now, I remember now. The trouble is they want to me do all those Bob Dylan songs – and they’re so heavy.’”

Mitchell lamented that both she and Dylan have been typecast as solemn: “It’s like Meryl Streep at a certain point decided to do comedy. I’ve done drama, he’s done drama; we’ve done it very well. But we both have a sense of humor.”

In 1985, Dylan did an interview with Time magazine’s Denise Worrell, which was published in her book Icons. Dylan said: “There’s some humor in my songs. I don’t know, I think so. Some other people might not get it. I think there are funny things inside a lot of them. Some there aren’t. It’s kind of mixed up so much that I wouldn’t be one to just point and say, ‘This is funny.’”

As I say, that’s something Dylan said in 1985. A few years before that, in 1981, Dylan came out with a record called Shot of Love, which he has repeatedly called his favorite album. I don’t have time to get into that now, but I made a video about that which you can find on the www computer. Dylan has called Shot of Love his favorite album a half-dozen times. He’s never called any of his other albums his favorite even once.

One of the things Dylan said about Shot of Love was that the reason it got short shrift is that people didn’t understand what he was doing on that album. And I would argue nowhere is that more evident than in the reaction to “Lenny Bruce.”

“Lenny Bruce” is a song Bob Dylan wrote which appears on Shot of Love, as well as on every list of the worst Bob Dylan songs. You know, every site now is a repository of lists. I’m waiting for somebody to do a list of the Top 150 Bob Dylan Lists. And every list of bad Bob Dylan lyrics is an opportunity for the person doing the list to sneer at “Lenny Bruce” and talk about how incredible it is that Dylan could miss the mark that badly.

The line in “Lenny Bruce” that critics always cite as one of Dylan’s worst, most embarrassing, cringiest lines is when Dylan sings of Bruce: “Never robbed any churches nor cut off any babies’ heads.” And people say things like, “gee, Bob, rather faint praise, don’t you think? Might want to raise your bar for what constitutes an accomplishment, I’ve never mutilated any babies, maybe you’d like to write a song about me.”

Then there’s another line: “I rode with him in a taxi once / Only for a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months,” Which people love to point out could easily be read as an insult.

Here’s the thing: Why are we assuming this was a misfire, instead of Dylan knowing exactly where he was aiming and hitting the target dead-on?

If we think of Lenny Bruce – the man, not the song – what are some words we could use to describe him? Well, “funny” would obviously be one, on account of he was a comedian. Another would be “outrageous.” “Shocking.”

Now let’s swing back to “Lenny Bruce” the song. What are some words we could use to describe the song? Well, “funny” would be one. “Outrageous.” “Shocking.”

So let me get this straight: Bob Dylan writes a song about a funny, outrageous figure, the song is funny and outrageous – and I am supposed to believe this was an accident? That those lines strike you and I and anybody who’s ever heard them as funny, but Bob Dylan – in writing the song, in recording the song, in singing the song on stage over 100 times – it’s never occurred to him that those lines are funny?

I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that for a second. I believe Bob Dylan knew exactly what he was doing. He knew Lenny Bruce lived on a lightning bolt – that Lenny Bruce took extreme chances, showed extreme courage, had extreme failings. So Dylan honors him by writing about him using extreme language. The line Dylan has about killing babies; Lenny Bruce said: “If there were absolute freedom, people would run over babies and charge admission.” Dylan is saying, “Yeah, but not you, Lenny. You were one of the good ones.” The whole song is like that. Dylan not only praises Bruce, he praises him in the language that Bruce spoke. It’s a clever song, and I applaud Dylan for not folding under the weight of everybody who says it’s stupid, or that it’s at best unintentionally funny.

You hear this all the time with Dylan – how unintentionally funny he is. Well what is more likely: that this guy has unintentionally stumbled into saying and doing funny things consistently for sixty years, or that he’s just a funny person who says and does funny things because it’s funny?

I would submit, every time you hear that Dylan said or did something unintentionally funny, you can subtract the word “unintentionally” and you’ll be closer to the truth.

The Philosophy of Modern Song is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. You read the reviews, you’d never know it. It’d be one thing if critics said the jokes aren’t funny, but they reject the idea that they’re even jokes. Just a total negation of the whole tone of the book.

It’s like reviewing a Rodney Dangerfield show: “Mr. Dangerfield repeatedly stressed that he gets no respect. I find this hard to believe, he’s a comedian of great renown, well regarded by his peers.”

Or look at Rough and Rowdy Ways. Unlike The Philosophy of Modern Song, Rough and Rowdy Ways received good reviews, but again the funny bits got short shrift. You ask people to name funny bits in Dylan songs and the answers tend to be “The sun’s not yellow it’s chicken,” “They asked me for some collateral and I pulled down my pants,” or to take a later example: “Man says, ‘Freddy!’ I say, ‘Freddy who?’ He says, ‘Freddy or not here I come.’” Or people talk about the dad jokes Dylan would tell in his band intros. Joke jokes. I love all that stuff. But there are joke jokes and there are conceptual jokes. You listen to Rough and Rowdy Ways, or Tempest, and Dylan’s all over the place bludgeoning people and knifing them and mucking with their corpses. I for one find this very funny. Reminds me of Warren Zevon, who Dylan is a big fan of and who was a master of making the ridiculous seem grim and the grim seem ridiculous. It’s as if, after Zevon died, Dylan felt he had to take up the comically morbid mantle. And it’s particularly amusing in light of the fact that so many of Dylan’s peers are writing these moving meditations on their mortality, getting ready to make their transition from this world to the next. Meanwhile Dylan’s over here gathering gunpowder. Dylan’s saying: “If you guys want to die so bad, how about I kill you!”

In 2018, Dylan did an art exhibition called Mondo Scripto, for which he handwrote the lyrics to sixty of his most famous songs and then did a corresponding illustration for each song. The exhibition catalog contains a Q&A with Dylan, which to me reads like another Dylan caper where he’s supplying both the Qs and the As.

Those of you familiar with Mondo Scripto will recall that Dylan’s illustrations are very much on the nose. “Lay Lady Lay” has a line about a big brass bed – Dylan draws a big brass bed. There’s a lot of that going on.

As if anticipating that people might call these illustrations uninspired, the person questioning Bob Dylan – who may or may not be Bob Dylan – raises the point that the illustrations are “very literal,” thus allowing Dylan to explain that not only is this not uninspired, it’s extra inspired, and that it’s predicated on Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno with its corresponding drawings by Henrik Drescher. Which… say no more, Bob. Say no more.

 

This Q&A also includes other revelatory moments such as:

Did it take some time to figure out how [the songs] would be organised on paper?

It did, because the songs vary in length.

Do some songs lend themselves more easily to illustration than others?

The ones that are more visual do.

 

And my personal favorite exchange:

Was it difficult to come up with concepts for illustrations?

At first it was a bit of a dilemma, but then I started experimenting with other people’s songs. The Tom Petty song “Love is a Long Road” – I drew a picture of a dirt road. For the Billy Joel song “Moving Out” I drew a picture of a moving van. The Prince song “Darling Nikki” – I drew a picture of a young girl masturbating in a hotel lobby. I saw that, okay, it can be done, so then I did it with my songs.

Some of these responses call to mind another of my favorite semi-recent-ish Dylan interviews, and that was an interview Dylan did in 2009 to promote Hohner’s “Bob Dylan Signature Series Harmonica.” Dylan did this interview with the Director of Sales and Marketing for Hohner, Inc., and boy let me tell you it is illuminating. Keep in mind, the purpose of this interview was to promote the new Bob Dylan Signature Series Harmonica. Here are some of Dylan’s responses:

Does the harmonica play a role in your songwriting process?

No.

How do you feel your harmonica playing has influenced today’s players?

I’m not sure it has.

Are there any young harmonica players today that capture your attention?

Not really. But I hope one comes along soon.

Of course I would be remiss if I left without mentioning what to me is Dylan’s comedic pièce de résistance, and that is an interview Dylan did while on tour with Carlos Santana in 1993. MTV sent a young reporter to speak with Dylan and Santana in Seattle, and rather than ask him about music, the reporter asked Dylan about pressing societal issues – because that always goes so well.

Do you think the availability of guns is a big problem today?

I don’t think there’s enough guns.

What about guns among kids? Do you think it’s just too prevalent?

Toy guns. There are moy toy guns than real guns, really.

Where do you think kids get these guns?

