Spanish Mary and the beggar man mystery. Bob Dylan uncompleted.

Spanish Mary is a song that one might associate very much with Dylan’s writing around the time of When the ship comes in (1963) although we are told that the notebook that includes the song comes from 1967.  Assuming 1967 is right (and I have no evidence to suggest that all the learned and excellent musicians who have put the New Basement Tapes project together got the date of the notebook containing the lyrics wrong) then we have Dylan looking back whistfully to the way in which he wrote songs before.

As I have noted in previous reviews from this album, the songs consist of lyrics Dylan wrote but never turned into songs, which were then completed and performed by Elvis Costello, Jim James, Marcus Mumford, Rhiannon Giddens.

Because for this song we have a copy of the notebook we can see some of the changes Dylan made along the way as where “Upon their ship quite scary” becomes “no longer could they tarry,” and so on.

The music created to accompany the song seems to me to be very closely related to “The Twa Sisters” which seems fair enough because Dylan’s Percy’s Song (also from 1963, the “When the ship” year, uses the same sort of approach.

 

Here are the lyrics that Bob left…

“Spanish Mary”

Beggar man, beggar man tell me no lie
Is it a mystery to live or is it a mystery to die?

I seek ye not to ask of you
It was in Kingston Town indeed
It is said they stopped but not for greed
But for the love of Spanish Mary

I remember well, they came one day
The buffoon, the fool, the fairy
They asked of me what could I say
For the love of Spanish Mary’

Tis not of me to talk absurd
No rumour do I carry
No, I’ll not give you one word
But for the love of Spanish Mary

 

It truly is an atmospheric piece, beautifully realised in my opinion as the music aims to enhance the images contained within the lyrics.

But there is a problem.  Not a problem that takes anything from the beauty of the realisation, but a problem with realising the song in a musical form.  This is the couplet that appears twice:

Beggar man, beggar man tell me no lie
Is it a mystery to live or is it a mystery to die?

What on earth was Dylan intending to do with that?  It’s very difficult to say, since it is so very unlike Dylan to put in a couplet of that nature twice within a song that is otherwise in an utterly standard strophic (ie verse-verse-verse) format.

The first of these two line inserts heralds a change in the rhyming scheme – another oddity for a Dylan song.  Although Dylan is very liberal with the rhymes, up to this point he is running with a conventional rhyme scheme A B A B (the first and third lines rhyming with each other, and separately the second and fourth rhyming with each other).  It is standard stuff, and none the worse for that.

But after the first “beggar man” couplet we get something quite different

I seek ye not to ask of you
It was in Kingston Town indeed
It is said they stopped but not for greed
But for the love of Spanish Mary

which can only be written as A B B C.   Then we are back to the original form, until the repeat of the Beggar Man.

Does it matter at all, or am I being pedantic?  I think it matters in the sense that the format and style are 100% traditional, but with these two sudden leaps in a different direction – the break in the rhyming scheme and the two “beggar man” lines – something quite different is happening.

Each jolts the listener who is carefully paying attention to the song – and there is no harm in that at all – jolts can be good.  But a jolt of this nature needs to be done with a purpose and in a way that allows the music to continue while the jolt occurs.

If we think for a moment of Visions of Johanna, with the extra line added to the last verse, the listener may not appreciate at first that there is an extra line, but if taking in the whole feel of the song most listeners appreciate that something odd has happened.  This “something” works in Johanna, because the change stresses the build up towards “as my conscience explodes”.  (Incidentally the official Dylan site’s version of the lyrics hides this by randomly changing the line breaks, making it look as if each verse has differing numbers of lines, but it really is a nine line verse throughout with a tenth added in the final verse).

So we really do have a lyric that is, I am sure, not yet complete, and one which Dylan couldn’t immediately see how to resolve.  He wanted the question to be asked, and indeed  to be asked twice, but he hadn’t yet found a way to get the question fitted into the rest of the story.  Nor indeed is there a clear route back into the story after the first asking of the question – hence the break in the rhyming pattern.

Of course a master of words such as Dylan could have solved it given time, but he was being drawn in one hundred directions, and I rather suspect that if Dylan did think of these lines at all, he thought only that he might come back to them another day.

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This is the fourth of these songs that we have reviewed so far the others being

1. Married to My Hack
2. Nothing To It
3. When I get my hands on you

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