Untold Dylan

by Tony Attwood

This is the utter simplicity of a Broadside ballad taken to its ultimate level – and for me it really works, and I for one am so glad that we still have the recording of Bob and Pete Seeger singing this song.

It works because the simplicity of the message of defiance is all that is needed to convey the message.  It works because it is utterly memorable.  And it works for me because it reminds me of those heady days when just speaking one’s defiance of the world around us felt like it was enough to make change.  We were going to win!  We just knew it!!!

I really am transported back to those heady days.

If you don’t know the song, there is a link to a recording of it at the end of this little piece, but I hope that if you flip down to that now, you might come back and read the rest of my ramblings… just in case you find something of interest therein.

The opening verse sets out the whole of the song’s structure…

Oh, ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world
Ain’t a-gonna run my world
Ain’t a-gonna run my world
Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world
Not now or no other time

After that the structure is set so with the second verse we get

You fallout shelter sellers
Can’t get in my door
Can’t get in my door
Can’t get in my door
You fallout shelter sellers
Can’t get in my door
Not now or no other time

and so on.

The third verse opens

Your Jim Crow ground
Can’t turn me around

and follows the same format, but for non-American readers I am going to explain this.  (I know this is a bit like me explaining the meaning of “Turn again Whittington” to an English audience, but I did try mentioning “Jim Crow” to a few well-educated and knowledgeable friends and their response ranged from baffled to uncertain.)

So, from an English perspective…

Up to the 1960s many of the states in the USA used what became known as the Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation between black and white members of society.

Jim Crow was the name of a fictional character portrayed in the early part of the 19th century by the white actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice.  His performance as an uneducated black slave (Jim Crow) were utterly demeaning and racist, and became very popular with white audiences.  And so “Jim Crow” became the standard disparaging generic name for black citizens.

We have to remember that at the time Dylan wrote this song, in many states the laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated.   As an example the laws of Alabama also required that female nurses should not be asked to work in rooms in which black men were placed.   Bus stations were required to be segregated, and have separate ticket windows while trains and restaurants were segregated.  People of different colour were also forbidden from playing pool or billiards together.

So, that is the Jim Crowe ground.   Bob Dylan continues

The laughter in the lynch mob
Ain’t a-gonna do no more
Ain’t a-gonna do no more
Ain’t a-gonna do no more
The laughter in the lynch mob
Ain’t a-gonna do no more
Not now or no other time

And then he takes his anti-war stance

You insane tongues of war talk
Ain’t a-gonna guide my road

Followed by

You red baiters and race haters
Ain’t a-gonna hang around here

before finally concluding

Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna own my world
Ain’t a-gonna own my world
Ain’t a-gonna own my world
Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna own my world
Not now or no other time

I find it a simple, but none the less highly enjoyable and important song, and it is particularly interesting to see how it sits among the songs Dylan was writing at this time in that most productive year of 1962…

• Train A Travellin’
• Walking Down the Line
• Ye playboys and playgirls
• Oxford Town

“Train a travellin” is itself a call to stand up and protest about what is going on around you, while “Walking down the line” uses a musical style and approach that is very similar to “Playboys” but to reflect on the singer’s own condition

My money comes and goes
My money comes and goes
My money comes and goes
And rolls and flows and rolls and flows
Through the holes in the pockets in my clothes

Then comes “Playboys” and the anti-racism stance within that is then extended with “Oxford Town”.   Musically and lyrically it was a really interesting time for Bob Dylan the songwriter.

Here’s the recording

And one of a number of alternative versions that exist, this from The Auld Toon Band

By Larry Fyffe

It can be interepted that in ‘Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts’, Bob Dylan uses the symbol of the rose(mary) to represent historical nothern Israel/Sumaria and the lily to represent southern Judea/Jerusalem.

As he so often does, Dylan mixes the sunshine and moonlit poetry of the Romantics with dark verses from the Judeo-Christian Bible:

I see the lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever-dew
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too
(John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci)

Keats picks up the symbolism from another Romantic poet:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold …..
And there lay the rider distorted and pale
With the dew on his brow, and rust on his mail
(Lord Byron: The Destruction Of Sennacherib)

According to the Holy Bible, the Assyrians conquer northern Israel and it’s capital Sumaria though they only manage to lay seige to Jerusalem, the capital of Judea:

And the king of Assyria did carry away Israel unto Assyria
Because they obeyed not the voice of the Lord their God
(Kings ll: 18: 11,12)

The Judeans, on the other hand, are rewarded for remaining loyal to Yahweh, and finally drive away the Assyrian army:

That which thou hast prayed to me
Against Sennacherib king of Assyria
I have heard
(Kings II, 19: 20)

With his artistic interweaving of Biblical and Romantic imagery, Dylan seeks Wordsworthian solace away from the woes of the world:

You trampled on me as you passed
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow
All my doubts and fears have gone at last
I’ve nothing more to tell you now
I walk by tranquil lakes and streams
As each new season’s dawn awakes
I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate
(Bob Dylan: Tell Ol Bill)

Metaphorically speaking, the song says that though the Almighty tramples down the singer/songwriter or his persona at times, Yahweh will come through for the individual who does not give up on Him:

All the world I would defy
Let me make it plain as day
I look at you now and I sigh
How could it be any other way?
(Bob Dylan: Tell Ol Bill)

Dylan does not travel down the Apocalyptic path, as many analysts of his songs lyrics declare; these critics do not examine his artistic vision in its entirety.

Chooses Dylan instead to walk down the Romantic path with Shakespeare, though sometimes it can get dark:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference
(Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken)

Dylan’s ‘troubled dreams” are often absurdist, surreal, and, at times, burlesque:

The ghost of Belle Starr, she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun, she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper, who sits
At the head of the Chamber of Commerce
(Bob Dylan: Tombstone Blues)

Mixed in the songwriter’s alchemist pot, filled with Romantic and Gothic images, is a good batch of biblical symbols – i.e., Jezebel and her husband Ahab, a king of northern Israel, both of whom worship the god Baal of the Assyrians – she gets what she deserves and is done away with by a follower of Yahweh:

And he lifted up his face to the window
And said, “Who is on my side – who?”
And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs
And he said, “Throw her down”; so they threw her down
And some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall
And on the horses; and he trod her underfoot
(Kings II: 9, 32, 33)

Then it’s another spin of the roulette wheel:

They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They’re destroy you as well ….
Sluggers and muggers
Wearing fancy gold rings
All the woman goin’ crazy
For the early Roman kings ….
Bring down my fiddle
Tune up my strings
I’m gonna break it wide open
Like the early Roman kings
(Bob Dylan: Early Roman Kings)

Which brings it all back home to the Roman emperor who fiddles while Rome burns; to Neptune, the mythological Lord of the Sea; and to the ‘unsinkable’ ship:

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?”
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

What else is on the site

1: Over 460 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

By Tony Attwood

“The Buffalo Skinners” (also known as “On the trail of of the buffalo) is one of the most popular of all the American traditional songs.  It has been widely sung, widely recorded, and like everything in the folk song index, it exists in a huge variety versions.   And if that were not enough reason to expect that Bob Dylan knew the song, and found it worthy of performing  (which he did) Woody Guthrie recorded it

It is also a song that has been adopted by singers and collectors and there is evidence that the song existed at least from the very earliest days of the 20th century (Jack Thorp included it in his collection of cowboy songs published in 1908).  It probably existed for quite a long time before that.

Dylan played a version of the song in 1961 and a recording of that gig still exist, and then suddenly in 1988 he introduced it into his Never Ending Tour performances, playing it 44 times before dropping it in 1991.

And what this has to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis is that Dylan took the song and the style of presentation as the basis for that song which he recorded in 1963 for Broadside under the name  ‘Blind Boy Grunt’.

It has since been argued that when Dylan said that he had written a song about the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was speaking not of “Hard Rain” as many people assumed at the time, but about “Cuban Missile Crisis.

So back to the crisis, which occurred in October 1962.   The “Cuban missile crisis,” gripped the whole world and John F. Kennedy gambled the entire future of the world by effectively threatening war on the USSR if the missiles based in Cuba were not removed.  The USSR denied everything.

On October 16 President Kennedy was given photographic evidence of the missile bases in Cuba suggesting clearly a capability of the option of a nuclear attack on mainland USA.   The USA contemplated the invasion of Cuba and mobilisation began with the President appearing on TV advising the nation of the danger, and a naval blockade around Cuba being put in place to prevent more missiles being delivered.

