By Tony Attwood
- If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
- If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
- If only there had been a Nobel Prize for music 3: From Times to Percy’s song
By the time Bob Dylan wrote Percy’s Song he had got well into the notion of the protest song. Indeed however one analyses the songs that Dylan composed in 1963, the vast majority had at least an element of protest within them. And to save you looking back to where we looked at these songs before here’s a list of those songs I would consider to be within the realms of “protest” from this period.
- Walls of Red Wing
- You’ve been hiding too long.
- Seven Curses
- With God on our Side
- Talking World War III Blues
- Only a pawn in their game
- North Country Blues
- Troubled and I Don’t Know Why
- When the ship comes in
- The Times they are a-Changing
- Percy’s Song
- The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Now in looking at these songs as a group it seems to me that Dylan was not only writing lyrics that contained what we tend to classify as protest commentaries, he was also varying the way the music was written, in order to emphasise the change in the lyrical approach.
These were not always huge changes to the musical structure and form but they were there and they had an important part to play in terms of what the music was doing in order to back up the themes of the lyrics.
After Hattie Carroll, one of Dylan’s strongest pieces of protest to date, in terms of the lyrics, Dylan finished the year with three more compositions. In these three songs, in the lyrics, he expressed the view that the natural world is superior to anything that mankind could create and that the only logical response to being in a time like this is to move on. These songs were:
With “Lay Down” Dylan himself expressed the view in his notes printed on the album “Times they are a changin” that he was trying to capture the feeling of a Scottish ballad that he had once heard on a 78rpm record. He didn’t identify the song in question, and it is more than likely that by the time he wrote the sleeve notes he had forgotten which song it was, (although there has been much debate about which song it might have been).
One possibility is “The Water is Wide” which Dylan himself performed in1975
Another source that is quoted is “I Wish I wish” a song that Bob clearly knew because he used its lyrics for part of “Bob Dylan’s Dream” in 1963. There are multiple versions of “I wish” around, although I suspect I have been listening to the wrong ones in trying to trace the source of Bob’s inspiration! Bob however did perform a version of “The Water is Wide” which is close to “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.”
“One too many mornings” is most likely taken from “Deliverance will come” a traditional folk song which is often traced back to John B. Matthias (1767-1848) but which may well have antecedents beyond that date.
“Restless Farewell“, is a song he wrote, we are told, as an angry response to a Newsweek reporter who in late October 1963 published a story about Dylan of which Dylan did not approve. In this case, the musical source is said to be the Irish folk song “The Parting Glass,” a Scottish song dating back to the 17th century.
What we can see with these songs is that with greater or lesser variation Dylan was not using the dominant musical forms and approaches of his time, but instead deliberate using the musical forms of other countries and previous eras.
Now of course what we don’t know is exactly which versions of which songs Bob listened to and worked from, but we can see a linkage between the songs themselves.
These three songs, “Lay Down your Weary Tune”, “One too many mornings,” and “Restless Farewell” are all about setting the past aside, and in such a situation one might expect the obvious next step for Bob to take at this point would be to write music which was new. And that of course was to come, but for now, in each case he returned for his sources to traditional pieces. It was as if he was taking the traditional visions, and writing new songs in that style from days gone by.
This of course contrasts with “The Hour that the Ship Comes In,” which I looked at in the earlier piece From Hattie Carroll to the Incoming Ship where I argued that it would appear that Bob wrote original music to match his bouyant positive message, but then only performed the piece very rarely indeed, despite the obvious success of the composition.
Dylan’s writing at the end of 1963 is thus most curious in a way that I feel most commentators have not considered. He had written one of his most successful songs ever (“Times they are a changin”) which had a strong, positive message about the future and for which, as far as I know, he developed an original melody to go with the lyrics. It says the future can be better than the past, and we can make it happen.
And yet then having not only written that song which clearly works in every way, and as far as I can see was an immediate success when first performed on 26 October 1963 at Carnegie Hall, Bob then turned away from that positive message and the strident “voice” of “Times” and wrote “Percy’ Song”.
Now Percy’s Song is a much more gentle piece, and contrary to “Times” is about the failure of justice. “Hattie Carroll” returns to the strident approach but again about the failure of justice. “Lay Down” is about the failure of everything manmade, “Mornings” is about giving up and moving on, and so is “Restless Farewell.” In fact, and rather bizarrely, after wriitng his most positive piece to day, he writes about negativity. Everything is now about failure and the need to keep moving. Which of course was the message the songs of Robert Johnson were giving Bob.
Now I postulated above that the songs Bob composed, and which we are looking at here, reflect a view that there is nothing mankind can do which nature cannot do better. Robert Johnson gives us the slightly different visio, that whatever we do we are going to be in trouble. So perhaps to find the answer to questions about what was driving Bob in these musical directions, we should look at the end of “Restless Farewell”, as I have noted before in writing about that song. For if Robert Johnson was anything, he was utterly restless.
Musically Bob is back to that less-than-common 12/8 time which I noted before, and however one writes out the lyrics, the rhyming scheme is irregular. Indeed if we write out the lyrics so that each line of lyrics is one bar of 12/8 time we get this….
Oh, ev'ry girl that ever I've touched, I did not do it harmfullyAnd ev'ry girl that ever I've hurt, I did not do it knowinglyBut to remain as friends You need the time to make amends And stay behindAnd since my feet are now fast, and point away from the pastI'll bid farewell and be down the line
There are indeed eight lines of lyrics when written this way, but this is not how most transcribers write the lyrics, because they are not contemplating the progression of the 12 beats and the use of the triple time which makes the song so unusual.
But what I think Bob is doing here is reflecting the irregularity of Robert Johnson’s timings and rhythms, but doing so in a way that takes the edginess of Robert Johnson’s music, and combines it with the gentility of European folk songs from earlier centuries.
In short, he is combining different traditions in unique ways. And all this was happening just in a short period at the end of 1963. Bob had created a great worldwide hit song, but his interests and his resultant subsequent compositions, were taking him to very different musical places.