No Nobel Prize for Music: How Dylan turned the strophic form into something new

Posted on June 5, 2025 by Tony Attwood

Details of the earlier articles in this series appear at the end of this piece.

By Tony Attwood

In the last episode I looked at Farewell Angelina, which is a song in which Bob returned to the simplest form of music that he has used: the strophic approach, which in essence is just verse, verse, verse and so on, for as long as you like.   And noting this is not to criticse Bob or the form: the strophic form is the fundamental of English folk music, on which of course American folk music was based.  The variation of the “middle 8” (or “ternary form” as music scholars call it) came later to give a feel of variance in songs that because of the technology of the 78rpm record, could only last a maximum three minutes at normal quality.   (They could be recorded up to three and a half minutes but the technology was stretched as the maximum length was reached).

Given the changes Bob had been making in the way that he had been writing music in the year before “Farewell Angelina,” going back to the strophic form of verse-verse-verse this was quite a backward step, and here we might well see two explanations for that.

First we might note that Bob did not ever perform “Farewell Angelina”, and his recorded version was only published on Bootleg 1-3.  Second Bob did not actually write the music himself but in fact took it from traditional folk songs, as he himself acknowledged.    So we could conclude from this that Bob never had any intent of performing it himself.  Indeed it could be argued that it was in fact for him, n0t part of his standard songwriting process but rather it was Bob playing with an idea, nothing more.

We may also note that in 1963 Bob had already written two songs concerning the issue of saying goodbye: “Farewell” and “Restless Farewell”.   The word, or the concept, seemed to be an issue of particular interest to him at this time, possibly because with the songs such as “Gates of Eden” he very much was saying goodbye to his earlier form of songwriting, which was in fact to use the same approach to the song as most previous writers had done.

For although Bob had used the form, he clearly knew it did not give him the freedom to delve into the music and come up with the expression of different feelings and emotions.   For that, he seems to have felt, something more was needed.  If you want to delve further into that background I did a little piece on the song some ten years ago which is still on this site.

But what we could never have predicted, and if I may say, I think what many commentators have never noticed, is that what Bob would write next was the most extraordinary song: “Love is just a four letter word” which sounds like nothing he had ever written before – but again did not perform.

Certainly just listening to the range that Joan Baez puts into the song, it clearly had extraordinary potential, although I rather suspect Bob didn’t try to use the full range that Joan finds by raising the opening line by an octave.  Although of course, it may be that Bob suggested that to her.

But leaving the range aside we can immediately hear that this again is a strophic song – which is to say it is verse, verse, verse, but with that really unusual, challenging and indeed interesting melody.  But more than that, Bob uses a technique he has used before, but is rarely used by other songwriters – he changes the number of lines in two of the verses.

The song is based on a standard series of eight lines of music, plus a final ninth line, which occurs at the end of each verse and which is unusual enough in itself.

But the penultimate verse has two extra lines added and the final verse has one more than the earlier verses.   As it happens I can’t think of any other song that has this approach, but I am not going to say “this is unique”, although until someone comes up with something written before this song which uses this effect we may think along these lines.   But of course because most commentators focus on other aspects of the song, this is often missed.

Although to be fair, the range of the melody is extraordinary.

Here’s the first verse for example:

Seems like only yesterdayI left my mind behindDown in the gypsy caféWith a friend of a friend of mineWho sat with a baby heavy on her kneeYet spoke of life most free from slaveryWith eyes that showed no trace of miseryA phrase in connection first with she occurred
That love is just a four-letter word

And below the final two verses…

Though I never knew just what you meantWhen you were speaking to your manI can only think in terms of meAnd now I understandAfter waking enough times to think I seeThe holy kiss that's supposed to last eternityBlow up in smoke, it's destinyFalls on strangers, travels freeYes, I know now, traps are only set by meAnd I do not really need to be assured
That love is just a four-letter word

Strange it is to be beside youMany years the tables turnedYou'd probably not believe meIf I told you all I've learnedAnd it is very, very weird indeedTo hear words like forever, fleetsOf ships run through my mind, I cannot cheatIt's like looking in the teacher's face completeI can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard
That love is just a four-letter word

(I should add that Joan Baez did later perform versions in which she omitted one verse and sang the second verse in a strong mock-Dylan style, which I’m not including here.  Personally, I think that version is awful – I leave you to go and find it if you must.  It doesn’t change the music, it just changes the accent and thus the implied meaning).

But back to the main point.   Adding an extra line or two is not that dramatic, of course, but it is in popular music incredibly rare.  Dylan had done it before, as for example in “Tambourine Man”, but then had prior to this composition written a number of songs without this effect, so here he returns to it.   And even though we are of course not counting the number of lines as we listen, most people tend to hear that there is something that bit different, that bit “extended” in these last lines.   We might not immediately say, “There’s an extra line” (or two) but we feel it.

Baez immediately took to the song, which was written by Dylan sometime around 1965, and “Dont Look Back” has a snippet where she sings part of it and says to Bob, “If you finish it, I’ll sing it on a record”.

Baez first included the song on her 1968 LP, “Any day now”, and has recorded it several times since with one of the versions actually creeping into the Hot 100.   It also appeared on “Baez sings Dylan” and on live albums.

As we know Bob did not perform it, possibly because he doesn’t have the vocal range and so his version would then sound inferior to the Baez version.

Dylan never released a recording of this song, and, according to his website, he has never performed the song live either.   Earl Scruggs played it with Joan Baez, and I have seen it written that he released an instrumental version of the song, but I have not been able to find a recording of this, so as things stand, I am a little suspicious of that claim.  It is possible that the version in question, is the one below, with Earl Scruggs playing, and Baez singing.

But let me return to my main point.   What Bob is doing with this song is experimenting again.  He has taken the strophic form in which so many of his songs are written but then played with it in a way that, as far as I know, no one else had previously done, by extending the number of lines and having a rhyming pattern which changes part way through, starting out A B C B, and then moving onto D, D, D, E, F.

Now it can be argued that the rhyme is a lyrical thing, not a musical effect, and that’s true to a degree, but the music has to be arranged to work with this, and if it is not, the whole song falls apart.   At the very least I would argue that this is a musical and lyrical effect – but it is the music here that gives us the song’s unique feeling.

And I would add, it shouldn’t work.  It should sound all wrong.  But it doesn’t!

Previously….

 

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