Quite possibly the reason I am able to sit here today and write this (rather than sitting in a cave in a continuing nuclear winter) is that President Khrushchev ordered the fleet of the USSR not to attempt to land in Cuba and the dismantling of the missile sites.  In return the USA agreed not to invade Cuba.

I was 16 at the time, and of course my little commentary above is written from an English perspective.   For our purposes here the exact details of the events are not what is relevant but rather the perception at the time of many people is what I wish to draw on.  Dylan’s response to it all was not “Hard Rain” (although that is what the commentary on the song at the time suggested) but “Cuban Missile Crisis.”

As Dylan has said several times since, “hard rain” was not the fallout of nuclear bombs but rather the pellets of poison are the lies that are propagated by the media.

So setting aside “Hard Rain”, and returning to “Cuban Missile Crisis” it is curious that a song such as “Buffalo Skinners” should be the foundation of “Cuban Missile Crisis” although listening to that opening line that rises from the major chord to the minor, one can see at once what gripped Bob and convinced him to use that song.

Certainly there was nothing in the lyrics of the original that would have drawn him to this song as the basis for his Cuban Missile Crisis song…

Come round you old time cowboys, and listen to my song
Please do not grow weary, I will not detain you long
Concerning some young cowboy, who did agree to go
Spend the summer pleasantly on the trail of the buffalo.

Here’s the link to Trail of the Buffolo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df-e6PJ0YmQ

And now here is Bob’s reworking and turning it into Cuban Missile Crisis.  There’s a fair amount of getting ready and deciding on the key at the start – Bob actually gets going on 30 seconds, so you can jump forward if you don’t want all the extras at the start.

Come gather 'round me people, and a story I will tell
About a night not long ago, you all remember well.
I tell it to you straight and true, I tell it like friend
All about the fearful night, we thought the world would end.

I was walkin' down the sidewalk not causin' any harm
The radio reported, it sounded with alarm
The Russian ships were sailin' all out across the sea
We all feared by daybreak it would be World War Number Three.

I was worried about an argument I had the day before
Over some small matter, I'm sure it was nothin' more.
But just a day ago, how it wrinkled up my brow
The same thing today seems so unimportant now.

These lyrics were provided by the always excellent “Dylanchords” website.

But less you haven’t heard the original, and you are driven to think that the buffalo song is a romantic tale of hardy men taming the beasts out in the wild, it might be worth considering the original a little further, for those men who are persuaded to work on the trail of the buffalo end up killing the organiser of the expedition after he refuses to pay them.

As Justanothertune.com reports in its analysis of the original song, “The “romanticization of the West” was a recent development, the “mythical cowboy” a new cultural icon. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, popular dime novels, Theodore Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1896), Frederic Remington’s paintings, Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902) and the very first Western movie The Great Train Robbery (1903) all had their share in the creation of this “mythic West” that is now such an important part of American popular culture.”

Dylan’s “Cuban Missile Crisis” reflects a modern version of the song take us back to the original reality.

This was written

and

By Larry Fyffe

“Rosemary, Lily, And The Jack Of Hearts” is a song-play, a time-warped allegory by the word-alchemist Bob Dylan – starring the Jack of Hearts as ‘Ezekiel’; Rosemary as ‘Aholah’; Lily as ‘Aholibah’; and Big Jim as ‘King Solomon’:

Big Jim was no one’s fool, he owned the town’s only diamond mine
He made his usual entrance lookin’ so dandy and so fine
With his body guards and silver cane and every hair in place
He took whatever he wanted to and laid it all to waste
But his body guards and silver cane were no match for the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

Aholah (Rosemary) represents the biblical Kingdom of Israel that, at the time, includes what is now the West Bank; Aholibah (Lily) represents the Kingdom of Judea that has Jerusalem as its capital. Northern Israel (Rosemary) breaks up with Solomon’s Unified Kingdom (Big Jim); she runs around with the Assyrians; Judea (Lily) is even worse and flirts with both them and the Babylonians.

In another one of his songs, Bob Dylan compares these two sisters to brothers “Tweedledum And Tweedledee”, from a poem by John Byrom:

They’re lying low and they’re makin’ hay
They seem determined to go all the way
They ran a brick and tile company
Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dee Dee
(Bob Dylan: Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee)

Referenced, as in ‘Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts’, is the Book of Ezekiel:

Thou also, Son of Man, take a tile, and lay it before thee
And portray upon it the city, even Jerusalem

In modernized format:

Now you, son of man, get yourself a brick, place it before you
And inscribe a city on it, Jerusalem
(Ezekiel 4:1)

Prophet Ezekiel tries to warn the Judeans that the Babylonian (Iraqi) army is coming yet again; that there is good reason to be nervous.

Gnosticism deals in word play, its writers laying down riddles to be solved, codes to be deciphered:

In the beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And the Word was God
(Book Of John 1:1)

Also, but not in official canon:

And Jesus said, ‘Whoever discovers the interpretation of
these sayings will not taste death”
He said, “Those who seek shall not stop seeking until they find
When they find, they will be disturbed
They will marvel and will reign over all”
(The Gospel Of Thomas 1, 2)

Jump to modern times: Canaan is threatened to be divided once again into a Palistinian (West Bank mostly) and a Jewish state.

The distant, unknowable, albeit loving God (‘Yahweh/Jehovah’), the name of whom is not supposed to be spoken, remains hidden in the letters JWH of  songs like “John Wesley Harding” and JOH of “Jack Of Hearts”. Yahweh punishes wayward Hebrews; He’s a ‘tough-love’ daddy.

Analogized as re-incarnated prophet Ezekiel, the Jack of Hearts, follows God’s orders:

And thou, Son of Man, take thee a sharp knife
Take a barber’s razor and cause it to pass
Upon thine head and upon thine beard
(Ezekiel 5:1)

Dressed up as a shaven-headed Christian monk, the Jack of Hearts stabs the modern-day worshippers of the Golden Calf, symbolized by Big Jim, the King of Diamonds:

As the leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk
There was no actor anywhere better than the Jack of Hearts …..
Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The knife is a pen that writes out warnings on the wall of impending danger in the Middle East:

In the vision-play, the master thief and trickster, the Jack of Hearts, like Ezekiel, believes that Yahweh is on his side. It matters not were secular justice to cut Rosemary’s baby in half – into West Bank Palistine and Israel. That’s only to punish Israelites who are naughty.

The Jack of Hearts/Ezekiel knows that Rosemary is playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette – at first, the cold revolver ‘clicks’. But in the end, YOH has her paying the price for going it alone, for trying to do the right thing:

And Rosemary on the gallows, she didn’t even blink
The hangin’ judge was sober, he hadn’t had a drink
The only person on the scene missin’ was the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The Jack of Hearts is missing because Yahweh wants him to go and paint the Holy Temple in Jerusalem – to give it a really good paint job this time as a fitting tribute to the memory of father Abraham:

The cabaret was empty now, a sign said, ‘Closed for repair’
Lily had taken all of the dye out of her hair
She was thinkin’ ’bout her father, who she rarely seldom saw
Thinkin’ ’bout Rosemary, and thinkin’ ’bout the law
But most of all she was thinkin’ ‘ bout the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

As for the Jack of Hearts, he’s spun the Wheel of Fortune, turned the roulette wheel. And if he’s lucky, Yahweh won’t have everyone’s brains blown out.

It’s a risky business though for li’l Lily and any boyfriend she has in the future:

Someday little girl, everything for you is gonna be new
Someday little girl, you’ll have a diamond as big as your shoe
Let the wind blow low, let the wind blow high
One day the little boy and the little girl were both baked in a pie
(Bob Dylan: Under The Red Sky)

Of course, the above may not have anything to say about what Bob Dylan actually thinks one way or the other about the Middle East situation of today, but rather has to do with his ambiguous lyrics that are open somewhat to different levels of interpretation.

Articles related to Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

The current series:

• Bob Dylan Disguises Himself As Ezekiel (Part I)
• Bob Dylan Disguises Himself As Ezekiel (Part II)

Past articles and series

• Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts: revealing the source of this and other Dylan songs. Part 1.  by Larry Fyffe
• Bob Dylan And Damon Runyon: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts And Other Songs (Part II) by Larry Fyffe
• Source Of Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts (Part III)by Larry Fyffe

• Lily Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts (as I understand it): an alternative vision. By Ann Alenjandro
• Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts: revealing the source of this and other Dylan songs.  By Larry Fyffe
• Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts: the meanings behind Dylan’s song By Tony Attwood (updated Nov 2017)
• Lily O’Valley, Mary Magdalena, and The Jehovah of Hearts: Bob Dylan mixes up the medicine By Larry Fyffe

By Tony Attwood

In 1962, having written “Hard Rain’s a gonna fall”, “Hollis Brown”, “Blowing in the Wind”, “Dont think twice” and in fact a grand total of 27 songs (and that really was in this year alone) Bob Dylan was still experimenting with different “voices”, different styles, different messages and different approaches.