They get ’em in a toy store.

It is impossible to overstate how quick Dylan is with his responses here. Somebody might ask, where did he get these reflexes?

In 1968, Bob Dylan’s parents – Abram and Beatty Zimmerman – were interviewed by Robert Shelton. Really a fascinating document; Dylan’s father died a few weeks later so it’s not something that was or could ever be replicated. Anyway, there’s a section of this interview in which Shelton is probing to figure out how Dylan became such a skilled writer. And it inadvertently shows where Dylan got his comedy chops. It’s a print interview, so we can’t be certain of speed and inflection, but tell me this doesn’t remind you of somebody:

Robert Shelton: Was there anybody in the family that was a writer?

Bob Dylan’s Father: [pausing] No, outside of me there was no one.

Bob Dylan’s Mother: What did you ever write, a letter?

Bob Dylan’s Father: I could write if I wanted to write

I should say, in 2017, Dylan was asked by Bill Flanagan – in an interview posted on Dylan dot com – about the idea that he was the “jester” in Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Dylan did not take kindly to this idea.

In Don McLean’s “American Pie,” you’re supposed to be the jester.

Yeah, Don McLean, “American Pie,” what a song that is. A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “It’s Alright, Ma” – some jester. I have to think he’s talking about somebody else. Ask him.

This would appear to run counter to everything I’ve just said, but I don’t think it does. To say somebody is funny is very different from saying somebody’s a jester. A jester is somebody who uses humor for a particular purpose, and that purpose is flattery. A jester tries to ingratiate himself with his supposed societal superiors by playing the fool. Well, it goes without saying but Bob Dylan is nobody’s fool. One of the reasons Dylan doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his sense of humor is because it’s wholly his own. His objective with his jokes is to amuse himself, which is part of his larger mission to stay true to himself. If other people get what he’s putting down, comedically or otherwise, that’s great. But as he told Denise Worrell in 1985, he’s not gonna go out of his way to say “This is funny.” People are either gonna laugh or they’re not. And he’s good with it either way.

All right, there are many more avenues I’d love to wander aimlessly down before eventually passing out, but in the interest of time I gotta get to the big finish. Why does any of this matter? Here’s why I think it matters, or at least this is why I think it’s worth caring about, and you can decide whether you think it’s worth caring about too. I’m a Bob Dylan fan, as I suspect most people in this room are. It’s a heck of a conference to come to if you aren’t. Although I suppose everybody’s gotta be somewhere.

As a Bob Dylan fan, my interest is in expanding the Dylan fandom. My interest is in ensuring that interest in Bob Dylan doesn’t die when he dies, or when we die. And the only way to ensure that is to bring new people into the fold. How do we do that? Two words: Timothée Chalamet.

I think that’ll help. But the way to do it, the real way to do it, the only way to do it – is to meet people where they are. To not put up walls. There’s a peculiar impulse in society today that says: “If somebody doesn’t like something as much as I do, I’d rather they didn’t like it at all. If somebody doesn’t know as much about something as I do, I’d rather they knew nothing.” And that is death.

There’s nothing wrong with serious people doing serious scholarship as it relates to Bob Dylan – I love it. I thank everybody doing that work. I think I’ve proven that it is not work I’m capable of doing. But I also think there’s space for sillier stuff. And I think that it is through some of this sillier stuff that we can welcome in new fans. People for whom Bob Dylan can feel like homework; people for whom Dylan can seem like a remnant of a bygone era. My experience has been that if you show these people that Bob Dylan is not only one of the most profound, important artists of his time, but that he is also hilarious, both in his work and just as a dude – you can connect Dylan with people who otherwise would pass him by. And then from there those people can drill down deeper if they want. Or they can just chill out and have fun on the surface. Whatever works.

I hope this worked. Thanks, everybody.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Mr. Tambo & Mr. Bones, Play a Song for Me: Foster & Poe in Dylan’s ‘Nelly Was a Lady’ Chapter.”

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“Mr. Tambo & Mr. Bones, Play a Song for Me: Foster & Poe in Dylan’s ‘Nelly Was a Lady’ Chapter.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Graley Herren, Xavier University

 

Robert Hunter, longtime Grateful Dead lyricist and sometime Dylan collaborator, wrote an interesting foreword to David Dodd’s book The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. In his opening paragraph he observes, “When fans hear a song they like, they internalize it, dance to it, sing along. Tape it, collect it, trade it. When scholars hear a song they like, they annotate it” (Dodd xi). Now, if this were Dylan talking, I’d expect him to throw in a dig at nerds like us who waste our time annotating his songs. But instead Hunter offers a more sympathetic view: “There is more than one way to love a song. There are as many ways as there are listeners” (xi). Amen! Hunter appreciates that annotation – the shadow chasing of tracking down allusions to their original sources – isn’t an attempt to minimize, sterilize, or euthanize a song: it’s just another way to love it. The same holds true for The Philosophy of Modern Song. Writing the book is just another way for Dylan to love the songs of other artists. But sometimes his love speaks like silence: the art of the unsaid.

He devotes a chapter to “Truckin’,” a song written by Robert Hunter and performed by the Grateful Dead (and by Dylan in his 2023 Japanese and European tours). He describes Hunter as “steeped in the songs of Stephen Foster” (138). David Dodd identifies several Foster allusions in Hunter’s lyrics, including “the Doo-dah man” in “Truckin’,” a reference to Foster’s “Camptown Races” [“Camptown ladies sing this song / Doo-dah! Doo-dah!”].

Dylan is also steeped in the songs of Stephen Foster. He acknowledged his debts to Foster long ago. Readers of The Dylan Review are probably familiar with his touching rendition of “Hard Times” on Good as I Been to You (1992). In a 1985 interview with Robert Hilburn, Dylan reflected on his role models for songwriting: “But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster” (1337).

In that same interview, Dylan tipped his cap to another artistic mentor from the nineteenth century: “I had read a lot of poetry by the time I wrote a lot of those early songs. I was into hard-core poets. […] Poe’s stuff knocked me out in more ways than I could name” (1340). Maybe he couldn’t name it then, but he has been naming Poe lately. He name-drops the poet in “I Contain Multitudes”: “Got a tell-tale heart like Mr. Poe / Got skeletons in the walls of people you know.” Dylan may also be nodding in Poe’s direction by naming his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which sounds an awful lot like Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” a detailed explanation of how he wrote his most famous poem “The Raven.”

In Chapter 24 of The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan focuses on “Nelly Was a Lady,” composed by Stephen Foster in 1849. Like many chapters, this one is very brief, consisting of a five-paragraph riff followed by a two-paragraph commentary, accompanied by one full-page and two half-page pictures. There’s a lot more going on here than first meets the eye – lots of breadcrumbs left for us annotators to trace back to their sources. Dylan’s most explicit statement of what he’s up to comes in the first sentence of the commentary: “Stephen Foster is the counterpart to Edgar Allan Poe” (115). He just drops that stone in the water and lets it sink. But a sinking stone gathers ripples. I want to follow some of those ripples through a series of annotations connecting Poe and Foster to one another and to their counterpart Dylan.

Poe published “The Raven” to instant acclaim in 1845, and he wrote “The Philosophy of Composition” the following year. In the essay he asserts: “the death […] of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” Pretty creepy if you think about it – a beautiful woman must die in order for a man to mourn her loss beautifully. The canons of poetry and song are filled with countless examples, including “Nelly Was a Lady.” The opening verses depict this very same scenario:

 

Down on the Mississippi floating,
Long time I travel on the way.
All night the cottonwood a-toting,
Sing for my true love all the day.
Now I’m unhappy, and I’m weeping,
Can’t tote the cottonwood no more;
Last night, while Nelly was a-sleeping,
Death came a-knocking at the door.
Nelly was a lady.
Last night, she died.
Toll the bell for lovely Nell,
My dark Virginia bride.

 

Here is Dylan’s translation of the singer’s situation:

 

You’re hauling the timber on the grand river, the big river, river of tears, manifest destiny – you hoist the cottonwood logs, the silver bark poplars, that make bright shiny tables and furniture, but you’ve reached the station in life where the work is meaningless, and it’s been this way ever since grief came to knock. Knocking when the cock crowed – grief and gloom in the first light of morning, knocking out the bright lights of the heavens. (113, italics mine)

 

There’s a lot worth annotating here. Let’s begin with that knock-knock-knocking. We cannot miss the self-allusion to Dylan’s own song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” He does this repeatedly in The Philosophy of Modern Song, forging understated links between the songs he comments on and the songs he composed. I also hear strong echoes of Poe. Death comes a-knocking at the door in “The Raven,” too. The grief-stricken narrator first mistakes a person (or a ghost) rapping at his chamber door before realizing it is a bird at his window. Readers will doubtlessly hear another Dylan echo from the end of “Love Minus Zero / No Limit”: “My love she’s like some raven / At my window with a broken wing.”

