The songs Bob wrote and then ignored: Ballad for a Friend and the issue of originality

• Dirt Road Blues and Too Much of Nothing
• The utterly brilliant Angelina, plus Maybe Someday, Under you spell
• The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• No time, time passes and Dirge
• World Gone Wrong, She’s your lover, Foot of Pride
• Abandoned Love and Up to Me

By Tony Attwood

I’ve raved over Ballad for a Friend so often on this site across the years it seems odd to write about the song again, but it does of course fit into this category of songs written but not performed.   However there is something else to add now…

But just in case you are not familiar with the song, or indeed if you fancy hearing it again, here it is.

It is a song that no one has suggested (at least as far as I have seen) was written by anyone other than Dylan.  However, here’s the conundrum.

Eyolf Østrem who knows everything anyone could ever know about the musical construction of Dylan songs in terms of chords and how they are played, notes the recording as being an open D tuning with the capo on the 7th fret.   As well as noting that  “The interlude figure also appears in Standing On The Highway, recorded on the same occasion.”

So from this we might take it that Bob had a tuning, and was making up a melody to go around it while he played the guitar in the restricted way that opening tuning allows and this happened early in 1962.  Of course that might not be how it all happened, but it is possible.

Now I think what often draws people like me who rave over this recording [at least I suppose there are others who also rave over this recording, although maybe I am more on my own that I imagine when it comes to commentaries on Bob’s recordings] are the lyrics which are extraordinary; simple and yet profound largely because at first we don’t know where this is going, and once we do, all we can do is go back to the start and hear it again.   The melody is plaintive – it is not complex, just three lines of music repeated six times, but once heard it stays in one’s mind.

Sad I'm sittin' on the railroad track,
Watchin' that old smokestack
Train is a-leavin' bit it won't be back

Years ago we hung around,
Watchin' trains roll through the town
Now that train is a-graveyard bound

Where we go up in that north country,
Lakes and streams and mines so free,
I had no better friend than he

Something happened to him that day,
I thought I heard a stranger say,
I hung my head and stole away

A diesel truck was rollin' slow,
Pullin' down a heavy load
It left him on a Utah road

They carried him back to his home town,
His mother cried, his sister moaned,
Listin' to them church bells tone.

 And yet as I am writing about Dylan’s compositions in the following year, I find I need to pose a question that I am not sure anyone else has previously asked.   If Bob was able to write this stunning original piece in 1962, or perhaps earlier, why then in 1963 was he copying the melodies and chord sequences of existing songs when writing the pieces that secured his legacy for the decades to come?  A list of the songs from early 1963 which were based on existing music appears in the article When copying other people’s music was Bob’s prime way of working

Of course one possible explanation is that “Ballad for a friend” was copied from someone else’s music, and Bob recorded it for the Whitmark Demos, just because he liked it and it demonstrated his talent.  After all there was no demand that we know of with the Whitmark Demo for Bob to record songs he had written.  And indeed as we can hear from the recording, it was not professionally recorded, as the tape is not running at the proper speed at the very start.

The notion that the music comes from elsewhere is originates from the thought that if Bob could write something this good in 1962, why in 1963 would he start taking existing music as the accompaniment for his lyrics?   Was “Ballad for a friend” not an original piece of Dylan music?  Did someone persuade Dylan he wasn’t a composer, and so should restrict himself to lyrics?  Or was Bob perhaps transfixed by the notion that in the old days when folk music flourished people did just take existing songs and write new lyrics?

Now it is of course quite possible that someone (or maybe a number of people) has/have answered that, and if so I would be really grateful if you could either put a note at the end of this little piece telling me about it, or indeed write to me at Tony@schools.co.uk – because I am puzzled.   How could he, and others, not recognise the power and elegance of the music of Ballad for a Friend, and then realise that if he could produce something as good as that musically, he had no need to take up other people’s (or indeed traditional) songs, but could in fact write music himself.

After all, writing music is not just something Bob does with difficulty.  One only has to listen to the extraordinary re-arrangements he has made of his own work in subsequent times to appreciate that.  Of course if you really want to go back over this topic you can read the series on the Never Ending Tour Revisited, but if you are short of time, or have had more than enough of my ramblings, I will once more refer you to Tweedle Dum, first as it appeared on the record

And compare it, as I have done before, to this live recording from 2014

Now this transformation shows an utterly astonishing musical and literary ability; for it is incredibly difficulty to set aside one’s original composition and re-invent it.  And let me add, that if you have never done such a thing yourself, it really, really is much harder than you might imagine – which is part of the reason why very few composers ever do it.  Writing a song embeds it in one’s mind.  Setting that aside totally and starting again as this rewrite does is an amazing achievement.  Dylan’s ability in this regard is rarely noted favourably, but it really ought to be.

Of course it might be argued that this ability to write and re-write songs in this way is a more recent development in Bob’s writing, but if that argument were to be put forward I would then counter by going back to this version of “It’s alright ma” from 1980 and was featured in Mike Johnson’s “History in Performance” series

1975/81. Stuffed graveyards and false gods.

This time the melodic line is roughly maintained, but the whole essence of the piece is changed by the installation of a totally new sort of urgency in the music both by the speed of the song and the way Dylan’s voice has modified the power of the message.   Just compare that with this 1964 live version:

So yes, I am puzzled by the way Bob turned to taking old folk songs and re-using the music for his songs in the early part of his career, when it seems his ability to write new music was as profound in the early days of his recordings, as it was in the years to come.

But the fact is that from the evidence we have it seems that this is what happened.  At first he wrote original music, and in 1963 he was using other people’s songs.   But the division is not simple – let us not forget that perhaps Bob’s most famous song of 1962 is “Don’t think twice it’s alright”, which is based musically on Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone”.