Part of this experimentation, it seems to me, revolved around the resolution of the issue of  whether it was all going to be ok in the end, or not.

I’d hate to be you on that dreadful day announced that when the world ends and the Almighty returns, all sinners are going to burn for eternity.  So don’t worry too much about life being awful at the moment – if you are one of the good guys you will be fine after death.

Paths of Victory, the next song, was utterly different and told us the way was difficult but we’d get there in the end.  We really will make this a better place.

The gravel road is bumpy
It’s a hard road to ride
But there’s a clearer road a-waitin’
With the cinders on the side

That evening train was rollin’
The hummin’ of its wheels
My eyes they saw a better day
As I looked across the fields

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast between two songs than those two polar opposites, and yet Bob managed to find a third, totally different route to travel with “Train A’Travelling”

For “Train A’ Travelling” – the next song he composed, still focuses on the evil around us, but now suggests that we can change the world if only we would rise up and protest.  This is a completely different notion from what has been sung before.  “Dreadful Day” doesn’t require any protest because after death all will be ok.  “Paths of Victory” doesn’t require any protest because “there’s a clearer road a-waitin”.

But now this next song that says “don’t follow leaders” because “That the person standin’ next to you just might be misled,” you have to sort it out yourselves and stand up for what you believe, because this world is rotten to the core.

The symbol of the train is of course one that Dylan loved to use through the years, and to my mind never more effectively than here where the train is society, our social system, our government… well, whatever you choose.

The character referred to in the song (as in “Then you know my voice and you heard my name”) is, I feel, not Dylan personally, but the symbol of all who stand up against the broken society that is all around.

Dylan really plays with the lyrics here is a way that I find stunning effective.   A “furnace full of fears” is a simple alliteration but if works perfectly in the context of the song.  (Trying to be too clever in a song never works; you can’t do all the clever stuff that poetry contains when there is music added, because the music controls the speed of delivery).

Dylan recorded three verses in the two versions of the song we have available, but he then added more for the Broadside publication,  And across these lyrics Dylan seems to me to put his message without preaching or demanding, and without falling back to the “it will all get better no matter whether you do something or not” approach of “Times they are a-changing”.

Lines such as

Do you ever get tired of the preachin’ sounds of fear
When they’re hammered at your head and pounded in your ear?

really have the impact (for me at least) of saying, it is time to get up and do something about what is going on around you.

In a real sense Dylan is taking on the position of the embodiment of the young, the people who have been left with all the mess of a society and economic system that the generation who survived the second world war have handed down to their children…

I’m a-wonderin’ if the leaders of the nations understand
This murder-minded world that they’re leavin’ in my hands

Out of these images the lines

Have you ever had it on your lips or said it in your head
That the person standin’ next to you just might be misled?

really do have a power because they are so simple.  Then, in the Broadside version we have the final verse that is not on the recordings that we have the all-conquering final verse

Do the kill-crazy bandits and the haters get you down?
Does the preachin’ and the politics spin your head around?
Does the burning of the buses give your heart a pain?
Then you’ve heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name

Dylan knows his targets well, and he’s going to attack them with all he’s got.  This really is a composition in tune with the ending of Hard Rain…

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

I absolutely adore “Train A’Travelling” and it is sad that we don’t have a recording of Dylan singing the compete set of verses that he finally released to Broadside.  Nor come to that do we have any recordings by other people.

It is a song that a lot could be done with in terms of arrangements, but sadly no one has picked it up.

In its own way it is, for me, an absolutely powerful masterpiece in terms both of music and lyrics.

Here is the complete set of lyrics as sung on the recording (not as published on the official site) with the additional Broadside verses added in italics.

—–

There’s an iron train, there’s an iron train a-travelin’ been a-rollin’ through the years
With a firebox of hatred and a furnace full of fears
If you ever heard its sound or seen its blood-red broken frame
Then you know my voice and you heard my name

Have you ever stopped to wonder ’bout the hatred that it holds?
Have you ever seen its passengers, its crazy mixed-up souls?
Did you ever start a-thinkin’ that you gotta stop that train?
Then you know my voice and you heard my name

Do you ever get tired of the preachin’ sounds of fear
When they’re hammered at your head and pounded in your ear?
Have you ever asked about it and not been answered plain?
Then you heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name

I’m a-wonderin’ if the leaders of the nations understand
This murder-minded world that they’re leavin’ in my hands
Have you ever laid awake at night and wondered ’bout the same?
Then you’ve heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name

Have you ever had it on your lips or said it in your head
That the person standin’ next to you just might be misled?
Have you ever looked around and been confused at what you’ve seen?
Then you’ve know my voice and you heard my name

Do the kill-crazy bandits and the haters get you down?
Does the preachin’ and the politics spin your head around?
Does the burning of the buses give your heart a pain?
Then you’ve heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name

—–

A second recording (almost identical but in a different key) of the song, again without the additional verses appears on “Broadside Ballads Vol 6 – Broadside Reuion” (which also contains the recording of “Dreadful Day”) and was released in 1972.  The LP was re-released as a CD in 2007 in the USA.   I haven’t seen it released in the UK, but it is available on Spotify.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

By Larry Fyffe

“Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts” is easily interpreted as a modern allegory that depicts the historical journey of the Jewish people:

The festival was over, the boys were all planning for a fall
The cabaret was quiet except for the drilling in the wall
The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin’ wheel shut down
Anyone with any sense had already left town
He was standin’ in the doorway lookin’ like the Jack of Hearts

The ‘festival’ of Atonement is over, the fasting of the Hebrews for their misbehavior that caused God to become angry. They were punished by the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s Holy Temple by the Babylonians. Before that loyal followers of God, including Ezekiel, had been banished from Judea by the King of Babylonia:

Back then, Ezekiel the prophet, has visions of God sitting atop a roulette-type wheel carried by four winged creatures:

And they four had one likeness and their appearance
and their work was if it were a wheel within the middle of a wheel
(Ezekiel 1:16)

In Bob Dylan’s version, The Jack of Hearts, Ezekiel re-incarnated, returns to the town of Jerusalem and enters the Holy Temple that has been turned into a Cabaret and gambling den. There, he puts on a show that, like Ezekiel of yore, warns of doom and gloom if the people of Israel (everybody for that matter) do not change their misbegotten ways.

In the original version , Ezekiel has more than one vision that involves digging a hole in the Temple walls – one is to demonstrate to the townsfolk that at least he has the good sense to pack up his things and leave town:

Dig thou through the wall in their sight
And carry out thereby
In their sight shalt thou bear it out upon thy shoulders
And carry it forth in the twilight
(Ezekiel 12: 5, 6)

For details, see Part I of “Bob Dylan Disguises Himself As Ezekiel”.

In another vision, the Hebrew prophet meets up with two woman of questionable character – Aholah and younger sister Ahoibah:

Aholah played the the harlot when she was mine
And she doted on her lovers, on the Assyrians her neighbours
(Ezekiel 23: 11)

She represents the people of northern Israel who collaborated with the Syrians of that time:

And when her sister Abolibah saw this, she was more corrupt in
her inordinate love than she
And in her whoredoms more than her sister in her whoredoms
(Ezekiel 23:12)

She represents the people of southern Judea who co-operated, not only with the Syrians, but also with the Iraqis – then called Babylonians.

Bob Dylan presents us with visions of Big Diamond Jim (King Solomon of the united Hebrews), Lily (Aholibah) and Rosemary (Aholah):

Rosemary started drinkin’ hard and seein’ her reflection in the knife
She was tired of the attention, tired of playin’ the role of Big Jim’s wife
She had done a lot of bad things, even once tried suicide
Was lookin’ to do just one good deed before she died
She was gazin’ to the future, riding on the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The ancient Sumarians of Mesopotamia (Iraq) were known to commit mass suicide to be with their ruler after his death, and they had ceremonial structures that resemble those of Aztec Mexico.

The King of Diamonds thinks he might have once seen Rosemary there with the Jack of Hearts:

“I know I’ve seen that face before”, Big Jim was thinkin’ to himself
“Maybe down in Mexico or a picture up on somebody’s shelf”
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The eternal cycle of history is a theme of many Dylan song lyrics.