Poe’s speaker grows increasingly frantic, interrogating the bird about its motives. He desperately seeks a message from his dead lover Lenore, some sign that they will one day be reunited. Unfortunately, he gets nothing from the raven but croaks, which he hears as “Nevermore.” Lenore, Eleanor, Nell, Nelly – it’s basically the same name. Both Poe’s “The Raven” and Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady” dramatize the same circumstances: a first-person widower grieving for his dead wife. Dylan hears those intertextual echoes and writes a riff that at times could apply just as well to either work, as well as to some of his own songs. Poe, Foster, Dylan. I even wonder if he had an elegiac trio in mind when he inserted an image of three time-scarred mausoleums in Chapter 24.

“My dark Virginia bride.” Let’s pause over Virginia. After Poe’s father abandoned the family, his mother moved them to Richmond, Virginia. He briefly attended the University of Virginia but had to drop out because he couldn’t afford tuition. If you know anything about Poe, it’s probably that he wrote scary stories, was a drunk and drug fiend, and married his thirteen-year-old first cousin. You may also recall the name of his child-bride: Virginia Clemm. She died at the tender age of 24, and 40-year-old Poe followed her into the grave two years later in 1849, the same year Foster wrote “Nelly Was a Lady.”

“My dark Virginia bride.” Why dark? Because the singer and his lost love were slaves. What Dylan conspicuously neglects to mention in Chapter 24 is that “Nelly Was a Lady” was written by Foster for the minstrel stage and was originally performed in blackface and in dialect. Remember what Dylan told Hilburn when discussing his influence from Foster: “If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to” (1337). Dylan doesn’t explicitly reference Foster’s background and the minstrel roots of “Nelly Was a Lady,” but he did his homework and sneaks in obscure footnotes.

For instance, here’s an example of Dylan’s clever sleight of hand. This is from the Jeff Slate interview Dylan gave about The Philosophy of Modern Song. Slate asked him if it matters where you first hear a song. Dylan’s meandering answer makes you wonder if he’s lost his train of thought:

 

One of my granddaughters, some years back, who was about 8 years old at the time, asked me if I’d ever met the Andrews Sisters, and if I’d ever heard the song ‘Rum and Coca Cola.’ Where she heard it, I have no idea. When I said I’d never met them, she wanted to know why. I said because I just didn’t, they weren’t here. She asked, ‘Where did they go?’ I didn’t know what to say, so I said Cincinnati. She asked me if I would take her there to meet them. Another time, one of the others asked me if I wrote the song ‘Oh! Susanna.’ I don’t know how she heard the song, or when, or what her relationship to it is, but she knows it and can sing it. She probably heard it on Spotify.
(Slate)

 

Dylan is crazy like a fox. I suspect he knows that the Andrews Sisters are not from Cincinnati but rather from his old stomping grounds in Minneapolis – even an 8-year-old could Google it. I guarantee you the “Oh! Susanna” reference isn’t arbitrary. Stephen Foster worked as a bookkeeper for his brother’s shipping company in Cincinnati from 1846 to 1850. The offices of Irwin & Foster overlooked the bustling Ohio River wharf where goods were loaded and unloaded onto steamboats. Foster also frequented the bars and theaters of Cincinnati, where traveling minstrel shows did booming business. Inspired by what he saw on the wharf by day and the stage by night, he wrote several of his most famous songs while living and working in Cincinnati, including “Oh! Susanna” and “Nelly Was a Lady.”

Intrigued by Foster’s local connections to my adopted hometown, I went downtown to walk in his footsteps. He lived at a boarding house on Fourth Street. For many years afterwards, the building was converted to the Guilford School, and today it contains corporate office space and a fitness center. I found a commemorative plaque on the front of the building that reads:

 

On the site of this school between the years 1846-1850 lived Stephen C. Foster, master of the art of song, composer of ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ‘Swanee River,’ ‘Old Black Joe,’ and many others. In native ballad form and melodic strain distinctively American, he sang of simple joys and pathos to all the world.

 

We know that Dylan sometimes likes to visit homes where songwriters he admires lived in their youth. I don’t know if he ever visited the Guilford School building, but it would have been easy to do. Walk a couple blocks northwest from Foster’s former residence and you’ll run into Taft Theatre, where Dylan played his first concert in Cincinnati in March 1965, and where he returned to play in 2007. I made that short stroll myself, and on the way I was delighted to pass by the Edgar Apartments building. Total coincidence, of course, but a delicious one. Even the streetscape of Cincinnati invites connections between Foster, Poe, and Dylan.

Foster is sometimes called “the Father of American Music,” but much of his legacy now seems offensive and destructive. He perpetuated derogatory racist stereotypes through his so-called “Ethiopian melodies.” Foster frequently indulged the myth of slaves pining with nostalgic affection for Southern plantation life. Hell, he more than indulged it: he was one of the myth’s chief architects, and he cashed in on the popularity of this fraud through his popular minstrel songs. But, if you study blackface minstrelsy in any depth, as Dylan clearly has, then you’ll also learn that it’s more complicated than that.

Readers of this journal may be familiar with the 1993 book published by Eric Lott titled Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Dylan was apparently familiar with at least the title, since he borrowed the idea for his 2001 album “Love and Theft”, a collection of songs steeped in the minstrel tradition. While fully acknowledging the fundamental racism of blackface minstrelsy, Lott also finds other economic, ideological, and psychological forces at play in the tradition, including envy, class-conscious anxiety, and desire – in short “love and theft.”

Foster penned many famous minstrel songs, but Dylan’s choice to focus on “Nelly Was a Lady” is telling. Scholars often credit this song as a turning-point in Foster’s career, where he pivoted away from racial mockery in favor of sentimental ballads designed to elicit sympathy. The singer demands dignity for Nelly. She is not a figure for ridicule. She is a lady, and she deserves respect and commemoration. Dylan makes a redemptive gesture of his own by spotlighting Alvin Youngblood Hart’s version of the song. Hart is an African American blues singer, and his sensitive interpretation isn’t tarnished by blackface appropriation. “Alvin sings the song in its pure form,” as Dylan puts it (115).

But. There’s only so far one can go to purify “Nelly Was a Lady.” We shouldn’t pussyfoot around by whitewashing out the burnt cork. You might accuse Dylan of laundering Foster’s reputation, giving him a free pass and an undeserved promotion, by setting him up as counterpart to Poe, instead of minstrel patriarchs like Daddy Rice or Dan Emmett. If Dylan wants to put Foster’s work in conversation with Poe’s, it seems worth mentioning a fundamental distinction, namely that “Nelly Was a Lady” is “The Raven” in blackface.

As composed by Foster and sung by Alvin Youngblood Hart, it’s a genuinely moving ballad. “A lot of sad songs have been written,” writes Dylan, “but none sadder than this” (115). However, viewed in its original context – published in Foster’s Ethiopian Melodies and performed by the Christy Minstrels – the song was tangled up in blackface. No matter how sympathetic Foster’s intentions may have been, he was working within a denigrating theatrical form dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.

Now let me dismount my high horse and give Dylan some credit. In certain subtle but unmistakable ways, he signals his awareness of the problematic minstrel history behind “Nelly Was a Lady.” Let’s return to a line I quoted earlier and reconsider it from another angle. “You’re hauling timber on the grand river, the big river, river of tears, manifest destiny” (113, italics mine). As a student of nineteenth-century American history, Dylan knows that the concept of “Manifest Destiny” had specific significance for that era. American nationalists believed it was the divinely ordained mission of the United States to expand its dominion over the continent, spreading democracy and capitalism, and seizing land from indigenous people and people of color. Manifest Destiny was the driving force behind the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) which greatly expanded U.S. territory out west. Stephen Foster stayed back in Cincinnati and helped run the office while his brother Dunning went south to fight in the Mexican-American War.

