How Bob Dylan turned the entire notion of how a song should be written, upside down.

By Tony Attwood

I ended my last commentary The songs got longer the form started to bend; we needed patience with the question how on earth has Dylan….

“…managed to persuade so many of us to listen to (and one might almost say “adopt”) a song that paints the world as being in such an utterly disjointed and decayed state?   For “Visions” is not a protest song like “Masters of War” or  “Times they are a-changin’” – it is a song of collapse and disintegration.    And yet it is one of his most popular and successful songs of all time.

I then offered up by way of conclusion, a recording of none of those songs, but Laura Marling singing “A hard rain’s gonna fall”.   Which maybe if you read my piece, made you think that I’d either lost it totally, or simply made a silly mistake.

But actually, I was trying to prove my point, without explaining it… in short leaving me something to say in this, the next article.

For my point is that in these early years Dylan was learning, through his writing of multiple songs (36 published songs in 1962, 31 in 1963) how to write songs in different ways.  The form was pretty much the same each time (mostly verse-verse-verse, occasionally verse and chorus, and occasionally verse with a repeated line), but the essence of the songs was still experimental, which is what has allowed others since Dylan, to take his songs into new pathways musically.

In doing this Bob stuck to strophic (ie a verse format repeated throughout the song), or verse and repeated lines (Times) or later verse and additional lines (Johnanna).

Now I have to admit that I do not know any other songwriter who developed his writing in such a manner.  And here I would love your help.  Because, if you know of other songwriters who did (either back in the 1960s or any time since) what Bob did in songs like “Tambourine Man” in varying the length of verses, and with the use of repeated rhymes, then please do tell me.

What we can see even without such comparisons however is the experimentation that Bob goes through as he looks for ways to extend his songwriting through this technique.

Take the “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol”.  That song is based primarily on three chords: C, A minor and E minor.  That’s unusual but within the structure of a song in the key C major these are conventional chords.  However musically it leaves us unsure of what key the song is in.  It could be C major or it could be Eminor, but eventually, most of us who think about such things feel it to be in C major.  But it is a very unusual C major since most of the time the song is accompanied by minor chords.  That’s legit, but weird.

In short, already Dylan is something very unusual with the music: a song in a major key which spends most of the piece in the minor.

And that is not all, here again, Dylan goes exploring, in terms of musical form.  The first two verses are nine lines long, the third verse is 10 lines long and the final verse is 14 lines long.  Whoever did that before?

All of this is a challenge to normal, conventional music which says that each verse of a song should be the same length.  But more than that, it should be the same length but NOT nine lines long.

And then consider the rhyme pattern

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops was called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

We have two rhyming couplets there (lines three and four, and lines eight and nine).  And the fact that one of those pairs takes us into line nine shows us how far Bob has moved on from conventional songwriting.   Not only did songs not previously just have two rhyming pairs of lines and others without rhyme, but songs didn’t have nine lines in a verse.

But by the last verse we have travelled even further.  Now we have a 15-line verse!  We can make out some rhymes – I am stretching it a bit by including “caught em” and “bottom”, and it is possible at the end to argue that the last two lines I have set out, are not the last two lines, as many transcribers turn those into three lines.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'.
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face for now's the time for your tears.

But however we look at this, the old concept of rhyming and regular line length and structure has been thrown away, and replaced by something new.

Thus my point is that Dylan, having moved away from taking other people’s music, and keeping his own compositions very simple with simple techniques such as a repeated last line (such as in “Times they are a changing”) Bob had very quickly moved into a near free form of, and a new approach to, songwriting.

Now I was going to contrast the above rhyme scheme with that of Don’t Think Twice written in the previous year.  But at this point, coming to look at Don’t Think Twice again, I think we can see the same games being played with the rhyme scheme even in that early composition, although the music itself is more regular.  (“Don’t think twice” was written about a year before “Harrie Carrol”).

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If'n you don't know by now
And it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It'll never do somehow
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm a-traveling on
But don't think twice, it's all right

Here the rhyme scheme is

A B A B

C D D E

You can, if you really want to stretch the point, argue that “dawn” rhymes with “gone” but really I think that is going too far.  Unless you are from a part of the world where “gone” really does rhyme with “dawn”.

What I think we have got, when we come to look, is Dylan experimenting with the structure of the songs from his earliest years in serious songwriting, in terms both of the lyrics (in the sense of what the song was about), but also in terms of the way he made the lines rhyme.   And here I think that very few, if any, other songwriters of this time were doing that.  And yet for some reason, very few commentators show any interest in this.

Which is interesting since in popular music that period – and I am tempted to say any period – the rhyme scheme was central to the construction of most songs except the “art” songs of composers in the classical romantic tradition such as Hugo Wolf.

For example, the song “White Christmas” plays with the rhyme structure a bit, but the rhymes are still clearly there:

Verse 1: “Know” rhymes with “snow”

Verse 2: “Write” rhymes with “bright” rhymes with “white”

Now I am not saying Dylan invented the notion of playing around with rhymes, (in “Hound Dog” the word “time” rhymes with “mine” – which is almost a rhyme, although not strictly so), but I am saying he went much further than anyone else in these early songs – and remember the rhyme in songs was, until Dylan came along, at the very heart of the song structure.

And I think to round this off one might also note that what is by common consent one of the most famous songs of the Beatles, who were, I think you might agree, fairly famous for their songwriting in the 1960s, was…

Oh, yeah, I'll tell you somethin'
I think you'll understand
When I say that somethin'
I want to hold your hand

Oh, please, say to me
You'll let me be your man
And please, say to me
You'll let me hold your hand

And when I touch you
I feel happy inside
It's such a feelin' that my love
I can't hide

So my point is that Bob was not just experimenting with what he could write about, he was also experimenting with the whole notion of rhyme, and with the whole concept of how a song should be structured, not least by regularly changing the length of each verse.

Yet these revolutionary musical approaches and musical changes were and still are often ignored in reviews of Dylan’s work because, in my view, of the insistence of most commentators in focussing only on the lyrics, and not at all on the music or the structure.  Bob was, from the start, challenging the entire concept of how a song could be structured, and this I think is utterly amazing.   He hadn’t been writing songs for that long, and yet he was turning the whole notion of how a song was put together, upside down.

If you have found anything here of interest, you might also like to glance at….

• • The songs got longer the form started to bend, we needed patience
  • Dylan’s songwriting: does it matter who wrote the music (and were we missing a deeper meaning?)
  • Bob Dylan, truth and fiction from 1963 to 1995. The Restless Farewell.
  • Breaking down the rigidity of the popular song. Dylan in 1963
  • Why does Bob Dylan so often re-write the music of his songs?