(End of Part Two)

Stay tuned for Part III, the exciting conclusion of “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts”

by Tony Attwood

This is one of the songs from the Whitmark demos, which Dylan procured from the 16th century English tradition of folk songs and which eventually he turned into, “When the ship comes in”.  By the time of that final transformation the English folk original music and lyrics were gone,  but the message was more powerful and more imaginative than before.

Throughout this evolution however it is always a very clear piece, saying, quite obviously, that there is going to be a Judgement Day and only those who believe and have behaved according to the Laws of the elders and prophets, will survive.   And the implication seems to be Bob is one of those who is going to make it, and those unbelievers who have behave badly will.  (It is only an implication but if didn’t think he’d be ok, why would he give the message?)

The origin of the song is “Dives and Lazarus” (Dives is Latin for rich, splendid, although here it becomes a man’s name), and is found in the Gospel of Luke (16:19 and onwards).

It became the basis of Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus by the English orchestral composer Ralph Vaughan Williams who had a deep interest in English folk music and was an associate of the folk song collector Cecil Sharp.  If you are interested in a version of the English folk song it can be found on “Round Again” by Swan Arcade (which is on Spotify if you can’t get the album.)  The opening verses of the song give a clear indication where it is going…

As it fell out upon one day,
Rich Divès made a feast,
And he invited all his friends,
And gentry of the best.

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Divès’ door:
Some meat and drink, brother, Diverus,
Bestow upon the poor.

Thou’rt none of my brothers, Lazarus,
That liest begging at my door;
No meat, nor drink will I give thee,
Nor bestow upon the poor.

Eventually Dives dies and goes to hell, while Lazarus is blessed, and of course Dives repents but it is all too late.

Then Divès looked up with his eyes
And saw poor Lazarus blest;
Give me one drop of water, brother Lazarus,
To quench my flaming thirst.

O, was I now but alive again
The space of one half hour!
O, that I had my peace again
Then the devil should have no power.                

Luke 16:19 and onwards reads,

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.

So that’s where Bob gets it all from.  His version however loses much that is in the tale, and it was not replaced until the ship did come in.  And perhaps just ponder for a moment the difference between

Well, your clock is gonna stop
At Saint Peter’s gate

and

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin’

Same idea, two worlds apart in terms of the use of the language.  Here are the first four verses of “I’d hate to be you”.

Well, your clock is gonna stop
At Saint Peter’s gate
Ya gonna ask him what time it is
He’s gonna say, “It’s too late”
Hey, hey!
I’d sure hate to be you
On that dreadful day

You’re gonna start to sweat
And you ain’t gonna stop
You’re gonna have a nightmare
And never wake up
Hey, hey, hey!
I’d sure hate to be you
On that dreadful day

You’re gonna cry for pills
And your head’s gonna be in a knot
But the pills are gonna cost more
Than what you’ve got
Hey, hey!
I’d sure hate to be you
On that dreadful day

You’re gonna have to walk naked
Can’t ride in no car
You’re gonna let ev’rybody see
Just what you are
Hey, hey!
I’d sure hate to be you
On that dreadful day

So it continues.  It is not Bob at his best, but we do now know where it led.

Here’s another version of Bob’s song.  This guy may not be a brilliant presenter of his performance but he can play the guitar!

And just because I don’t have many chances to put up orchestral music on this blog, here’s the Vaughan Williams piece

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

By Larry Fyffe

Through analogy, allegory, and symbolism, Bob Dylan updates the story of the Jews and Israel in “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack of Hearts”.

With his gold and silver mines, wise King Solomon, represented by the King of Diamonds in a deck of playing cards, gets punished by God for turning away from Him to wine, women, wealth, and the worshipping of idols. Solomon’s united Kingdom is divided into the House of Israel and the House of Judea with Jerusalem as its capital.

Big Diamond Jim, as the ghost of King Solomon past, symbolizes the corruption of Judea’s leaders by pride and greed:

Big Jim was no one’s fool, he owned the town’s only diamond mine
He made his usual entrance lookin’ so dandy and so fine
With his body guards and silver cane and every hair in place
He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste
But his body guards and silver cane were no match for the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

Bob Dylan modernizes the story – The Jack of Hearts is the leader of a gang of outlaws, Jewish cowboys who have been kicked out of the town of Jerusalem by Nebuchudnezzar, the mean Sheriff of Babylon:

In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more who had business back in town
But they couldn’t go no further without the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

In the Old Testament, the prophet Ezekiel has visions of the coming invasion of Judea by the Babylonian (Iraqi) army and the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of its Holy Temple:

I was among the captives by the river
That the heavens were opened
And I saw visions of God
(Ezekiel 1:1)

According to Ezekiel’s visions, the destruction of the Temple is allowed by God because of the decadent behaviour of the Hebrews; Ezekiel envisions God speaking to him:

And he said unto me, Son of man
“I send thee to the children of Israel
To a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me
Even unto this very day”
(Ezekiel 1:3)

To sound the alarm of the coming doom if the Hebrews do not mend their ways, God has Ezekiel go into town and put on a show in the Temple. There the prophet gets himself involved in a game of five-card stud with the Almighty as dealer:

Then I arose, and went forth into the plain
And behold, the glory of the Lord stood there
As the glory which I saw by the river of Chebar
And I fell on my face
(Ezekiel 3: 23)

The singer/songwriter picks up the allegory, the Cabaret serving as the Temple, and the the Jack of Hearts as Ezekiel:

He moved across the mirrored room, “Set it up for
everyone”, he said
Then everyone commenced to do what they were doing
before he turned their heads
Then he walked up to a stranger and he asked him with a grin
“Could you kindly tell me, friend, what time the show begins?”
Then he moved in the corner, face down like the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

God’s deck of cards has the one-eyed Jack of Hearts and the one-eyed King of Diamonds looking to the left and to the right, not ahead:

Lie thou also upon thy left side
And lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it …
Lie again on thy right side
And thou shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah …
(Ezekiel 4: 5-6)

The decadent King of Diamonds and the saintly Jack of Hearts both keep an eye on the fluttery Promised Land, represented by Lily:

But then the crowd began to stamp their feet and the house
lights did dim
And in the darkness of the room there was only Jim and him
Starin’ at the butterfly who just drew the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The prophet Ezekiel finds himself ordered to dig a hole in the Temple wall, where he observes the wicked ways of the previous leaders of Judea:

Then he said unto me, “Son of Man, dig now
in the wall
And when I had digged in the wall, behold a door
And he said to me “Go in, and behold the wicked
abominations that they do here
(Ezekiel 8: 7-9)

Bob Dylan’s rebel gang of outlaws, in town from the banks of the river in Babylon, get their revenge on the immoral King of Diamonds by digging a hole in the wall of the Cabaret:

Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe, it’s said that they got off
with quite a haul

Big Jim Solomon’s once-loyal girl friend is Lily -“As the lily among thorns,
so is my love among the daughters” (Song Of Solomon 2:2). The King of Diamonds holds a losing hand against herJack of Hearts and two Queens. Of course, she can’t be sure it’s a winning hand. Neither can the wandering Jack; only God, the dealer knows:

Lily took her dress off and buried it away
“Has your luck run out?”, she laughed at him
“Well, I guess you must have known it would someday
Be careful not to touch the wall, there’s a brand new coat of paint
I’m glad to see you’re still alive, you’re lookin’ like a saint”

Wary is Lily of those who bluff in life’s game of poker, their temple of cards built with insecure motar, covered up with a coat of paint:

And one built up a wall, and lo
Others daubed it with untempered morter
Say unto them which daub it with untempered mortar
That it shall fall
(Ezekiel13: 19-11)

She, like Ezekiel, evisions the coming of a true Messiah who’ll one day re-unite the divided family, the broken land of Israel:

Lily was a princess, she was fair skinned and precious as a child
She did whatever she had to do, she had that certain flash every
time she smiled
She’d come from a broken home, had lots of strange affairs
With men in every walk of life which took her everywhere
But she’d never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts

(End Of Part I)

Footnote: “Jack of Hearts” is one of the most analysed and commented upon songs on this web site.  A listing of all the Jack of Hearts articles is given at the top of the Bob Dylan Themes page.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

by Tony Attwood

For almost ten years after playing “Times they are a changin” at the Albert Hall in London in 1965, Dylan dropped the song from his set list.  Since then, apart from a handful of pauses each lasting two or three years, he stayed with the song as a performance staple, all the way of to 2009, when it seems to have been put to rest.  It was not in every gig of course, but he played it quite a lot of times.