Another sign that Dylan is conscious of context comes in the final paragraph: “The guitar turnarounds are a slow cakewalk between heartbroken verses, loss shared on the front porch” (115, italics mine). The cakewalk originated as a Black dance tradition in the U.S. South around the mid nineteenth century. Blackface minstrels soon recognized that the cakewalk made for a highly entertaining spectacle in live performance, however, and started working these numbers into their shows. By the late nineteenth century, cakewalks were routine on the minstrel stage. Dylan’s cakewalk reference isn’t accidental here. But it’s not elaborated upon either. He gestures obliquely in the direction of minstrelsy, but he doesn’t spell it out, leaving us annotators to lift that barge and tote that bale.

In my book on Time Out of Mind, I interpret the songs recorded for that album as a series of dreams working on multiple levels. In the final chapter, I argue that, on one level, the singer dreams his way into the experiences of a fugitive slave. This imaginative exercise may be what prompted Dylan to start considering his own work in relation to the minstrelsy tradition with greater scrutiny and urgency. Something certainly sent him down this path, because it kept reappearing in various guises in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I’ve already mentioned the minstrel show influence on 2001’s “Love and Theft”. In 2003, Dylan co-wrote and starred in the film Masked and Anonymous, which includes his performance of the minstrel staple “Dixie” and an encounter with the ghost of a minstrel performer (Ed Harris in blackface). In 2006, he extended the pattern on the album Modern Times, lifting several lines from the so-called “Poet of the Confederacy” Henry Timrod, and reworking an old minstrel song into the haunting ballad “Nettie Moore.” [My friend Rob Reginio has an excellent chapter on this song in Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World.] Then his fascination for the subject seemed to fade. Or maybe it just got channeled into the descendants of the minstrel legacy: the songs of Tin Pan Alley, Dylan’s major musical interest in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Now in the century’s third decade, he reminds us that minstrelsy is a recessive gene in the DNA of modern song. Dylan focuses his final chapter on “Where or When.” The song was written by Rodgers & Hart for their 1937 musical Babes in Arms, but Dylan pays particular attention to the 1939 film adaptation, which includes a blackface performance by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Dylan describes America’s sweethearts “slapping on the blackface and mugging incessantly through a simulacrum of a traditional minstrel show, with Rooney portraying Mr. Bones, Garland portraying Mr. Tambo, and Douglas McPhail portraying the straight-man interlocutor. All three characters were minstrel show mainstays, which explains but does not excuse their presence” (332). He neglects to mention that Rooney and Garland’s grotesque travesty opens with a performance of Foster’s “Oh! Susanna.” The phrase “explains but does not excuse” applies to Foster’s troubling entanglement with minstrelsy in “Nelly Was a Lady” as well, and to some of Dylan’s own excursions into this cultural minefield.

Eric Lott devotes a chapter to Dylan in his 2017 book Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. Lott speculates, “I would guess that Dylan regards minstrelsy, say, whatever its ugliness, as responsible for some of the United States’ best music as well as much of its worst” (201). Lott further asserts that Dylan “wants to step up and face the racial facts of one of the traditions he inherited” (202). Does Dylan “step up and face the racial facts” of “Nelly Was a Lady” in The Philosophy of Modern Song? Not exactly. He foregrounds the things he loves about the song while remaining largely silent about its more disturbing elements. That said, while hopscotching his way through Chapter 24, he purposefully drops tell-tale clues that point towards the skeletons in Foster’s walls. He draws circles around his own omissions and calls attention to things he avoids confronting directly – presumably so that annotators like me have something to write for journals like this. In his signature style for the book – the art of the unsaid – Dylan makes furtive glances and winking innuendos to insinuate connections between Foster, Poe, and his own work. Then he leaves the shadow chasing to us.

 

Works Cited

Dodd, David G. The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

—. “Hard Times.” Good as I Been to You. Columbia, 1992.

Dylan, Bob. “I Contain Multitudes.” Rough and Rowdy Ways. Columbia, 2020.

—. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Columbia, 1973.

—. “Love Minus Zero / No Limit.” Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia, 1965.

—. “Love and Theft.” Columbia, 2001.

—. “Nettie Moore.” Modern Times. Columbia, 2006.

—. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.

—. Time Out of Mind. Columbia, 1997.

Foster, Stephen C. “Camptown Races.” Songs of America.

https://songofamerica.net/song/camptown-races/.

—. “Nelly Was a Lady.” Songs of America. https://songofamerica.net/song/nelly-was-a-lady/.

—. “Oh! Susanna.” Songs of America. https://songofamerica.net/song/oh-susanna/.

Herren, Graley. Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. Anthem Press, 2021.

Hilburn, Robert. “Rock’s Enigmatic Poet Opens a Long-Private Door.” Los Angeles Times

(4 April 2004). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances. Ed. Artur

Jarosinski. Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, pp. 1337-43.

Lott, Eric. Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism.

Belknap Press, 2017.

—. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford University

Press, 1993.

Masked and Anonymous. Directed by Larry Charles. Written by Sergei Petrov and Rene

Fontaine (aka Bob Dylan and Larry Charles). Sony Pictures Classics, 2003.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ rticles/69390/the-philosophy-of composition.

—. “The Raven.” Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven.

Reginio, Robert. “‘Nettie Moore’: Minstrelsy and the Cultural Economy of Race in Bob

Dylan’s Late Albums.” Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the

World. Eds. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss. University of Minnesota Press, 2009,

pp. 213-24.

Slate, Jeff. “Bob Dylan Q&A about ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’” (20 December 2022).

The Official Website of Bob Dylan. https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan-interviewed-by-wall-street-journals-jeff-slate/.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘The future for me is already a thing of the past’”: The Philosopher’s Nostalgic Dilemma in The Philosophy of Modern Song”

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“‘The future for me is already a thing of the past’”: The Philosopher’s Nostalgic Dilemma in The Philosophy of Modern Song.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Jim Salvucci

 

Bob Dylan clearly loves the past, and The Philosophy of Modern Song is steeped in seeming nostalgia. Almost every song selection is old, a few very old. The photos and illustrations are mostly vintage, many in black and white. The prose itself is old-fashioned, harkening back to the hip rhythms of the Beats and the diction of the hard-boiled detective novel. Even the themes of the book are often backward looking – the casual sexism, the risible machismo, the dated references.

I could tell you the origins of the term nostalgia, that it was coined in the eighteenth century by a Swiss physician to document a mysterious madness associated with homesickness experienced by Swiss soldiers during deployment. Or that by now, no longer a malady, it has been reconceived as a mere a fondness for the past, particularly an idealized or romanticized past, or as Dylan describes it, “the sanitized versions of life.” I could tell you about all that, but I won’t. I will tell you that one problem nostalgics have is that to be truly nostalgic, one must eschew optimism. After all, to focus on the past as ideal makes moving forward undesirable if not impossible. The only future that nostalgics long for is one that replicates a past that never really was. This is the dead end of all retrograde ideologies, such as MAGA and other Lost Causes, and backward-looking trends, such as the vinyl revival. Unless you are willing to force a future based on a false past, there is nowhere to dwell but back in that misremembered past, and that past has passed if it ever existed. In the specific case of vinyl records, it has passed with a skip and a hiss and maybe another skip.

Yes, Dylan loves the past and lovingly pays tribute to it in The Philosophy of Modern Song. But for Dylan, as this book makes clear, the past is just fodder for the future. It’s merely a source that feeds the pastiche nature of his art and thinking. He builds anew from the pieces of the past. He assembles his philosophy from what we can preserve while always looking for the next thing. As has been established, particularly in the last quarter century, Dylan’s writing technique is roughly parallel to his approach to metallic sculptures: elaborate and wholly new constructions framed by old scraps, many unremarkable and otherwise forgotten. A newness literally assembled from the old. Moreover, his nostalgic tone furthers his irony and highlights satiric moments. If nostalgia is a fondness for an idealized past, Dylan cannot be a nostalgic, for, as a creator, he is an undoubted if cynical optimist.

