Recent articles:
- Bob Dylan’s songs: are they related to events that happen around him?
- Bob Dylan and the songs of entrapment
by Tony Attwood
I have been trying t put forward an answer to the headline question above, in recent articles on this site, and the thought I have got to basically suggests that through much of his writing career Bob Dylan has picked up on a theme, an approach or an idea, in terms of the lyrics he writes, and he has then, more often than not, he has written a number of songs which lyrically all fit around the same theme.
This was not the way Bob started out in 1959/60, as he tended to jump into a different subject with each song, but by the time he reached 1962, this was the approach he was starting to consider.
Now 1962 was not entirely devoted to writing a very large number of songs on certain subjects, and then moving on, but it was also the year in which Bob changed. For by the end of the year, the notion of taking a lyrical them and then writing several songs on that topic had become the core of Bob’s approach.
So the opening nine compositions in 1962 – up to “Blowing in the wind” were on a variety of topics: death, gambling, moving on, right wing politics, protesting against nuclear war, and seeing the world in many different ways . And indeed all these themes can be found within those nine songs.
But then, Bob seemed to get the feeling that a more interesting approach might be to take a lyrical theme and explore it from several angles by composing several songs in relation to each theme.
Now this was no real problem to him because the songs were simply pouring forth in a seemingly unstoppable flow. In fact in 1962 Bob composed no less than 36 songs that have been kept (and quite probably a few more that bit the dust before the wider public could get hold of copies!). The list of those 36 songs along with all the other songs written by Bob in the 1950s and 1960s, that we know about and have recordings of, can be found here.
But then after the composing of “Blowing in the Wind” that Bob changed his approach – although he had already undertaken the exploration of a couple of songs on the same lyrical themes but with new words and music, with Death of Emmett Till and The Ballad of Donald White both of which were social commentaries based around one person.
So maybe it was “Emmett Till” which suggested to Bob that he could also write about someone else – in this case Donald White, followed by Corina Corina – a song of lost love and moving on. But the key point here is that this was followed by Honey just allow me one more chance, and then Rocks and Gravel; three songs in a row on the lost love theme.
And indeed Bob didn’t then abandon the notion of “lost love” (often described by those who trace the history of pop lyrics as one of the three mainstays of the genre – the other two being “love” and “dance”, because later in the same year Bob also wrote Down the Highway, Tomorrow is a long time, and Kingsport Town, all of which are lost love songs.
And I do believe this using of specific themes in the lyrics was a deliberate (or at least sometimes an unconcious) from which Bob eventually felt the need to break away, as later in the same year we find Bob composing Hard Rain’s a gonna fall, and John Brown – both songs that protest about war, each of which breaks away from the established “love” and “lost love” themes.
As the year went by other themes struck Bob and he used them more than once, as for example with the expression of the need to stand up and protest if you want to change the world. Here, very interestingly I think, the theme wasn’t focussed on the issue of what the protest was about (as for example with anti-war songs) but rather about the need to protest if you want change. Examples were Train A Travellin’ and Ye Playboys and Playgirls
Indeed such songs can be associated with Bob’s growing feeling for commenting on the way people behaved and the way they might behave if they wanted change. For spread out through the year we can find songs such as Quit your Lowdown Ways, Ballad of Hollis Brown, Train A Travellin, Oxford Town and Kingsport Town, each of which is, in its own way, about change, how change is being enhanced, and how it might be held back.
In fact Bob wrote what was, I think, a record number of songs in that one year (36) which he recorded and which have survived, and so it is not surprising that they began to fall into thematic groups – even if that was not his intention. For there are obviously only a certain number of issues that are wrong with the world which one can write about.
So although in the midst of all these compositions we have Don’t think twice which of course is about a relationship, this song again is about change and the lover moving on. Indeed it is the concept of change itself that seems to be central to Bob’s thinking at this time. As I wrote earlier about Train A Travellin’, when I first hear that song (also written in the same year as those noted above) the theme there was “Stand up and protest about what’s going on around you”, rather than protest about specific issues. Put another way, the them is “change”. Not necessarily change to something specific, but simply “change.”
Thus I would argue that Bob, as a result of this formative year in his song writing, realised that “change” was a theme that particularly attracted him, and which he could write about in many different ways.
Indeed if we look at the final group of songs Bob wrote in 1962 we can see how solidly the concept of change and moving on had gripped him. These are the last nine songs Bob wrote in that year, in the order they were written, with the briefest possible summary of the theme of each song:
- Train A Travellin’ (Stand up and protest about what’s going on around you)
- Walking Down the Line (Keep on moving on)
- Ye Playboys and Playgirls (Stand up and change the world)
- Oxford Town (Protest against racism)
- I shall be free (I’m crazy, the world is crazy, that’s the way to be)
- Kingsport Town (Lost love, moving on)
- Hero Blues (Beware when your girlfriend loves you because you are famous)
- The Ballad of the Gliding Swan (Life gives us changes and surprises, but life goes on)
- Whatcha Gonna Do? (How will you be placed at the second coming – the biggest change of all).
And from this I just wonder if I should be seeing Bob’s life work as a treatise on change in general, rather than certain specific changes in partcular.