It appears on 16 different albums and has been played over 600 times in concert placing it in the top 20 most commonly performed songs by Dylan. In 2004 Rolling Stone made it song number 54 in its top 500 songs of all time.

“Times” an absolute icon, a defining moment in the 1960s in terms of the way young people were thinking.  And in its historical context it is the ultimate, contemporary, “Come all ye.”  Dylan himself has cited songs such as ‘Come All Ye Bold Highway Men’, and ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’ as being part of his inspiration.

Of late critics have argued that the song still has relevance to those who admired it as teenagers when it first came out.  But as critic Christopher Ricks has said, something rather awful happened. “Once upon a time it may have been a matter of urging square people to accept the fact that their children were, you know, hippies. But the capacious urging could then come to mean that ex-hippie parents had better accept that their children look like becoming yuppies. And then Republicans…”

Yep, it was the same in my country.

But for me there has always been other problems there too.   Problem one is that although the album is named after the song, this is the only song on the album that says times they are a changing for the better.  In the rest of the album time has stood still, or things are getting worse.  Just think how times changed for Hollis Brown.

I’ve made that point about the rest of the album’s backwards looking stance too often before to bore you with it again, so instead let me take you back just for a moment to what the words of Times actually say.  Although many have analysed it, I feel that some writers have swept over what seem to be very simple lyrics, and just heard the simple call to recognition that times are a changing.

And that is where I want to start: this is a song that says the world is changing.  It is not like the calls to arms, the demand that we should all stand up and keep the movement (whatever the movement is) moving. We’re not being asked to man the barricades. This is ultimately a passive song; it says change is happening, just accept it, don’t try to block it, it will happen no matter what you do.

So it is simple.  You can’t block it, the change is inevitable, so just help it along and enjoy the ride.  If you don’t you’re in trouble, but if you just accept, you’ll be fine.  It’s a bit like what they used to say in East Germany.

And of course in retrospect one can see that was wrong – and indeed it is always wrong.  When major upheavals and changes happen, they happen sometime because the old economic and/or political system collapses, and sometimes because people work hard to make the changes happen.  Social justice, an end to war, free health care for all, free high quality questioning education for all, these things don’t happen inevitably – they happen because people push and challenge and work and sacrifice themselves to the cause.

But Dylan doesn’t talk about “the struggle” at all.  The key is in the first verse

Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

It’s a beguiling image, and I was beguiled with it for a while in my teenage years.  It gives great hope that all those old farts who are simply holding on to their images of the past will be swept away AND I WON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING BECAUSE IT WILL JUST HAPPEN.

Dylan then tells us of the role of writers in all this – obviously something of particular interest to me, for even in those very early days, I knew I really fancied being a writer (although such an ambition was widely derided by those who taught me).  OK sometimes I wanted to be a musician, and sometimes I wanted a long-term career in the theatre, but mostly I wanted to be a writer).

That second verse just tells us that the change is on-going, and it certainly hasn’t stopped.  One easy interpretation, and I think the one I made at the time, was that all the changes we could see in the mid 1960s were going to go on and on.  Lecturers in universities would be held to account, we could have our own fashions, there was a sexual revolution happening, we were being liberated day by day, soon the House of Lords would fall.

It wasn’t so much “there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’” but rather because “the wheel’s still in spin” the message was “there’s no tellin’ where it is endin'”

But Dylan doesn’t call for change at all, he simply tells the senators and congressmen to embrace the change, because nothing can stop it now.  You can’t stop it so you might as well accept it.

It’s a beguiling image, and oh oh oh oh how I wanted to believe that.  Change was inevitable.  That simple purity of Marxism that states that capitalism will collapse under its own contradictions and a proper democratic state of equality under communism will inevitably arise.   Historical inevitability.  I wasn’t too sure about the USSR, but the notion of historical inevitability…  Hmm that was appealing.

And that is what Dylan is preaching in this song, (although Marx did seem to suggest that we could do our bit to help speed up the timetable by organising the working classes into trades unions).

But of course, I don’t think Dylan was preaching historical inevitability in the Marxist sense – obviously not.  Instead he was preaching a sort of folksy “the world is changing for the better” vision – right at the same time as he was writing and singing “Hollis Brown” – ironically the second track on the album.  Indeed if one goes back and listens to the album, song after song takes us away from the title track’s message.  “God on our side,” “One to many mornings” “North Country Blues”; on a social and personal level, nothing is getting better, except on track one.  In fact it is getting worse.

What Dylan got perfectly in the title song of the album was the hope of those of us who were teenagers at the time that this might be the moment.  I had rows with my parents about the length of my hair, the clothes I wanted to wear, and my rejection of traditional authority.  But we made it up and stayed very close, and indeed I think they became very proud of me later as I dropped the idea of my personally being involved in overthrowing the state, (that was never quite their image of their son) and made something of a success of my life in terms of creating stuff, making some money, bringing up three wonderful children…)

And in doing all that, the next time I looked, well, the great change that Dylan had foretold had never happened.  We’d had Nixon, and Thatcher, and Trump.  Social justice had long since vanished.  Poverty and economic imbalance in my country is increasing inexorably year or year.  If the times really had been a-changing they had changed for the worst.

And I got to thinking, maybe if we hadn’t been seduced by that notion that change was inevitable; that Dylan and Marx concept that all you have to do is believe and let change happen, maybe we could have avoided the world as it is today.  Because if I am sure of anything at all, it is that, “The order is rapidly fadin’” is just about the most misleading line I’ve ever heard in a song.

Of course it wasn’t really down to Bob and his song.  However I can’t help thinking that if only that album had been called “Rise up and take the streets” we might have ended up with a different set of thoughts and maybe a different set of outcomes.

A few years later I went on a gigantic anti-Vietnam War march through London.  Goodness knows how many there were on it; these were the days when the organisers would say there was a million in the march and the police would put out a statement that it was more like 500, and half of those were arrested.

At the end, despite all the chants of sacking the American Embassy, and taking over Parliament, everyone packed up and went home and that was that.  Nothing had changed, except that those who concerned themselves with the job of maintaining the status quo presumably put on their collars and ties the next morning and smiled slightly at the realisation that nothing had changed.

In short The Times They Didn’t Change.

Just like the rest of the album said.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

You may also find these indexes useful…

• American poets and writers to whom Dylan pays tribute: an index
• British and French writers In reference to Bob Dylan’s song lyrics

By Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan songs often crunch past and present and future time into a singularity.

To give listeners a linear time perspective on British/French poets and writers that Dylan actually or seemingly alludes to in his song lyrics, here are the birth and death dates of writers that I’ve referred to in my articles.

The writers cited are listed in chronological order by date of birth, and in each case followed by a one line summary of their position in literature.  Beneath that is a link to an article (or two) on this site that includes mention of this poet – although please do note that these range from articles that are primarily dedicated to the link between the poet and Bob Dylan, to articles that touch upon the writer in less detail.

We are aware from correspondence both from academics and students that this site is being used for the purposes of studying Bob Dylan’s work, and of course we find that incredibly gratifying.  Indeed we hope that this list might be of help in that work.

All that we ask in return is that if you do utilise this page, or indeed extract data from any other page from this site, you do cite the author of the page and the website “Untold Dylan” as the source.

Homer ( ? – ? BC)
Odessey: Ulyssess journeys home to his faithful wife after victory at Troy

• Bob Ulyssess Disguised As Mack The Knife

Catullus (84 BC – 54 BC)
Let Us Live And Love: Pleasure and pain of love and certainty of death

• Bob Dylan And Catullus: Greek And Roman Mythology

*Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC)
Aeneid: Aeneas founds Rome after defeat of Troy

• Bob Dylan And Aeneas: The Greatest Troy Ever Sold

*Ovid (43BC – 18 AD)
Sadness: Ovid’s lonesome exile on the Black Sea

• Bob Dylan And Archibald MacLeish

* See also Canterbury Tales: Religious pilgrimage; influence of Virgil and Ovid in Bob Dylan and Geoffrey Chaucer 

Khayyam (1048 – 1131)
Rubaiyat: Zarathustrian one God of Wisdom; free will and individual responsibility; mixed world of order and chaos; solace in earthly pleasures

• Bob Dylan And Omar Khayyam
• Bob Dylan and Omar Khayyam part II

Rumi (1207 -1273)
The Guest House: Inward union with God through poetry, music and dance

The Great White Wonder: Bob Dylan And Robert Graves

Dante (1265 – 1321)
Divine Comedy: Pilgrimage from hell, through purgatory, to heaven;
influence of Virgil and Ovid