Visuals

The Philosophy of Modern Song is quite deceptive. On its surface, it looks like a slightly undersized coffee-table book. The black and white cover features retro red lettering. The cover photo itself at first may seem familiar, one you have seen many times. But look again. Sure, there is Little Richard, but he is posing with whom? On the right is Eddie Cochran, a promising young rock musician who died in a car crash at age 21. In the middle, the only one with an instrument, is Alis Lesley, one of the many “female Elvises” who seem about as historically abundant as all the “new Dylans.” Her career also ended abruptly at the age of 21 when she quit. The photos and illustrations throughout are so old that some of the more modern ones can be a bit jarring, such as the sudden appearance of an ebullient Jackson Browne outside a tour bus that sports the image of a launching space shuttle for some reason. It’s a great full-color shot of Browne, but it does not fit with the flow of black-and-white vintage images, the old- time movie posters and advertisements, the retro postcards, the sideshow signage, the paparazzi snapshots, the myriad photos of random older folks doing older-folk things. The colorized photo on the back cover anticipates (if a back-cover photo can anticipate) the nearly dozen photos of record stores, record displays, record labels, record factories, and just plain records that are sprinkled throughout with nary an image of an 8-track, cassette, or CD, let alone an MP3 player.

Song Selection

It is much the same with the song selection, which skews old, older, and older still, challenging the implication of “Modern” in the book title. The second-most recent recording that appears is 2003’s “Dirty Life and Times” by Warren Zevon, itself a look back in time, albeit a more jaundiced and personal look than Dylan’s. By far the oldest composition in the book is “Nelly Was a Lady” by Stephen Foster. In a twist that is most fitting for this collection of turns, Dylan’s chapter on Foster’s song features bluesman Alvin Youngblood Hart’s version from 2004, a year after Zevon’s recording. Thus, the oldest song is represented by the most recent recording.

Diction and Style

In line with the hoary song selection is the diction and patter of Dylan’s prose, which sometimes reads like Raymond Chandler, the hipster years. It is a charming mélange – quick, quirky, canny, and occasionally cranky – that, as many have noted, recalls Dylan’s style from his Theme Time Radio Hour days. Here too, as with the illustrations, occasional contemporary references or language rip us from the patter of Dylan’s retro style. Here is just one example selected at random. It’s a from the middle of the “El Paso” chapter.

El Paso – the passageway, the escape hatch, the secret staircase – ritual crime and symbolic lingo – circular imagery, names and numbers, transmigration, deportation, and all in the cryptic first person, the primitive self. The stench of perfume, alcohol, a puff of smoke, the duel, the worthless life, pain in the heart, staying in the saddle, love in vain, the grim reaper, and a love that’s stronger than death, and other things. (108)

The paragraph continues for several more lines in that paratactic style that Dylan uses so much throughout the book with nary a predicate in sight.

As with the illustrations, sometimes more contemporary terms or references can be quite jarring in the context of the more old-fashioned yet not stale prose. One small example, in the chapter on the Osborn Brothers’ bluegrass number “Ruby, Are You Mad?” Dylan abruptly references heavy metal music and guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. He then compares the Osborns’ song to “speed metal without the embarrassment of Spandex and junior high school devil worship” (143-4). Such anachronistic shifting occurs throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song, including in one of the more flagrantly nostalgic chapters, the one addressing Sonny Burgess’s unreleased late 50s track “Feels So Good.” After Dylan laments “the late great country you grew up in,” he describes the origin of the term “rock and roll.” He identifies the term as a “thinly veiled euphemism for copulation” (223), which is of course itself a coy euphemism for “fucking” (a term he has no compunctions using elsewhere.). After that he pivots to 60s drug use, The Rolling Stones and then to Skype, Zoom, and Face Time, diverging by miles from the song’s 1950’s origin.

Specific Passages

It is extraordinary how many chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences in The Philosophy of Modern Song start with time designators such as “back in the day,” “in the past,” “today,” or “now days.” Even Dylan’s commentary on contemporary culture is steeped in a comparison with bygone days. One of my favorites is from the chapter on The Who’s “My Generation”:

Recently, we have entered a new phase, where anyone entering the age of twenty-two as of 2019 is now a member of Generation Z. While people make jokes about millennials, that group is now old news, as obsolete as all the previous generations –– the baby boomers, Gen X, the Fragile Generation, the Intermediates, the Neutrals, the Dependable, the Unshaken, and the Clean Slate. (43)

Dylan’s sardonic take on the industry of generational labeling distances him from bygone generations (even his own). It betrays no allegiance to any particular period, past or present. So much for the voice of his generation. In contrast, the nostalgia-soaked chapter on Burgess’s “Feels So Good” ends with this zinger: “This is the sound that made America great” (224). Your mind might have automatically added an “again” at the end, a phrase Dylan slyly employed in full earlier in the chapter: “maybe you’re wondering what happened to the late, great country you grew up with or how you can make America great again” (223). Dylan’s invocation of this charged slogan seems apolitical and, in fact once more, sardonic. You are not supposed to recoil in horror. Nor are you to pump your fist and chant “U S A!” Instead, he inspires a knowing smile and chuckle. At least that’s how it worked for me. On top of all that caginess, much of the chapter is an inexplicably a moral rant about drug use.

Other passages throughout the book drip with longing for the bygone, whether it be his ongoing affection for old-time sociopathic outlaws, his fretting over the way religion is practiced nowadays (“as a thing that must be journeyed as a chore” (97)), or the passage on Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” that starts with “That’s the problem with a lot of things these days,” that everything now is too niche and “overly fussed with” (165). But even this curmudgeonly rant is offset by the next passage when Dylan, tongue-in-cheek, speculates about Williams singing all the hits of his day, such as “How Much Is that Doggie,” “Que Sera, Sera,” and “Stardust.” We will see this pattern again and again, a nostalgic romp juxtaposed to or immersed in humor, sarcasm, or jolting contrasts. That rant about religion these-a-days, morphs into a bizarre riff about the “excitement” Dylan experiences while reading the Book of Job, which wryly concludes with the seeming non sequitur, “Here’s another way to look at a love song” (97). As he says in that same paragraph, “Context is everything” (97). Dylan does make a strong argument, albeit not an original one, in favor of old media:

We all shared a baseline cultural vocabulary. People who wanted to see the Beatles on a variety show had to watch flamenco dances, baggy pants comics, ventriloquists and maybe a scene from Shakespeare. (325)

That shared experience opened minds to new realities and possibilities whereas he continues, “Today the medium contains multitudes and man needs only pick one thing he likes and feast exclusively on a stream dedicated to it” (325). It’s the old we-used-to-have-a-shared-national-knowledge-base-and-therefore-a-shared-national-discourse-which-we-have-diluted argument, not entirely untrue. He also expresses his fondness for old movies throughout. It’s hard, though, to not imagine that he included the Drifters’ 1964 song “Saturday Night at the Movies” solely so he could wax on about some of his favorite films, mostly in black and white (317). Indeed, not once does he mention the ostensible topic of Chapter 64, that being the Drifters and/or their song. He only discusses movies! The chapter ends with another sardonic MAGA reference: “People keep talking about making America great again. Maybe they should start with the movies” (317).

Dylan’s last chapter on Dion and the Belmonts summarizes his view of how the past informs the present. He lists items that have more-or-less remained the same over time and concludes, “you can be absolutely sure that it happened before and will happen again –– it’s inevitable … if it’s not happening now, it wasn’t happening then or ever” (329).

Not Nostalgia

So much of this sounds like nostalgia, right? That praise for the past that implicitly or explicitly deprecates the present and holds little hope for the future. It is important, though, to watch the juxtapositions of theme, word, image, and so on to catch the nuance of Dylan’s message here. For one small example of how this works, that chapter on “Saturday Night at the Movies” – when Dylan proposes making America great again by making movies great again – also features a black and white, World War II-era Weegee photo of a grabby sailor awkwardly groping a woman in a movie theater. The woman’s clothes are a bit disheveled, and while her face is largely obscured, she appears either indifferent or unconscious in the moment. The two other moviegoers in the frame are less interested in both the movie and the nearby maritime sounding than they are in the creepy photographer lurking in the dark. If this is the scene Dylan chooses to represent the superiority of erstwhile movie viewing, what does it really mean to make movies great again, let alone America?

