Watching The River Flow (1971) part 3: If I had wings like Nora’s dove

by Jochen Markhorst

III If I had wings like Nora’s dove

Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand
With the sun beating down over the chimney tops 
And the one I love so close at hand 
If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow

Alas, the second stanza that Dylan may or may not have shaken out of his sleeve on the spot soon makes clear that the promise will not be fulfilled: not epic it shall be, but rather lyric. The song poet will not tell a story, but express emotions. It becomes obvious, anyway, that we are not to understand the where and when, the exposition in stanza 1, as an actual setting. After all, the suggestion was that we were in a city (night café, slow-moving trucks) at the crack of dawn. But this stanza opens with the desire to be “back in the city” and it is early afternoon (sun beating down).

Even more illustrative of the improvised genesis of the lyrics, moreover, is the strange, undylanesque linguistic error with which this second stanza opens; Wish I was back in the city instead of this old bank of sand contains a rather simple dangling modifier (I am this old bank of sand?). A language error that could have simply been polished away by adding a preposition (instead of on this bank of sand, for example, or away from this bank of sand), and forgivable in light of the impulsiveness to which Dylan has voluntarily subjected himself today, but the non-running sentence is written down uncritically in the first official song lyric collection Writings And Drawings, and in all Lyrics editions thereafter – to this day, it’s still on the site that way too. And in live performances he continues to sing it comme ça for decades.

The spiritual stepfather Leon Russell is incapable of saying it, though. In his steamy, smoking contribution to the 1999 tribute album Tangled Up in Blues: Songs of Bob Dylan, he changes it on his own authority into: Wish I was back in the city, instead out here on this sand. Which apparently escapes Dylan – in 2000 in Cardiff, he still untroubledly sings the anacoluthon. But it does bother him eventually, as we hear half a century after the day of its birth. When “Watching The River Flow” is promoted to the set opening of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024, we notice:

Wish I was back in the city
In my true love’s arms
She likes older men
They can’t resist her charms

… a text change that will gain semi-official status with the release of Shadow Kingdom in 2023 (although the lyrics on bobdylan.com remain unchanged).

Dylan – Watching the River Flow (Shadow Kingdom):

For now, however, on this Wednesday afternoon in March 1971 the freestyling song poet has to fill the second verse. It seems he is again delving into his inner jukebox. He has placed his protagonist on a bank of sand, decides on “longing” as the motif for the lyric, and then opts for the rhyme “a love close at hand” – unusual, but in Dusty Springfield’s 1966 world hit it could be done (You don’t have to say you love me / Just be close at hand), and the song is on Elvis’ most recent album (That’s The Way It Is, the single “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” becoming his 42nd Top20 hit later in 1970), so a love close at hand does hang in the air.

The interline With the sun beating down over the chimney tops is again confusing in terms of content (does the narrator wish to be on a rooftop terrace with his beloved in the city, or is he sitting here on a bank while the sun reflects on the rooftops?), and seems to have been rather haphazardly snatched from that inner grab bag. In fact, the “chimney tops” can only be an echo from “Over The Rainbow”;

Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
High above the chimney tops,
That's where you'll find me.

… in the canon, at least, there are no other chimney tops to be found. Like the word combination sun beating down might bubble up because of the proximity of water and thus the proximity of “Under The Boardwalk” (Oh when the sun beats down and burns the tar up on the roof), but it is more appealing to think that Leon Russell triggers those words.

Russell has just cemented his place in the rock pantheon as bandleader, song supplier and sideman of Joe Cocker’s monumental Mad Dogs & Englishmen, the live album that features nothing but rock highlights, including the Russell/Cocker duet “Girl From The North Country”, the hits “The Letter” and Russell’s “Delta Lady”, and the definitive versions of “Feelin’ Alright” and “Cry Me A River” – to single out just a few titles. All of them songs capable of setting Dylan’s associative flow in motion as he is searching for inspiration while listening to Leon’s soundtrack for what will become “Watching The River Flow”, but we can be fairly sure that Dylan is enamoured with the album’s title contributor, “Mad Dogs & Englishmen”;

In a jungle town where the Sun beats down to the rage of man and beast
The English garb of the English Sahib merely gets a bit more creased
In Bangkok at twelve o'clock they foam at the mouth and run
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun

… Noël Coward’s immortal 1931 cabaret song (featuring the classic oneliner “But Englishmen detest a siesta”). And Dylan’s impressions are still fairly fresh. After all, he was there, at the live recording of Mad Dogs & Englishmen in March 1970 at New York’s Fillmore East, as we know from Leon’s announcement of “Girl From The North Country”:

“There’s a guy in the house tonight that I know that you all have watched for a long time. Me and Joe have watched him for a long time. We love him. We’re gonna do one of his songs cuz we love him, that’s why.”

Less puzzling is the source for the over-familiar If I had wings and I could fly. Although Heylin traces the words to “The Water Is Wide”, and is recognised as an authority by Wikipedia, that seems very unlikely. True, the opening of this ancient folk song is The water is wide, I cannot get over / Neither have I wings to fly (in virtually every variation since the eighteenth century, from Scotland to Canada and from the United States to Australia), but that’s really too thin to be promoted to “source”. Much further up front in Dylan’s working memory, and much closer to “Watching The River Flow” is:

If I had wings like Noah's dove
I'd fly the river to the one I love
Fare thee well, oh honey, fare thee well

… “Dink’s Song”, that is, the song that was in Dylan’s repertoire as early as 1961, the song he paraphrases in 2020’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”, the old folk song he duets with Joan Baez at the Rolling Thunder Revue in ’76, and the song with which he crushes his first great love in New York:

“He started slow, building the rhythm on his guitar. Something about him caught my full attention. He pushed out the lyrics as he hit the strings with a steady, accelerating drumlike beat. The audience slowed their chattering; he stilled the room. It was as though I had never heard the song before. He stilled my room, for sure.”
(Suze Rotolo – A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008)

… where Rotolo also quotes exactly these very lines (misquoting though, as she understands “Nora’s dove”, adding a pleasantly absurd touch to the famous opening line).

The ad-libbing creator is almost at the stanza’s conclusion, at the recurring refrain line, and then posts his third and final miss of this verse: “I’ll just sit here so contentedly.” Misplaced, as he has just assured us that the narrator wishes he was somewhere else and that he misses his beloved so much – the six verse lines before this are opaque enough, but at least one thing was clear: he does not sit there “so contentedly”.

Like the error in the first line, the performer holds on to this awkward paradox for a long time, only to finally correct it in 2021. Since then, he simply omits both But and so contentedly;

If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
Right now I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow

Too late, probably. We must fear Aristotle has already refused “Watching The River Flow” for his Poetics, passing the text on to Didactics.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 3: Cocker Meadow

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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

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