• It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry: Figurative Language In Blood On The Tracks

Cervantes (1547 -1616)
Don Quixote: Satire of a chivalrous knight searching for adventure

• La Mancha Is Blowing In The Wind: Bob Dylan And Don Quixote

Swedenborg (1688 – 1772)
The New Jerusalem: Vision of a spiritual age of love on material Earth

• Mixed Up Confusion

Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
Thus Spake Zarathustra: Eternal recurrence of order (Apollo) and chaos
(Dionysus); Overman seeks truth in their fusion as Christianity is an afterlife slave moraliry; existentialism – individual responsibility in an amoral Universe

• Bob Dylan And Omar Khayyam (Part II): Christ And The Monkey Man

Freud (1856 – 1939)
The Interpretation Of Dreams: sexual urges and repression

• You Can Be In My Dream If I Can Be In Yours: Bob Dylan Meets Dr. Freud

Conrad (1857 – 1924)
Heart Of Darkness: The horror, madness, and hypocrisy of colonial power

• Bob Dylan And The Heart Of Darkness

Smart (1913 – 1986)
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept: Emotional power of sexual love

• Bob Dylan: Songs Of Alchemy

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

by Tony Attwood

You might also like to see  Mixed up Confusion: Bob Dylan and Gnosticism

 * * * * *

“Mixed up confusion” comes from the what seems to have been a one off set of recording sessions in October and November 1962 .  It is a most curious diversion musically, since as far as can be judged from the data available, in the weeks before this adventure Dylan had been writing and recording such pieces as

• Hard Rain’s a gonna fall
• Ballad of Hollis Brown
• John Brown
• Don’t think twice

… four songs each of which had its own strong tale to tell – which is not something that can be said about Mixed Up.  This song is more a statement about Bob not being totally right with things.

Indeed for a moment Dylan appeared to be wandering off and exploring several new trains of thought, for his immediate subsequent compositions included “I’d hate to be you on that dreadful day” (an early venture into telling us sinners what is going to happen to us when the Almighty has had enough of our misbehaviour), “Paths of Victory“, “Train a travelin”, “Walking down the line” and “Cuban Missile Crisis”and “Playboys and Playgirls” before coming up with Oxford Town.

“Dreadful day” itself was thus an interesting period of diversification of the message; a message to which Bob returned full on with “When the ship comes in” which shows that there was a whole level of experimentation going on.  And thus it is perhaps not totally surprising that before all this we had “Mixed up confusion” which was released as a single (with Corina Corina on the B side) in December 1962, and subsequently appeared on Masterpieces and Biograph.

The sessions in which “Mixed up” was recorded also included the aforementioned Corrina Corrina which of course turned up on Freewheelin, and Rocks and Gravel, plus a working through of Elvis Presley’s first single, “That’s all right”.

Certainly “Mixed up confusion” has all the hallmarks of something dashed off fairly quickly (one story speaks of it being written in the taxi on the way to the studio) and Dylan later said that doing the song wasn’t his idea at all, although Heylin says Dylan is being a little less than complete in his version of the story.

Whether it was Dylan’s notion to try some electric music at this time, or producer John Hammond’s we can’t resolve but one way of another the track was recorded and released.

We have two versions of it; this is the version that was not on Biograph

The lyrics are fairly clearly Dylanesque, and could have been used in a blues if he had had a mind to do that

I got mixed up confusion
Man, it’s a-killin’ me
Well, there’s too many people
And they’re all too hard to please

Well, my hat’s in my hand
Babe, I’m walkin’ down the line
An’ I’m lookin’ for a woman
Whose head’s mixed up like mine

Well, my head’s full of questions
My temp’rature’s risin’ fast
Well, I’m lookin’ for some answers
But I don’t know who to ask

But I’m walkin’ and wonderin’
And my poor feet don’t ever stop
Seein’ my reflection
I’m hung over, hung down, hung up!

There almost an attempt here to use the oddball comedy of “I shall be free” in a rock n roll format.   It doesn’t work here because it doesn’t go far enough, but it wouldn’t be long before Bob rectified that.

Here’s the single version, which also appeared on the albums…

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x104oft

It’s a bit of an oddity, but it has its place in the history of Bob Dylan’s compositions and gives us a view of how ideas can come along, not quite be ready and need to be rested just for a while before reaching fruition.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Larry Fyffe

Allegorical and analogical Hebrew Gnosticism, with its emphasis on the power of words, has roots in the Book of Proverbs of the Old Testament.

According to Gnosticism, from an Unknowable God of Light emanates fragmented pairs of lesser spirits outward into the Void: akin to the Roman/Greek God of the Sun – Apollo, and his twin sister, the Goddess of the Moon – Diana.

And akin to the White Goddess of poet Robert Graves. Chokmah, the Lady of Wisdom, decides to venture forth on her own without her male companion.

In the insuing chaos, the material world is created by a singular male God, Yaldabaoth. Into the dark Earth, the Lady of Wisdom manages to infuse a spark of her divine spirit before being returned to the heavens by her male counterpart, Yehoshua – meaning Salvation.

The Lady of Wisdom, now back in balance with her ‘bridegroom’, attempts to impart knowledge to the human souls trapped in their material bodies down on Earth; thereby assisting them to return to the spiritual realm:

Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee
Love her, and she shall keep thee
Wisdom is the principle thing
And with all thy getting get understanding
Exalt her, and she shall promote thee to honour
When thou dost embrace her
(Book Of Proverbs 4: 6-8)

The Gnostic warning in regards to the disruption of the male-female binary is not lost on Bob Dylan:

Our Father would not like the way that you act
And you must realize the danger
Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you
And one deserving of affection?
And our purpose not the same on this earth
To follow his direction
(Bob Dylan: Oh Sister)

By taking steps to set the spark aflame within themselves (left behind by the redeemed Lady of Wisdom), earth-bound women can gain knowledge:

She openth her mouth with wisdom
And in her tongue is kindness
She looketh well to the ways of her household
And eateth not the bread of idleness
Her children arise up, and call her blessed
Her husband also, and he praiseth her
(Book Of Proverbs 31: 26-28)

So sings Dylan, albeit somewhat ironically:

I been sitting down studying the art of love
I think it will fit me like a glove
I want a real good woman to do just what I say
Everyone got to wonder what’s the matter with the
cruel world today
(Bob Dylan: Thunder On The Mountain)

The Old Testament presents an allegory with Chokmah as the symbol for a worthy bride:

Wisdom has builded her house
She hath hewn out her seven pillars
She hath killed her beasts
She hath mingled her wine
She hath also furnished her table
She hath sent forth her maidens
She crieth upon the highest places of the city
(Book Of Proverbs 9: 1-3)

As later condensed in Christian canon, the seven pillars pounded into the earth by the Lady of Wisdom – contrasted with their bad side – are:

Humility as opposed to Pride
Kindness as opposed to Envy
Temperance as opposed to Gluttony
Chastity as opposed to Lust
Patience as opposed to Anger
Diligence as opposed to Sloth
Charity as opposed to Greed

Literaure professor Christopher Ricks considers these seven pillars to be dominant themes in the song lyrics of Bob Dylan.

An example, illustrating Pride:

And the locusts sang; well, it give me a chill
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
And the locusts sang with a high whinin’ trill
Yeah, the locusts sang, and they was singing for me
Singing for me; well, singing for me
(Bob Dylan: Day Of The Locusts)

To be sure, few women have been able to climb to the top of Chokmah’s stairways and thereby fully balanced Gnostic knowledge:

Don’t know what I can say about Claudette
That won’t come back to haunt me
Finally had to give her up
‘Bout the time she began to want me
But I know God has mercy on them
Who are slandered and humiliated
I’d a-done anything for that woman
If she didn’t make me feel so obligated
(Bob Dylan: The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar)

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Tony Attwood

During 1962 Bob Dylan went meandering around folk and blues music composing a whole variety of songs as he explored possibilities at every level, before finally arriving at Hard Rain.  Hard Rain doesn’t exist within all these preliminary songs, but it somehow seemed to emerge from this cascade of words and melodies that sought to reflect a whole range of issues concerning the human condition.

So far in looking at these songs we have seen this extraordinary variety of pieces covering fun-laden requests for forgiveness, expressions of absolute desire, lost love, comedy, civil rights and the despair of nothing having ever changed in man’s inhumanity to man.