A little more exploration of one chapter in particular will help illustrate what Dylan is up to. Chapter 25 on bluesman Johnny Taylor’s 1973 number “It’s Cheaper to Keep Her” is arguably the most sexist in The Philosophy of Modern Song and is one of several chapters where the song and the artist barely make a cameo. In it, Dylan uses the song to launch a broadside on divorce lawyers as a race of greedy manipulators who are “by definition in the destruction business” and who “feign innocence with blood on their hands.” He also approvingly notes that in bygone days, “God-fearing members of the community regularly gave divorced folks the skunk-eye” for their general untrustworthiness (118). Later he preaches about “the laws of God” that “override the laws of man” (119). He is out-and-out sententious about the duty of divorced parents to support a child, before determining that “Ultimately, marriage is for the sake of those children.” He then concludes matter-of-factly, “And a couple who has no children, that’s not a family. They are just two friends” (118). I generally recoil at commentators who drag Dylan’s biography into every discussion of his work, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that this man, Bob Dylan, has been married and divorced at least twice himself, which certainly explains his animus for divorce lawyers but not his preachy traditional-marriage screed. This, of course, is all a prelude to the noxious solution he will propose at the end of the chapter, and subsequently we are subjected to Dylan’s polygamist fantasy, which starts as an argument specifically for polygyny. He doubles down on his inherent sexism (and heteronormativity) with his assumption that it will typically be the husband in a divorce who has sole responsibility to pay support. Then he treats us to this anti-feminist, self- pitying salvo:

Women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists take turns putting man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling. (121)

Notice that in this amalgam of wretchedness and mismatched metaphors he refers to the victim of all this feminist oppression as a generalized “man,” not “a man” in particular. But wait, there’s more! He then tinges his defense of his anti-feminism with misogyny, arguing any “downtrodden woman” would welcome a rich man’s protection by joining some sort of harem. It’s a statement worthy of Alex Jones minus the dietary supplements. In yet another twist, Dylan then helpfully points out that all along he never explicitly precluded the practice of polyandry before sarcastically declaring, “have at it, ladies. There’s another glass ceiling for you to break” (121).

And what does this have to do with nostalgia? Well first, there are the retrograde attitudes obviously. Is this Dylan’s pining for the casual sexism of yore? But what also of the language used? While “glass ceiling” is still a prevalent term, “women’s lib” is moribund, drolly archaic even. When was the last time you heard that phrase used in conversation? When I Googled it, all the first-page hits were explanations of the term, not actual usage in the vernacular. I will bet there are younger readers who don’t even recognize it. A reader who is affronted to distraction by Dylan’s sexist tropes may not even notice it slip by. As with other similar sections and passages, this obnoxiousness is accompanied by exaggerated language, extremist posturing, odd or comical images, and other hijinks. All this is to suggest that there is a wink-wink here, accompanied by a nod-nod.

In her book Irony’s Edge, Linda Hutcheon describes the “meta-ironic function” or marker, the textual or visual indicator that one is in the presence of irony or that irony will soon appear (154). The meta-ironic marker can take many forms – such as, “gestural,” “phonic,” or “graphic” (155). It is the equivalent of a tongue planted firmly in the cheek or finger to the nose. The markers of irony can be structural too (154) or meta-ironic and structural (156). The oddball factoids Dylan includes, the jarring juxtapositions, the sly illustrations, the knowing tone, the sudden reversals, and even the curmudgeonly voice that pervades the text operate meta-ironically to enable us to “get” Dylan’s irony. So how does his irony work? I would argue that Dylan’s irony here is meant sometimes just to amuse and sometimes to further a satiric point. I am not suggesting that The Philosophy of Modern Song falls into the genre of satire, but it is, like much of Dylan’s output, a work that contains satiric elements without being fully satiric. Case in point, “It’s Cheaper to Keep Her” is all by itself a fairly knuckleheaded song, a churlish novelty number, the product of a clueless era that may induce a mordant grin or a low groan. Meanwhile Dylan’s riffing on women’s lib and the mechanics of polygamy ultimately punch up the song’s ideological shortcomings – a subversive commentary that exposes the arguably offensive foibles of the song. In other words, satire. Then, after four pages without having once mentioned the subject matter of the chapter, Dylan seemingly out of the blue ends it with, “It’s cheaper to keep her, indeed,” thus at last connecting his commentary and the song. Dylan employs flagrantly sexist tropes in other chapters as well – notably the one on the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” (253). But meta-ironic markers arise there too, my favorite being an illustration featuring a too-literal portrait of a five-member band of eagles.

So, this is the philosopher’s dilemma in The Philosophy of Modern Song. How can you simultaneously honor the past, critique the past, and build the future upon it? Dylan loves the past, but he is not delusional about its shortcomings. The past is a component, an ingredient in the farraginous recipe that Dylan is whipping up in his Promethean kitchen. That he uses boorish jokes, odd and deflating juxtapositions, a few bizarre choices, and even flagrantly outdated thinking at once obscures his mission and marks it. People often talk about Dylan’s overlooked humor, but he is even less recognized for his considerable accomplishments as a satirist. In The Philosophy of Modern Song, when he plays the curmudgeon, the fuddy-duddy, the stick in the mud – shaking his harmonica rack at the neighborhood kids and yelling, “get off my private beach!” while carping on the nation’s decline – he is evoking a faux nostalgia that serves a more complex purpose. Dylan is no philosopher, at least not any more than he is a nostalgic. He is not out to write a philosophy of song any more than he is out to write a full- length satire. Instead, he seeks to tease out the philosophy in the songs he addresses, but – not interested in academic exegesis – he opts instead for a more subtle, dangerous, and interesting approach, using style and form to subtly make his substantive points. In all his work, Dylan regularly traffics in humor, irony, and satire – perhaps just for the fun of it. His seeming nostalgia in The Philosophy of Modern Song is one part of the mix. All this old stuff, though, is merely material for Dylan’s next work, be it a song, book, or whatever. Dylan loves the past as it serves and informs his creative future.

 

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York: Routledge, 1995.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘The Laws of Time Didn’t Apply to You’: Bob Dylan and the Zeitgeist of the Discontent”

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“‘The Laws of Time Didn’t Apply to You’: Bob Dylan and the Zeitgeist of the Discontent.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Court Carney, Stephen F. Austin State University

 

At first glance, Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, published in late 2022, overwhelms. The book features so many different songs and interpretations. Like a giant puzzle or, from a different perspective, a Joseph Cornell box. Intricate and mysterious. Where was the key? There also was a flurry of great immediate takes along the lines of “Can you believe what this song you’ve never heard says about our history?” Yet, something throbbed from the pages, less connected to the specific songs and more akin to a threat, sadness, or dissonant inchoate hum. I began to think of the book less in terms of songs and what Dylan likes (and, by extension, via omissions, what he dislikes) and certainly removed from the language used, authorial identity, or an accounting of demographics. All worthy, important topics. And topics that will continue to spin out thoughtful and engaged work. But I kept being drawn to something else in the book’s totality. A new song began to emerge, but one of loss, searching, ambivalence, anti-modernism, or at least its cousin, ambi-modernism. I began to situate Dylan’s book within a more significant age of discontent. From films and books and infinite news pieces, the past couple of years has been defined by a particular form of cultural discontent. A gloominess brought about by the modern condition and then, of course, reflected and refracted by it. We have lost a lot along this road toward progress as defined by late-stage capitalism. And traditionalism, whether good faith or not, has collapsed too, under a shift away from decorum politically, socially, and culturally.

A look at The Philosophy of Modern Song through this lens and somewhat detached from the songs themselves allows for a perspective at once defiant and driving. None of this is new, of course, and much of this modernist contempt leeches into the soil of the blues songs and motifs that defined large parts of Dylan’s career. Greil Marcus, in a timely reprint of an old column on World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been to You: “On both records, the music is all about values: what counts, what doesn’t, what lasts, what shouldn’t.” As Dylan himself notes: “it’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite, flood control – watching the red dawn not bothering to dress.”[1] Dylan has long walked through this undergrowth of dissatisfaction and world-weariness. And in some ways, this entire discussion dates back to the various waves of postindustrial fears. As we have seen, nostalgia plays a role here but also something thornier. Still, I think something newer and more specific is happening. Throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan checks in with this pulse of ambi-modernism – a concept that gets at a certain vibe. I don’t see Dylan as offering a gauzy-eyed and uncritical tribute to the past, or that there was necessarily some eternal truth in 1949 or 1957 or 1961 that forever was corrupted. He’s more nuanced than that. But there is a sense of loss or a feeling that something has been lost in terms of options or, as Marcus notes, “what counts, what doesn’t, what lasts, what shouldn’t.”

We see this throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song.

