By Tony Attwood
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”
- When copying other people’s music was Bob’s prime way of working
In this series I’ve gone back to look at Dylan’s songs of 1963 and in particular noted how although Bob was writing original lyrics he was using other people’s melodies as part of his compositions. Not just once or twice but as a regular event. In recent articles I’ve picked out such recordings as “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” “Only a Hobo” and “Masters of War” “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”), “Farewell” “All over you”, and “House of the Rising Sun.”
Of course, I am certainly not the first person by any means to raise this issue, although I am hoping to try and understand how a man who could write so many songs that are clearly not “borrowed” from others, felt the need to use existing songs in some of his work.
There is inevitably a website that digs into this issue with clear intent: Bob Dylan Plagarisms and this site quotes a 2004 interview with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, in which Bob is noted as saying “… you have to understand that I’m not a melodist. My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form. What happens is, I’ll take a song and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate.
“I wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That’s the folk music tradition – you use what has been handed down. ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ is probably from an old Scottish folk Song….
“I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”.
This of course has been investigated before and many have commented upon it. Joni Mitchell raised the point in 2010 in an interview with the LA Times as part of a joint interview with performance artist John Kelly. During this Mitchell said, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”
The interview involved Mitchell talking negatively about numerous other artists she didn’t like for various reasons, such as Grace Slick, Janis Joplin and Madonna although she is particularly positive about Jimi Hendrix.
The issue also appeared in the book Common as Air by Lewis Hyde, which won some literary prizes in 2010 when it was published. Here the author defends what he calls the “cultural commons” – meaning the ideas of the past that are now embedded in today.
In musical terms this could be translated to the fact that no one claims the copyright on the music of a 12 bar blues. If you want to know more about the 12 bar blues and how it works there is a video (linked below) going into it in some details… this takes “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley as an early example. If you don’t want the whole story of the 12 bar blues go to 2’58” and you will hear the song.
In essence, the structure is something you will know perfectly, and it is used in hundreds of thousands of songs
- 1st line on the tonic chord – that is the chord of the key the song is in
- 2nd line – same lyrics but on the chord of the fourth note of the scale, going back to the tonic chord
- 3rd line – new lyrics going through the fifth and maybe fourth chord, back to the opening chord – with the line rhyming with the first two lines.
Now this highlights our problem with authorship and copyright. Using the “12 bar blues” progression can’t be a copyright issue because hundreds of thousands of songs exist in that format. But the lyrics can be copyrighted, and possibly the melody (although lots of 12 bar blues songs use very similar melodies).
But Joni Mitchell took her criticism of Bob Dylan as a composer further claiming, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”
The question of plagiarism, made public by Joni Mitchell in 2010, is also discussed in Lewis Hyde’s Common As Air. The Bob Dylan Plagiarism site states that “Dylan’s first 70 recorded songs allegedly had clear predecessors and two-thirds of the melodies were directly lifted may be (as Dylan said) common to the “folk process.” But Yaffe also notes Dylan in his autobiography expressing feelings by using unacknowledged lines from Proust.
The issue thus has had wide coverage, and it is of course a matter for both the owners of copyright that might have been infringed and those who take a view on what songwriters should and should not do, to make their point as they wish. There can be no doubt that Dylan used music that had been composed by others previously, without acknowledging this, but whether this should be a central issue of debate or just accepted as the way things are, is of course up to the individual.
For myself, if I found someone had taken a melody for a song I had written and which I have placed on my personal website, and used it in a song without citing my name, I’d be both pleased that someone thought some music of mine was good enough to take, and annoyed and would ask for some of the royalties. If however it was pointed out to me that I had taken someone else’s melody and used it in one of my songs, I’d call it an honest mistake and apologise, remove the song from my website on which they are collected, and would argue that I hadn’t made any money out of the mistake (since the website is free to all – and is actually only there for the tiny number of people who have been kind enough to say that they like what I write). It’s one of those issues that depends on where you stand.
When we come to Bob’s next song in 1963, Who killed Davey Moore?, there is still some borrowing but it is of a different type, for the general consensus is that Bob took the idea for the song from the children’s song “Who killed Cock Robin”. The lyrics for this song are based in part on a song published in 1744, although of course the music has mutated many times since then.
Davey Moore won the World Featherweight Title for four years before being beaten on a technical knockout by Sugar Ramos in March 1963. During the fight with Ramos in Dodgers Stadium. After the match Davey Moor was taken ill, diagnosed with brain damage and passed away four days later. Phil Och’s song was issued in 1964 on the LP “The Original New Folk Volume 2.”
Dylan’s song however came earlier and he performed it at Carnegie Hall on October 26, 1963.
For the next performance however Wikipedia notes that during his October 31, 1964 show, before singing the song, Dylan said, “This a song about a boxer… It’s got nothing to do with boxing, it’s just a song about a boxer really… And, uh, it’s not even having to do with a boxer, really. It’s got nothing to do with nothing.
“But I fit all these words together… that’s all… It’s taken directly from the newspapers, Nothing’s been changed… Except for the words.”
What he didn’t mention was the tune itself, which was taken from the nursery rhyme Cock Robin.
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Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin. Who saw him die? I, said the Fly, with my little teeny eye, I saw him die Who caught his blood? I, said the Fish, With my little dish, I caught his blood.