• Honey just allow me one more chance
• Rocks and Gravel
• Quit your Lowdown Ways
• Baby I’m in the mood for you
• Down the Highway
• Bob Dylan’s Blues 
• Tomorrow is a long time 
• Ain’t gonna grieve
• Long Ago Far Away

Long Time Gone – which was written soon after “Long Ago Far Away” can be heard as a very early rendition of what was eventually to become “Shelter from the Storm” (although by the time it did become “Shelter” it had gone through a lot of mutations).

“Long time gone” is itself also a re-working of “Maggie Walker Blues” as can be seen from the opening lines…

Bob Dylan sings

My parents raised me tenderly
I was their only son
My mind got mixed with ramblin’
When I was all so young
And I left my home the first time
When I was twelve and one
I’m a long time a-comin’, Maw
An’ I’ll be a long time gone

“Maggie Walker” opens

My parents raised me tenderly,
They had no child but me.
My mind being placed on rambling,
With them I couldn’t agree
Just to leave my aged parents
And them no more to see.

After this Maggie Walker goes in its own direction but the feeling of the song has similarities to Bob’s re-working.   Here’s a version by Doc Watson and Clarence Tom Ashley – I’ve added the lyrics of the next verse below.

There was a wealthy gentleman
Who lived there very near by.
He had a beautiful daughter,
On her I cast an eye.
She was so tall and slender,
So pretty and so fair.
There never was a girl in this whole wide world
With her I could compare.

So moving on to Bob’s version…

https://youtu.be/MGUSQK8SHCc

Here he is creating his own mythology, exactly as most folk and blues singers did, to add to their own mystique.

Consider this verse as a way of creating a past you’ve never had

I remember when I’s ramblin’
Around with the carnival trains
Different towns, different people
Somehow they’re all the same
I remember children’s faces best
I remember travelin’ on
I’m a long time a-comin’
I’ll be a long time gone

I particularly like his protestations of who he is and what he’s done

If I can’t help somebody
With a word or song
If I can’t show somebody
They are travelin’ wrong
But I know I ain’t no prophet
An’ I ain’t no prophet’s son
I’m just a long time a-comin’
An’ I’ll be a long time gone

Sorry Bob, but for some people that prophet is exactly what you became.

The song has been picked up and reworked in some interesting ways…

So you can have your beauty
It’s skin deep and it only lies
And you can have your youth
It’ll rot before your eyes
Just give to me my gravestone
With it clearly carved upon:
“I’s a long time a-comin’
An’ I’ll be a long time gone”

Ah yes, the ultimate mythology of the bluesman.

Here’s an interesting alternative version…

Not everyone hears the link with Shelter from the Storm, but it shines out for me.

https://vimeo.com/149992621

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation an’ they gave me a lethal dose
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”

Indeed, the old blues man’s end isn’t always what he imagined.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

by Larry Fyffe

Frederich Nietzsche criticizes Judeo-Christian for its ‘slave morality’; for its messenger prophets who put prospects for a better life off into the distant future, whether here on Earth or somewhere in an otherworldly Heaven.

Western Gnosticism, rooted in Eastern mysticism, conceives the material world in a permanently fallen state that is remote and separate from the hidden Spirit of Oneness.

With cosmological visions like these, just how short-lived human individuals are supposed to cope with this physical world of woe becomes a point of contention.

Followers of the standard canon of Judeo-Christian Bible, like Lees de Graaf, interpret the song lyrics of singer Bob Dylan without taking into account the singer/songer’s awaress of Gnostic writings beyond those remnants found in the Holy Bible such as Eccesiastes, Proverbs, and Revelations – and even then the Gnostic bent in these three Books of the Bible are interepted to fit orthodox thinking. De Graaf considers ‘the stranger’ in “I and I” (below) to be Jesus though clearly referred to is the ‘strange woman’ that is in bed.

That Gnosticism’s search for cosmic order focuses on ‘ignorance’ rather than on ‘sin’ explains its appeal to nonconformist artists – its mystical version of history operates, not in a progressive linear manner, but rather in eternal cycles of darkness and light:

One generation passeth away
And another generation cometh
But the Earth abideth forever
The sun also ariseth
And the sun goes down
And hasteth to his place where he arose
(Book Of Eccesiastes I: 4,5)

Accordingly, Gnosticism projects, through analogy and allegory, a big picture of history that is rather static – fallen mankind changes for the better only for a time the social, economic, and political conditions on Earth:

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun
And behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit
That which is crooked cannot be made straight
And that which is wanting cannot be numbered
(Book Of Ecclesiastes 1: 14,15)

Still there is room for an imaginative artist to present a somewhat hopeful point of view:

To everything there is a season
And a time to every purpose under the heaven
(Book Of Ecclesiastes 3:1)

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan flashes a Shelleyan mirror that reflects the light of springtime:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slowest now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one will later be last
‘Cause the times they are a-changing
(Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changing)

All hope is not lost for spirituality on Earth – there be sparks of light amidst the darkness:

A time to love, and a time to hate
A time of war, and a time of peace
(Book Of Ecclesiastes 3:8)

The journey in search of intuitive knowledge is the key to opening the the door to inward happiness.

Some artists find Gnosticism lacking the capacity to create collective action when it’s thought needed. Exercising poetic licence, a 8folk singer envisions bringing the vicious cycle of light and darkness to an optimistic end:

A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late
(Pete Seegar: Turn, Turn Turn)

Thereby avoiding the pessimistic side of the Gnostic equation – luck has a lot to do with obtaining individual happiness considering the certainty of physical death:

I returned, and saw under the sun
That the race is not to the swift
Nor the battle to the strong
Neither yet bread to the wise
Nor yet riches to men of understanding
Nor yet favour to men of skill
But time and chance happeneth to them all
(Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Bob Dylan, as the Jack of Hearts and riverboat gambler, flips the coin that has the ‘do unto others’ rule etched on its light side and the ‘eye for an eye’ rule on its dark side:

Took an untrodden path once
Where the swift don’t win the race
It goes to the worthy
Who can divide the word of truth
Took a stranger to teach me
To look into justice’s beautiful face
And see an eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
(Bob Dylan: I And I)

The ‘stranger’ of the song lyrics is mentioned in the Old Testament:

To deliver thee from the the strange woman
Even from the stranger which flattereth with her words
Which forsake the guide of her youth
And forgetting the covenant of her God
For her house inclineth unto death
And her paths unto the dead
(Proverbs 2: 16-18)

While ‘justice’s beautiful face’ be the Lady of Wisdom noted below:

Wisdom is the principle thing
Therefore get wisdom
And with all thy getting get understanding
Exalt her, and she shall promote thee to honour
When thou shall embrace her
(Proverbs 4:5-8)

And standing in the doorway of the mirrored room are producer Jack Frost and poet Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same
(Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken)

Just and fair – a coherent interpretation of Dylan’s songs that’s as good as any.

Dylan, aka Jack Frost, produced the albums/CDs “Under The Red Sky”, “Time Out Of Mind”, “Love And Theft,”Modern Times”, “Together Through Life”, and “Tempest”.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

by Tony Attwood

This song, which appears on the Whitmark demos bootleg is another from that huge outpouring of songs that ran up to the composition of the absolute masterpiece that is “Hard Rain”.  And indeed we can hear in simple form a number of the themes that occupied Bob’s mind when he came to compose “Hard Rain” perhaps just a few weeks later.

The title comes from Long Ago (and Far Away) which appeared in the 1944 musical “Cover Girl” with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, written by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.  Whether Bob knew the song or not I can’t say.  If this title had been taken and reused in a 21st century recording I’d say yes, because that is the sort of thing we have got used to Bob doing in the latter part of his career, but was he watching the old movies back in the 1960s?  I really don’t know.

Musically the piece gets its edge by fractionally extending the rhythm of the words that have to fit into the music – they do fit in, but only just.  It really gives one a feeling that the whole piece is on the verge of falling over all the time, without actually ever doing so.  And that of course fits with the passion of song’s lyrics.

The meaning is fairly simple: nothing has changed, despite everyone from Jesus Christ to President Lincoln attempting to show us the right way to live.

The opening verse sets out the tone…

To preach of peace and brotherhood
Oh, what might be the cost!
A man He did it long ago
And they hung him on a cross
Long ago, far away
These things don’t happen
No more, nowadays

And so it proceeds – in the second verse we get

The chains of slaves they dragged the ground
With heads and hearts hung low
But it was during Lincoln’s time
And it was long ago

There’s a nod to what was to become Masters of War as well.

The war guns they went off wild
The whole world bled its blood
Men’s bodies rotted on the ground
Of oceans made of mud

(The official lyrics go for a wander at this point, but I think that is what Bob sings.)  And Dylan’s concern about inequality which was so strong in these early days continues down the liine…

One man had much money
One man had not enough to eat
One man he lived just like a king
The other man begged on the street

Everything is broken, everything is awful, and it is here all the time..