On “Detroit City”: “Like thousands of others, he left the farm, came to the big city to get ahead, and got lost.”[2]

On “Pump it Up”: “Why all the monotonous and lifeless music that plays inside your head?”[3]

On “Take Me From this Garden of Evil”: “But you’re in limbo, and you’re shouting at anyone who’ll listen…you want to be emancipated from all the hokum. You don’t want to daydream your life away, you want to get beyond the borderlands and you’ve been ruminating too long.”[4]

On “Money Honey”: “People with no discernable income buy flawless knockoff watches with one letter misspellings to thwart copyright. And then wealthy people buy the same “Rulex” [sic] so their six-figure real watches won’t get stolen when they are out at dinner.”[5]

On “My Generation”: “Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations that came before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them.”[6]

On “Nelly was a Lady”: “You’ve reached the station in life where the work is meaningless….Now you live life absent-minded and distracted, but you won’t give in to emotions, if you did you’d be sunk.”[7]

On “Ruby Are You Mad?”: “But people confuse tradition with calcification. We listen to an old record and imagine it sealed in amber. A piece of nostalgia that exists for our own needs, without a thought of the sweat and toil, anger and blood that went into making it or the thing it may have turned into….A snapshot can be riveting and artful, but it is the choice of the single moment plucked from the stream moments that makes it immortal.”[8]

On “Your Cheatin’ Heart”: “That’s the problem with a lot of things these days. Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything…Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs.”[9]

On “Blue Bayou”: “You’re looking forward to contentment and happiness on Blue Bayou, although right now you’re friendless, all by yourself, and feel marooned, ill at ease and edgy.”[10]

On “Midnight Rider”: “The midnight rider wants to return things back to a pre-corporate economic order and wipe the slate clean….The midnight rider has sympathizers.”[11]

On “Everybody’s Crying Mercy”: “[This song] offers a jaundiced view of the current state of the world – both when the songs were written and, sadly, now.”[12]

On “Feel So Good”: “Put it on repeat….and maybe if you’re wondering what happened to the late, great country you grew up with or how you can make America great again perhaps this record can give you some idea….Of course, this was before America was drugged into a barely functioning torpor…but it’s always hard to recognize yourself in someone else’s photo.”[13]

On “Big Boss Man”: Modern man is your employee – servile and hypercritical, he’s the informed citizen, the rational being, the yes man and the ass kisser, and his temple is the movie theater. He’s working for you around the clock, and he’s dehydrated. It would take oceans of water to cleanse him from his previous lives. He needs his rivers of poetry and music, but you won’t let him pause or stand down for a second from his chores…. You’re the Cyclopean giant – you’re on the right side of history. The supreme oligarch, the Generalissimo, the over-the-top Overlord who treats the whole world like butlers and chambermaids. You’re a man of distinction. You should be happy that people want to emulate you.”[14]

On “Strangers in the Night”: “Tramps and mavericks, the object of each other’s affection, enraptured with each other and creating an alliance – ignoring all the ages of man, the golden age, electronic age, age of anxiety, the jazz age. You’re here to tell a different story, a bird of another feather.”[15]

On “Saturday Night at the Movies”: “Sequels and remakes roll off the assembly line nowadays with alarming frequency and astronomical budgets but they still can’t recapture the wonder and magic of the originals….Those who dismiss movies from before their time as merely simplistic are missing out.”[16]

On “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”: “This song is a remembrance of things past, you’re looking back to olden times, to things that have happened before now.”[17]

You have these constant repetitions here: the unconventional life destroyed by normalcy – the constriction of creativity. The fear of being hemmed in, of being suffocated, vitality snuffed out by all the thou musts and thou shalts. It’s all about escape, reinvention, obsolescence, out-of-date, despair, suffering, mistranslation, generational shifts, generational static, and desperation. The noise of the Now drowning out the What Could Be or Could Have Been. Not negative, nor positive, optimistic, nor pessimistic: a more self-assured Zen take on loss. What have we lost? And who are the heroes? The deserter, the outlaw, the hobo, the maverick, the tramp. The enduring heroes of Dylan – no surprises here – but clearly, this book has a thumb on the scale in terms of values and needs and desires. Early reviews of the book took the title as a joke or an oversell. How do these songs cohere to something resembling a philosophy? And yet, from a distance, at least one perspective yields something definitive. How do we deal with the modern world? Here are several dozen songs that perhaps provide a path.

At the end of 2022 and into 2023, several prominent media pieces began to build a constellation of sameness: something was going on with Gen Z. After years of millennial handwringing over millennial destruction of all things holy, such as dairy to doorbells, a new culture of Not For Us, we demanded something different, something new, something that was commonplace 25 years ago. In December 2022, the New York Times ran a piece on “Luddite” teens. Every new generation discovers Kerouac, but now it’s poetry and flip phones. The Luddite club, which wanted a reprieve from constant connection and social media, soon encountered the Privilege Backlash. “You follow your kids now,” one parent said, “you track them. It’s a little Orwellian, I guess, but we’re the helicopter parent generation. So when she got rid of the iPhone, that presented a problem for us, initially.” “Well, it’s classist to make people need to have smartphones, too, right?” Mr. Lane said. “I think it’s a great conversation they’re having. There’s no right answer.”[18] Just a few weeks later, in January of 2023, the New York Times, featured teens who craved standalone digital cameras – not quite reliving the Polaroid/Lomography craze of the 00s and 10s. “Over the past few years,” the reporter notes, “nostalgia for the Y2K era, a time of both tech enthusiasm and existential dread that spanned the late 1990s and early 2000s, has seized Generation Z.”[19] “When I look back at my digital photos” – from his actual camera – “I have very specific memories attached to them,” Mr. Sondhi said. “When I go through the camera roll on my phone, I sort of remember the moment and it’s not special.”[20]

Two moments help show the way Dylan taps into moments of explosive historicism. Songs tether to particular moments but then vector backward and forward to highlight the past’s impact on the present and the Now’s imprint on the Then. The expansive nature of a song connected to a popular culture moment is slotted through the lens of Dylan. The movie that best captured the tensions here was Jordan Peele’s Nope. From its opening title card to its plot protection of analog cameras and vinyl records, to its questioning of 1990s media and nostalgia, to its provocative climax at the “Winkin’ Well,” the “old-timey” non-electric large format camera, Nope prods the audience to examine, horrifying monster or not, the cultural oxygen of modern life. Peele prefaces his film with the rarely quoted minor prophet Nahum: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”[21] Seeing these words offers a call back to Dylan’s speech in 1991 after accepting a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award:

My daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said …He said, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.[22]

In Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan uses remarkably similar language in discussing The Temptation’s “Ball of Confusion” from 1970:

Everything is rotten and tainted, even your punch-drunk brother, he keeps talking about love, but what’s that to you? The more you think about it, the less sure you know what it means. The new Beatles record intoxicates you – but you’ve no idea what you heard. [23]

Every ten seconds another news flash, another scandal, more headlines, more news commentators and they’re giving you the creeps. Everything is spoilt dirty, everything you touch on. [24]

But then again, things might not be so simple, you may be hallucinating, making too much of it all, blowing everything out of proportion. You just might be a difficult person to get along with. [25]

This idea that everything is “spoilt dirty” resonates. Back to 1991. Back to 1971. Back to the 7th century BCE. The promise of the past shaking the foundation of the present. And the Nope trailer? Set to “Ball of Confusion.”

A similar argument can be made with a connection between Dylan and the television show Mad Men. A Dylan motif runs through the entire series. Sometimes overtly: the use of his music, two characters plan to see him in concert, and often through allusion as with assumed identities, masking, and a traipsing across a rather obdurate generational divide. Dylan: “Like with many men who reinvent themselves, the details get a bit dodgy in places.”[26] “There’s lots of reasons folks change their names,” Dylan writes in his chapter on “Old Violin,” “And then there are those who change their own names, either on the run from some unseen demon or heading toward something else.[27] In 2007, AMC aired the inaugural season of Mad Men, a television show set in the early 1960s and centered on the world of New York advertising. The pilot episode culminates with Vic Damone’s “On the Street Where You Live.” After living with Don Draper’s seemingly single, carefree Manhattan life, the audience is shown the bait-and-switch as he ends his day at home with his wife and children – the romance of Damone, then, in high contrast to the duplicity at the heart of Draper. In his chapter on Damone, Dylan writes, “maybe that’s as close as you can get with somebody. Being on the street where they live.”[28] Trouble is avoided through charisma, perhaps, but for how long? For Draper, about a decade.

