By Tony Attwood
Previously in this series
- Dylan, 1963 from copying of other people’s music to the launch of the original composer
- 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
- Who killed Davey Moore?: A different type of borrowing
When we look at Dylan the songwriter in 1963 we get a curious set of contradictions, most particularly, we see a man who could write original music which is highly interesting, entertaining and worthy of listening to repeatedly, but who would also copy the music from other songs and use them these songs as a way of communicating his lyrics, generally without acknowledgement. Indeed as we have seen Bob was quite capable of copying his own melodies if that is what he perceived the new lyrics needed.
In the last discussion on this topic we got to “You’ve been hiding too long” and I concluded with the thought that “What we are in fact seeing is the evolution of Dylan the composer of music, who can work alongside Dylan the composer of lyrics.”
After that song, Bob composed Seven Curses a song concerned with the absolute betrayal of justice, and what a father will do to protect his daughter. Here, we are back to Dylan using an existing song and idea (in this case the “Maid Freed From the Gallows”.) There are multiple versions of the song around as it moved through the folk tradition across Europe – seemingly from Hungary. Below is one, translated into English, which takes the interpretation of the song in a different direction
And this is where Bob really does let his own arrangement of the music overtake the original
Now I am not really into trying to get you to jump around this site and read something else I have written, but I think I was getting fairly near the mark when some ten years ago I wrote my review of Dylan singing the song – a review that others have been kind enough to quote off and on love the years. So I will include a couple of sentences in which I point out that Dylan “took elements from the old songs, and devised his own new words and variations on the old. It is the natural ability of the artist that tells him which words work in which context, and here Dylan gets it right throughout.”
What makes this re-writing by Dylan, and indeed this recording, so important in the history of Dylan’s compositional ability, is that here has taken a traditional piece of music, kept the simplicity of the song, and indeed given it an accompaniment which is also simple, and yet gives us a morality tale which is utterly profound. The music and the lyrics are utterly as one, in the sense that the world just keeps on going, while these appalling events unfold before us – and somehow we simply have to continue, somehow pretending that everything is ok, and there is nothing utterly wrong with our species and the cultures we create.
In short, this is for me a moment in the history of Dylan’s creativity which is as important – indeed as monumental – as his recording of Ballad for a Friend, a song for which I still cannot trace the antecedents. In essence, this is the taking of a traditional piece in such a new direction, and with such a perfect accompaniment that one is moving from the notion of “arranged by Bob Dylan” into “written by Bob Dylan”. It is the same music as existed before, but somehow, it isn’t.
And I think this is important to note, because it highlights the fact that there was a process going on – a process which involved the coalessing of the performing of traditional songs with the writing of new songs. Dylan had no worry about performing the piece as it was in earlier times – his interest was in making new music irrespective of the sources of his inspiration. His interest was in fact, in his own creativity in relation to the musical monuments that had come before.
Now to me, this is a prime issue that is generally ignored in most writings about Bob Dylan. Indeed if you had the patience to read through some of my ramblings in relation to Heylin’s monumental work “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” you might have noticed that across thousands of words I was making the point that Heylin’s reportage was fundamentally meaningless because he refused utterly to take into account the creativity of Bob Dylan, both in terms of the resultant music which he created, and in terms of how being such a creative genius affected Dylan’s personality and behaviour.
And if you want an example of Dylan’s creative genius in relation to taking other works, and then out of such works finding something utterly new, and utterly worth listening to, this song is that example. For Dylan merges the ancient traditions of music with the modern in a way that results in an utterly engaging and incredibly powerful composition and performance.
One thing we can conclude, however, is that it is very likely that Bob didn’t quite know what he had done at this point or how incredibly brilliant the result was. For as I have mentioned before “Seven Curses” was only performed twice, in the spring and autumn of 1963. Although fortunately, we do have that recording above from one of those performances.
And as I have written before, quite how Bob could have created such a brilliant, wonderful composition, and then just left it at two performances, I don’t know. Maybe someone in the record company was making suggestions as to what was worth playing and what was not. If so, we really ought to have a legal sentence of extended public humiliation for whoever it was.
What we do know for sure, however, was that this song emerged just after “New Orleans Rag” and “You’ve been hiding too long” – a song which I summarised as putting forward the view that “Our leaders have betrayed the ideals of our country”. I am tempted to print a few verses of the song here, but having done so in a draft version of this little piece, I find they fail to portray the depths of the emotion that Bob got into that song. You’ll have to listen to it above.
But the fact that this song is a monument of sheer genius in terms of lyrics, music and, above all, the arrangement through the way Bob plays the guitar, is not the full story. For what Bob achieved with this now often forgotten song, is the delivery of the most powerful of messages and most overwhelming set of emotions, in a most simple song. The only question there could have been for anyone following his work at the time had to be, “What on earth could he do next?”
And yet, despite this brilliance, what Bob did not do was to write a piece of music of his own. Instea,d he took the music of “The Patriot Game” to create “With God on our Side”.
The music of the Patriot Game has the simplicity that Bob found worked so brilliantly in Seven Curses, both in terms of the music which formed the basis of “With God” but the music now became less sorrowful that Seven Curses, and one might say “more accursed.”
But there is a profound desperation in “With God” – both musically throughout and of course with that famous last couplet
"The words fill my head, and they fall to the floorThat if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war"
Thus, in two consecutive songs, written in a year in which Bob wrote 31 songs (an utterly astonishing number second only to the previous year in which he composed 36 songs), we have astounding genius. And in the composition of these two songs, Bob took on the very fundamentals of mankind’s inhumanity and wickedness. For in “Seven Curses” the legal system and its representative is betrayed and destroyed by the powerful. In “With God on our Side” the world teeters on the edge of ruin through our own collective stupidity and idiocy.
If we ever need an example of Dylan brilliantly telling humankind how pathetic and stupid it is, in consecutive songs, this is the moment. And it was done with two songs that used borrowed melodies. And I doubt anyone who realised that the music was borrowed from earlier compositions minded at all. Why should anyone? Surely the results were so complete, so absolute, so overpowering, any suggestion that the music had existed before would be utterly churlish.
These two songs – one of which became known across the western world, one of which was perhaps only known to those dedicated to the study of Bob’s music, told us something that perhaps many of us knew but had not always wanted to acknowledge. This is an appalling world that our ancestors have created and we have allowed to continue. And Bob was pointing out how pathetically stupid we had become in allowing it to happen.
In short, so powerful was the message that I doubt that anyone at the time was the slightest bit worried about the notion that the music was copied from elsewhere. Most wouldn’tt have known, and even if they did, surely that fact made not the slightest difference to the power and importance of the message contained therein.