Bob Dylan: the composer of music part 11: “When the Ship Comes In”

By Tony Attwood

This series looks as the way Bob Dylan evolved from being a man who would arrange older folk songs, and on occasion, take existing melodies and write his lyrics around them, into an extraordinarily effective composer of both lyrics and music.  That is where he started out, but somewhere along the way Bob became a composer of music (as well as a lyricist) in his own right.

Previously in this series I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”

Next comes “When the ship comes in” which naturally has a lot of commentaries written about it.  However, none that I have seen suggest directly anything other than the notion that the music is a Bob Dylan original composition.

But there are hints and suggestions, perhaps because with Dylan there are always hints and suggestions, that ideas behind the song were drawn from elsewhere.   For example, Bob Dylan commentaries that there is a link drawn between “Pirate Jenny” from the “Threepenny Opera” and Dylan’s song.  In the video below, the music starts on the 30-second mark.

Of course this is not suggestive of an exact copy by Bob Dylan of music from elsewhere, but we could be talking about an influence, (and all composers are subjected to influence) as the rhythm of the song is much the same as that used by Dylan.  It could be the sort of situation where the rhythm of the melody of one tune is retained in the mind and gets mutated to fit the next set of lyrics.

And let’s be clear – there is nothing illegal or even generally considered “wrong” in a composer, or indeed a poet or novelist, being “influenced” by what has gone before.  To be utterly original is not only nigh on impossible, given how much has been written before, but also often pointless.  There is still much to be made out of taking what has gone before and seeing where else it can go.

Thus staying with the origins of Bob’s interest in “Pirate Jenny”, it has also been noted that Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo was the set director for an amateur production of the play, and indeed it has been often noted that Dylan attended the rehearsals. Here are the lyrics to the opening of Pirate Jenny.

You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors
And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking
Maybe once you tip me and it makes you feel swell
In this crummy Southern town

It is quite possible to sing those lines to the music of the opening four lines of “When the Ship Comes In.”   The melody of each song is quite different of course, but the pulse is the same, and for many song composers it is the pulse of the song that is the thing that is first set down, as a guide to how further verses will work.  Even if you have no musical background, you can perhaps sing “You people can watch while I’m scrubbing these floors” to the music of “Oh the time will come up when the winds will stop.”

Of course, that is not proof of where Bob got the rhythmic pulse of the song from, but it is a possibility and this allows us to postulate that this could be the origin.  But if we do say that then it is important to be clear that this is not at all “copying” to the extent we have noted in some other early Dylan compositions where virtually a whole melody is taken and re-used with new lyrics.  It is, in fact, what many songwriters do; they listen to a lot of music, to the rhythms, to the melodic passages, to the chord changes and so on, and some of this will stick in the mind, and get reused as a new idea or a new set of lyrics starts to emerge.   In short, if Bob were to have been influenced by “Pirate Jenny” then that was all it was – an influence, not a copying.

Indeed, as we pursue this line of thought, there are certainly lines in “Pirate Jenny” which maybe point again toward the “Ship” such as

Then one night there’s a scream in the night
And you’ll wonder who could that have been

which perhaps you can hear in your mind to the tune of the Ship instead of the lyrics

Then they'll raise their hands sayin' we'll meet all your demands
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered

Furthermore, “Pirate Jenny” as the title suggests, does have ship images in it as with

There’s a ship
The Black Freighter
with a skull on its masthead
will be coming in

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin’.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

And in Revelations 7.1 we have

“And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.”

So as I have tried to note before, we must accept that most authors and composers generally draw on what are called “sources”; not always of course, and not in every book or song, but nevertheless it is common practice for writers in all formats to be influenced by what others in their field have done.  Almost every writer in every format is listening to and noting where others have gone, and we certainly know that Bob has always had an encyclopedic knowledge of music in multiple formats.

I have recently noted in an article on this site, that despite the obvious popularity of the song “When the ship comes in” Bob only performed it three times on stage and of course, as ever, we don’t really know why.  The simplest answers are that having recorded the song, he didn’t really fancy it anymore and that there is not too much you can do to re-arrange the song while still keeping it as the song that we all know (and indeed love).

But what I think we can also conclude is that this is, without much doubt at all, truly a Bob Dylan original song, with music (unlike many seen up to this point) totally by Bob Dylan.  There are influences, but every composer is influenced.

We do, however, on this occasion, have a comment from Dylan himself on the composition of the song, although it was made almost 20 years later, so it may not be that reliable. And as it turns out, is not particularly helpful!  For it is reported that “in 1985, he [Dylan] told the highly acclaimed film maker Cameron Crowe, “This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced, of course, by the Irish and Scottish ballads …’Come All Ye Bold Highway Men’, ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’.”

And this is where I have a problem, because although I can find references in the literature (presumably taken from this comment) to Bob having taken “Come all ye bold highway men” as a source for some of his own work, I can’t find any references to that song anywhere.   And this is despite having had quite an engagement with traditional folk music of the British Isles in my musical life.  It is simple not a song I know.

Now of course, that latter point is neither here nor there, I’m moderately knowledgeable about the folk traditions of the British Isles, but not an expert.   But beyond that it seems that the internet doesn’t seem to have much on that song either.

So if you can find a recording of someone singing “Come all ye bold highway men,” which is not an obvious contemporary piece, please do leave a link to it in the comments section, as I have drawn a blank.  And if we all draw a blank, I think we might begin to consider the notion that there was no Scottish or Irish ballad called “Come all ye bold highway men” which has survived the ravages of time, to be a valid one.