The first season culminates famously with “The Wheel,” a poignant episode centered on the run-up to Thanksgiving 1960. The episode closes out with Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” a song released in 1963. Bob Dylan runs through the entire seven seasons of the series, if only at times as a glancing aside. Dylan’s appearance in the first season’s finale provides a multifaceted tableau of the (a)historical. The episode’s theme relates strongly to the dark gravity of nostalgia – both in terms of individual emotional life and packaging the potency of longing for an unobtainable past. As the main character imagines a Thanksgiving weekend with family and without strife, Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” slides into the soundtrack. The song works on several levels in the scene. A vital element of this conversation relates to the anachronistic aspects. The season ended in 1961, but Dylan would not release the song until 1963. Critics tended to get hung up on the inaccuracy. Still, it can help frame the discussion as the anachronistic nature of its placement allows for a meta-discussion of how popular culture projects history and historical tableaus to audiences. A straightforward plot discussion quickly unravels as the soundtrack pushes against these narratives.

All these vectors converge in the book’s final chapter in an essay centered on “Where or When” by Dion and the Belmonts. This particular song, so simple on the surface but endlessly deep on repeated listens, underscores the metanarrative of The Philosophy of Modern Song. “This is a song of reincarnation,” Dylan writes, “one repetitious drone through space, plugging the same old theme, nonstop over and over again…where everything is exactly alike, and you can’t tell anything apart.” “History,” Dylan argues, “keeps repeating itself, and every moment of life is the same moment, with more than one level of meaning.[29] Memory, too, matters in all of its fallibility and, thus, its potency. “But so it is of music,” Dylan writes, “it is of a time but also timeless; a thing with which to make memories and the memory itself. Though we seldom consider it, music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space.”[30] As a preface to the chapter, the book includes an uncited photograph of two young lovers on a bench beneath L’Heure de tous, a striking sculpture outside the Gare Saint- Lazare in Paris. Created by French-American artist Arman, the piece is a fusion of bronze clocks, each set at different times. Where or when?

The creaking ropes of the buried camera in Nope spit out chemical images of the metaphoric and real. The nostalgia of Mad Men, with its slide projector clicking and shuddering through personal memories, scatters psychic wounds against a blank screen. We see this, too, in two paintings that help set the scene. One is by Norwegian painter Harald Oskar Sohlberg, currently in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. And a second is by Bob Dylan, based on a film still. Sohlberg’s Country Road (1905) shows a dirt path bisecting a dark, twilight landscape of stillness. Yet, the eye is drawn to the telephone poles spiking the center of the frame. Sohlberg crushes the past and present (and anticipated communicative future) into one image of striking ambivalence. The painting’s deep purples, browns, and greens evoke a spectral scene of change and continuity. The poles pose both a threat and a promise. Seemingly built out of the wood from the trees surrounding the road, the telephone posts beckon and fade simultaneously. Dylan’s painting serves a similar purpose, though from a different direction. The scene in Texas Boneyard centers on a dilapidated drive-in movie theater with a wrecked screen and faded marquee standing as silent monuments to the entertainment of the past. The marquee sign in transition also shows up in The Philosophy of Modern Song, as a worker replacing Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis’s war picture Kings Go Forth (1958) leaves “FRANK SIN” in midair.[31] In their dreamy blues and greens, both paintings suggest time passing with technology spreading and dividing the scenes in challenging and complicated ways. Nostalgia. But for what? Perhaps anti-nostalgia. But to what end? The emotional sentiment (shy of sentimentality) of both paintings forces the viewer to register past/present/future while maintaining a grasp on their connection to their contemporary moment.

Dylan’s painting comes directly from the final scene in John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996), where the two main characters, following a rather uncomfortable moment of awareness of blood realization, stare into the ruined drive-in (the El Vaquero). Forget all that stuff. Forget the Alamo. A film obsessed with the falseness of memory ends with an admonition to forget everything that came before. Dylan, too, must have been struck by that scene and its fever of wistful forgetfulness, the ambiguity of the half-remembered. It’s the ambiguity here that must be evoked. Not new, but still, a nuanced ambivalence runs through this book – a theme and a mood that reaches back to earlier anxieties about earlier industries and technologies. Put another way, as Richard “Rabbit” Brown sang in “James Alley Blues,” a song caught on tape by a young Dylan on the cusp of fame: “Times ain’t now nothing like they used to be.” On a related note, in his discussion of John Trudell’s “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore,” Dylan hits directly at this point. “How do you identify with a world that has set you aside, a world that took everything from you without asking, a world that’s asleep, bedded down and deep into slumber- land taking one long endless siesta?” “You’ll go into the mythic land of rebirth,” Dylan argues, “stare up into the mirror of the night sky and talk to your ancestors. They’re wide awake.[32]

In his interview with Dylan in December 2022 for the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Slate asked how he listened to music. “I listen to CD’s, satellite radio and streaming,” Dylan replied:

I do love the sound of old vinyl though, especially on a tube record player from back in the day. I bought three of those in an antique store in Oregon about 30 years ago. They’re just little, but the tone quality is so powerful and miraculous, has so much depth, it always takes me back to the days when life was different and unpredictable. You had no idea what was coming down the road, and it didn’t matter. The laws of time didn’t apply to you.[33]

With its specificity and invocation of the magical, this response sums up much of the discussion in The Philosophy of Modern Song. So much of the book focuses on this connection of life to music via technology, and however complex and even infuriating the technology piece is, it remains the bridge between lived experiences and memory and art and existence. Writing on “Where or When,” Dylan argues that “music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transcend life by living it again and again.”[34]

The laws of time didn’t apply to you.

The outmoded camera, the rickety slide projector, the drive-in movie, the stacked clocks, the telephone poles bisecting nature, bisecting time. Is it a rejection of the new and a grasping of the old? Is it fetishistic? It is interesting that young people want to recover the cameras of the past – the cameras from 2008, from 1998, from 1958. They seem to seek better approximations of their lives in yesterday’s warped, woozy imperfect photos. Of course, in a generation, the filtered Instagram world of 2023 might seem hopelessly authentic to those similarly trapped in their current search for authenticity. The archive of memory rejects any simple cataloging. These images run through Dylan’s book, and it is here where he clearly delineates the contemporary moment of cultural discontent. The “philosophy of modern song,” indeed.

 

[1] Greil Marcus, “Days Between Stations” (December 1993).

[2] Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 5.

[3] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 8.

[4] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 15.

[5] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 35.

[6] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 43.

[7] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 113.

[8] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 144.

[9] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 165.

[10] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 170.

[11] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 174.

[12] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 209.

[13] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 223.

[14] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 259.

[15] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 301.

[16] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 314.

[17] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 319.

[18] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

[19] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/digital-cameras-olympus-canon.html

[20] nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/digital-cameras-olympus-canon.html. Of course, the rise of AI (especially across college campuses) has driven new conversations about old topics. Earlier this year, Medium published a piece: “AI and the New-Luddites.” https://medium.com/electronic-life/ai-and-the-neo-luddites-6e154260da28. But more noise was felt in art and film, for the films of 2022 defined much of this discourse. Tár’s take on generational critique and criticism. The Fableman’s take on childhood nostalgia/anti-nostalgia and film. And White Noise, released just a couple of weeks after The Philosophy of Modern Song with its satire, by way of 1985, of consumerism and consumption. LCD Soundsystem provides a mission statement of this feeling in their “New Body Rhumba,” written for the soundtrack (and featured in the film’s choreographed ending). “The distance is growing but so is the longing,” James Murphy sings, “which leaves the in-between.”

[21] Nahum 3:6.

[22] https://www.expectingrain.com/dok/int/grammiesspeech.html

[23] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 76.

[24] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 77.

[25] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 77.

[26] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 23.

[27] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 147.

[28] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 134.

[29] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 327. “Life in the wasteland, where there’s no tomorrow and it always seems like only yesterday, where we share the same faults over and over, where reincarnation overtakes you. Where the past has a way of showing up in front of you and coming into your life without being called….Where if it’s not happening now, it wasn’t happening ever.” Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 329

[30] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 334.

[31] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 337.

[32] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 196.

[33] https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan-interviewed-by-wall-street-journals-jeff-slate/. “How do you discover new music these days? Mostly by accident, by chance. If I go looking for something I usually don’t find it. In fact, I never find it. I walk into things intuitively when I’m most likely not looking for anything….Obscure artists, obscure songs.”

[34] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 334.

August 26, 2023 by