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
- How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second: “Masters of War”
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,” “Only a Hobo” and “Masters of War” with a view to understanding how Bob was working as a songwriter in these early days of his career. And the immediate conclusion is obvious – he was taking established traditional songs and using their melodies to which he added song lyrics of a totally different nature from the originals.
And so as the next song on the compositional list is “Girl from the North Country” the music for which was used a second time in the next song that Bob wrote, “Boots of Spanish Leather”.
We know from numerous accounts that at this time Bob Dylan met Martin Carthy who introduced Bob to a few of the vast number of English folk songs dating back to the 17th century if not much earlier – and it appears that until this moment Bob was not aware of the rich tradition of English and Scottish folk music which actually dates back to the 13th century, if not earlier. Perhaps the earliest of all such songs is “Sumer is icumen in” still known in England today as “Summer is a-coming in”.
Among other songs Martin Carthy introduced Bob Dylan to was “Scarborough Fair”
It has been widely commented that Bob took the music and some of the lyrics of this song for his own song “Girl from the North Country,” including the line from the refrain “Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine”. The music was then used again with “Boots of Spanish Leather” and I wrote about these two songs in the “Music and the Lyrics series”
I won’t repeat myself as that article is still on the site, but I do want to make the point that during this period Bob was not writing music; he was writing lyrics and attaching the lyrics to an existing melody.
And this didn’t stop there for the next song Bob presented to the world was “Farewell” which took the music of “The Leaving of Liverpool” another English folk song.
And here is the Leaving of Liverpool
What is particularly interesting to me, as and Englishman brought up in a musical family, is that these are not obscure English folk songs, but ones that I heard and learned in the 1950s. Indeed I suspect many English people will indeed still be familiar with this song and at least some of the other songs that Bob used.
Now of course these songs were new to Bob, and he knew that people in America who were interested in folk music would not have heard them. For Bob I guess it must have been like finding a second Woody Guthrie!
And as I pointed out in an earlier article on this, it is not just the music that links Dylan’s “Farewell” back to “Leaving of Liverpool” it is also the lyrics. The version everyone who has ever visited folk clubs where traditional folk songs are sung in my country will know is
Farewell to you, my own true love;I am going far away.
I am bound for Californ-i-a,
And I know that I’ll return someday.
So fare thee well, my own true love,And when I return, united we will be.
It’s not the leavin’ of Liverpool that grieves me,
But, my darling, when I think of thee.
Leaving aside all the similarities of the tune, the opening lyrics in Dylan’s song is so similar that it is getting awfully close to copying:
Oh it’s fare-thee-well, my darlin’ true,I’m a-leavin’ in the first hour of the morn.
I’m bound off for the Bay of Mexico,
Or maybe the coast of Cal-i-forn.
So it’s fare-thee-well, my own true love,We’ll meet an-other day, an-other time;
It’s not the leavin’ that’s a-grievin’ me,
But my darlin’ who’s bound to stay behind
Bob recorded the song as one of the Witmark demo recordings in March 1963 and as I have noted before there are several sources that say he had it marked down as a possible song for the “Times they are a changing” album.
So what we now have are the first five songs Dylan composed in 1963 all having had music borrowed from earlier folk songs: “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, and “Farewell.”
Quite clearly then taking old folk songs and writing new lyrics was not a one-off, but in 1963 was a way of writing for Bob. He was indeed at this time a poet who set his poems to other people’s music.
Here’s the sort of singing of “Leaving of Liverpool” that I heard repeatedly, in my youth (and which I might add rather annoyed me as a proud Londoner who saw the north as a run-down backward irrelevance).
Judy Collins, Anita and Helen Carter of the Carter Family, Tim Buckley and The Modern Folk Quartet all recorded Bob’s version. As did Lonnie Donegan, Dion DiMucci of Dion and the Belmonts, and Liam Clancy (who would of course been fully aware of the source of the song).
What this indicates is that no one was particularly concerned about the rewriting of old English folk songs and having them designated on the record as being written by Bob Dylan.
And at ths point I want to take in one more of Dylan’s songs from this period (early 1963) for I think it shows the first sign of Bob breaking away from the notion of using traditional music to go with his lyrics, and that is the largely forgotten “All over you” which is a comedy alternative to the talking blues which was popular at the time. It is however still based on something previous: in this case ragtime music.
My feeling is that Bob was very aware of this ragtime style and so rather than copying it directly (it really does take a lot of work to be able to play ragtime in the authentic style), he had the idea of taking a generic style and writing a piece in that, without actually copying directly. We can hear Bob’s introduction making a reference to his own copying of other people’s work.
And that seems to me to be the start of the new direction, or not just copying a song, but actually recognising that he had been doing this, and maybe could go a step further thereafter.
Indeed this had been something Bob had been doing for a while – we might recall “Death of Emmett Till” which uses the House of the Rising Sun” as its musical base
So my point is simple: Dylan copying other people’s music was not an occasional one-off, but a prime way of working which he had been using for some time.