Previously in this series
- Why does a simple, hardly known Dylan song, get recorded over and over again?
- How the most subtle of musical changes gave “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a totally different meaning
By Tony Attwood
As noted above I have been writing in the last few days about some of Bob’s early compositions, in articles such as “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Only a Hobo.” Here I have been trying to understand how Bob was working as a songwriter in these early days of his career.
One of the key points is that with those early Dylan songs (they were both composed in 1963) we can see and hear that Dylan was taking existing songs, adding some modifications and writing a completely new set of words. This in turn drew a completely new audience into the music of bygone eras.
I’ve not seen an analysis of how many Bob Dylan songs from this period were of this type, with the music “borrowed” from earlier times, and new lyrics added, but for the moment can say it was a fair number. (If you have seen an article that works out how many songs from one of these early years had original music and how many used earlier compositions, please do add a note – it will save me working it out).
I am also not aware of other songwriters in the early 1960s doing the same thing – and so again I would be grateful if you could let me know of other examples of the process I describe here, that happened before Bob started releasing his own compositions. In short I am trying to resolve whether Bob thought up the notion of taking traditional songs and adding lyrics strongly related to the early 1960s, or were others doing it.
Thus I’m following this a little further, hoping my meanderings might be of some interest. And today I’ve moved on to “Masters of War”, and to give a context of the proximity of the compositions, here is the start of the list of Dylan compositions in chronological order. There were 31 songs that Dylan composed in 1962, of which the first nine were…
- Masters of War (War protest)
- Girl from the North Country (Lost Love)
- Boots of Spanish Leather (Song of Leaving)
- Bob Dylan’s Dream (Lost love)
- Farewell (a song of leaving)
- Talkin Devil (talking blues, the Devil is real)
- All over you (comedy alternative to talking blues)
- Going back to Rome (there is something about Italy)
- Only a Hobo (moving on)
Now the very short description of the subject matter of the song is something I dreamed up some years back when I created a chronology of Dylan’s songs (the 1960s section is here if you want the full story), as I was trying for the first time to get a grip with the way Dylan’s creativity evolved. And it is interesting, to me at least, that Bob was writing about so many different subjects. There are two lost love songs, and two songs of leaving, along with a song about moving on, and so on, but no single subject matter dominates Bob’s writing here. It really does look as if he was trying out every subject he could think of.
But only one of these is a song that in any way could be called a protest song, even though when Bob started to become famous, he very quickly became described by many commentators (who are always looking for a short cut to describe a complex situation) as a “protest singer”. That of course is Masters of War.
And here again, as with “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Only a Hobo” Bob took an existing song and used that as the musical base of his newly created lyrics.
As has been widely acknowledged, “Masters of War” takes its melody from “Nottamun Town.” Dylan’s version appeared on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and between 1963 and 2016 Bob performed it on stage 884 times. And of course it changed a lot over the years.
The exact origin of that song on which “Masters of War” is based is disputed, and although multiple people have put forward theories explaining “Nottamun” as a reference to Nottingham in what is now known as the English East Midlands (and as it happens that city is very much still there, which I can attest by pure chance as I was dancing in Nottingham last night, although that event has no connection with this article), but there is nothing in particular in the original song that does link it with Nottingham, or anywhere else or anyone else.
The simplest explanation is that it is a song celebrating nonsense, created in the days when everywhere beyond the confines of one’s own village or town, was considered to be strange, weird and by and large unsafe. A world that is in fact upside down (a thought that was commonly expressed in pamphlets of the time, as that is what seemed to many people to be happening in the English civil war (1642 to 1651) – as well as this being a fundamental concept of folk tales from the earliest of of times).
Thus the song has been reinvented to include many settings telling of strange lands where strange things happen. But what Bob did was to take this melody and create new lyrics telling of a world where horrors were about to happen not because of the world’s weirdness but because of mankind’s stupidity. The concept also is that the singer can see what’s going on – (and by extension so can the fans). It is in fact a very appealing conceit: you might be fooling everyone else but you don’t fool me. “I can see through your mask”.
The point about the song however is that the simplicity of its construction (it is all based on one implied chord, and everything is powered by the melody and the lyrics – although changes can be added as the song progresses). This video includes an interesting introduction to the song, as well as some contemporary musical variations.
Now what Bob did was to start with a simple variation on the traditional song in terms of the lyrics, while keeping the essence of the song as close to the original versions – at least as we can assume they were performed.
In Dylan’s original version, the genius is the simplicity of the accompaniment with a powerful melody reaching to the high notes twice in each verse before descending. Add in the fact that so many of the lines are themselves memorable, and those of us hearing the song for the first time on Freewheelin could not but be moved. The fact was, for most of us, we had never heard anything like this before.
Now my point here is that Bob’s recording of the song seemed to come out of nowhere. I certainly had never heard “Nottamun Town” at the time and never heard such a strong public denunciation of war in a song before. All I had known was the poetry of the war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves etc.
So this was an extraordinarily powerful piece of writing, made all the more so because I was (as I think many others who listened to Freewheelin’ soon after it was released were) completely unaware of the source of the music. Of course, it was the lyrics that we all remembered, but it was the power of the music that brought the song to mind – and of course which then allowed it to be performed in the folk club scene that was growing exponentially.
And this leads me to my point. The songs of Bob Dylan at this time, which I and my contemporaries got to know, were, to some extent at least, songs for which Bob wrote the lyrics, but not the music. Quite why he chose to work that way I don’t know – maybe he just hadn’t discovered how good a writer of music he could be. Maybe he had been told that his songwriting was “not how we do it” (for there are always people who think they know about such things, but in reality just get a buzz out of criticising). Maybe he just loved the folk songs that he found.
But for whatever reason, at this time Bob was often creating songs for which he did not write the music, but did write the lyrics. I’m not saying that every song he composed at this time was one in which the music was lifted from elsewhere, but it is certain that in some important cases, this was what happened.