One man died of a knife so sharp
One man died from the bullet of a gun
One man died of a broken heart
To see the lynchin’ of his son

The lyrics on the official Bob Dylan site are clearly inaccurate – at least from this recording, and there is one more verse on the Whitmark version which is not included (if you can transcribe it for me, I’d be really grateful.  I’ve had a go but the results can’t be right, and as we’ve discovered before on this site, my ears really aren’t up to the task any more).

And then on the recording we get the first verse again.

The song could have fitted into Freewheelin, but by the time that album was made Bob was so bursting with new compositions, it got relegated and lost.  It’s not a great piece: it is just a solid protest song of the era.  I’m glad it has been salvaged.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

You may also be interested in American poets and writers to whom Dylan pays tribute: an index

By Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan songs often crunch past and present and future time into a singularity.

To give listeners a linear time perspective on British/French poets and writers that Dylan actually or seemingly alludes to in his song lyrics, here are the birth and death dates of writers that I’ve referred to in my articles.

The writers cited are listed in chronological order by date of birth, and in each case followed by a one line summary of their position in literature.  Beneath that is a link to an article (or two) on this site that includes mention of this poet – although please do note that these range from articles that are primarily dedicated to the link between the poet and Bob Dylan, to articles that touch upon the writer in less detail.

We are aware from correspondence both from academics and students that this site is being used for the purposes of studying Bob Dylan’s work, and of course we find that incredibly gratifying.  Indeed we hope that this list might be of help in that work.

All that we ask in return is that if you do utilise this page, or indeed extract data from any other page from this site, you do cite the author of the page and the website “Untold Dylan” as the source.

British writers

Chaucer 1343 -1400
Canterbury Tales: Satirical narrative of Christians on holy pilgrimage

• Bob Dylan and Geoffrey Chaucer: Thunder on the Mountain
• Bob Dylan And Geoffrey Chaucer: The Death Of Pity

Spenser 1552 – 1599
Faerie Queen: Allegory of Christian Knights’ faith, charity, and moderation

• Eden is where you find it.
• Literary Allusions ll

Shakespeare 1564 – 1616
The Tempest: Fantasy that explores romance, sibling rivalry, and fatherly love

•  Shakespeare’s In The Well With His Pointed Claws And His Bell

Donne 1572 -1631
For Whom The Bell Tolls: Conceits, extended metaphors satirising blind faith

• Literary Allusions ll

Milton 1608-1674
Paradise Lost: God depicted as Satan

Blake 1757 – 1827
Jerusalem: Gnostic coexistence of light and dark, good and bad, body and soul

• Eden Is Where You Find It: Frederich Nietzsche, William Blake, And Bob Dylan
• Bob Dylan Has His Blake, And Keats It Too    
• Blake, Keats, And Spots Of Ink: Spinning Reels Of Rhyme

Burns 1759 – 1796
My Heart’s In Highlands: Anticleric Romantic visions of lost freedom

• Bob Dylan And William Carlos Williams

Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
Solidarity Reaper: Intuited transcendental Spirit of light throughout Nature

• My Ruth’s In The Highlands

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
The Fire-King: knightly romance

• Bob Dylan And John Crowe Ransom (Part II)

Coleridge 1772 – 1834
Kubla Khan: Dark aspects of earthly existence beneath the Spirit of light

• The Land Of Milk And Honey: Bob Dylan And Samuel Coleridge 
• Bob Dylan And Samuel Coleridge (Part ll)

Byron (1788-1824)

The Destruction Of Sennecherib: The struggle against oppression; nature and love have a dark side, but art endures

Shelley 1792 – 1822
Ode To The Westwind: Analogical hope for the return of youth and springtime

•  Bob Dylan And Percy Shelley
• Bob Dylan: Threepenny Shelley Continues (Part II)

Keats 1795 – 1821
Ode To A Grecian Urn: Melancholic life juxtaposed with the lasting beauty of art

• Blake, Keats, And Spots Of Ink: Spinning Reels Of Rhyme

Tennyson 1809 – 1892
Charge Of The Light Brigade: A melancholic Pandeistc view of Darwinianism

• Bob Dylan and Lord Tennyson: Flagging down the Double E

Browning 1812 – 1889
Love Among The Ruins: A darkly humoured Gnostic vision of Darwinism

• The Browning Of The Green Mountain

Carroll 1832 – 1898
Tweedledum And Tweedledee: Mirror images and reference to nursery rhymes

• Handy Dandy
• Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum

Swinburne 1837 – 1909
Delores: Catullus influenced where Christianity is depicted as a religion of pain

• Charles Swinburne, Wallace Stevens, And The Jack Of Hearts

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900

• The Picture Of Dorian Gray: Life imitates art

▪Bob Dylan And Oscar Wilde

(after Wordsworth) – Scott is Scottish so index can be expanded to include Scots

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
The Fire-King: knightly romance

Bob Dylan And John Crowe Ransom (Part II)

Kipling 1865 – 1936
The Law Of The Jungle: the misapplication of Darwinism to human ‘races’

• Bob Dylan And Rudyard Kipling: The God Of Deliverance, The God Of Forgiveness, And The Law Of The Jungle

Yeats 1865 – 1939
The Second Coming: The eternal recurrence of authoritarianism and nihilism

• Bob Dylan And William Yeats: Heaven Blazing In My Head

Joyce 1882 – 1941
Ulyssess: An ironic Homeric reconciliation with an unfaithful wife

• Bob Dylan and James Joyce: making the old new again

Eliot 1888 – 1965
The Waste Land: Conrad-influenced feeling of isolation in a materialistic society

• TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Bob Dylan Fighting In The Captain’s Tower

Tolkien 1892 – 1973
All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter: The inversion of material and spiritual values

• Literary Allusions l

Graves 1895 – 1985
The White Goddess: Elimination of the Gnostic Goddess under Christianity

• The Great White Wonder: Bob Dylan And Robert Graves

Auden 1907- 1973
Victor: Critique of the Christian call for vengeance against unfaithful women

•  The Three Penny Opera: Bob Dylan And WH Auden.

Thomas 1914 – 1953
Children Of Darkness: Gnostic-like confrontation of the chains of Christianity

• Dylan On Dylan: The Songs Of Bob Dylan And The Poems Of Dylan Thomas
• Under The Milk Wood With Bob Dylan

French writers

Villon 1431 – 1463
Ballad Of The Easy Life: The joy and comfort provided by material things

•  Things have changed or have they?

Charles Perrault (1628-1703)
Sleeping Beauty and other fairy stories

▪Bob Dylan: Paul Verlaine And Charles Perrault

Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
Seven Old Men: Surrealistic images of depraved beauty in the modern city

• The Ghosts Of Electricity: Bob Dylan And Symbolism

Verlaine 1844 – 1896
After Three Years: Triumph of man-made art over the beauty of organic nature

• The Never-Ending Art Of Becoming: Bob Dylan And Paul Verlaine

Ducasse 1846 – 1870
Songs Of Maldoror: Gnostic surrealism’s enough so Christian heaven can wait

• Bob Dylan And Lucien Ducasse: The Maldoror

Rimbaud 1854 – 1891
Subject Of Flowers: What a symbol stands for, an artist can freely choose

• Bob Dylan And Arthur Rimbaud

Breton 1896 – 1966
Freedom Of Love: Gnostic analogies alchemized from the world outside

• Bob Dylan And Andre Breton

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

By Tony Attwood

Looking back at the early songs that Dylan recorded claiming himself as composer it is amazing to think how he jumped from genre to genre and how he moved from songs that clearly are adaptations from older works through to songs that are still recognised as complete breakthroughs in songwriting, and are celebrated as masterpieces of contemporary compositions.

Take for example this sequence of writing from 1962.  As I have often said before the order shown here is not definitive, but as close as I can get using t he sources and information available.

• Rocks and Gravel
• Quit your Lowdown Ways
• Baby I’m in the mood for you
• Down the Highway
• Bob Dylan’s Blues 
• Tomorrow is a long time 
• Ain’t gonna grieve
• Hard Rain’s a gonna fall

There were actually four or five other songs written around this time, all of which pre-dated Hard Rain, and I shall shortly be taking at look at these – so that list might get a bit longer – but none of these really change the point; Hard Rain came out of nowhere.

But looking at the songs already reviewed here we have desire, comedy, despair, traditional blues, leaving… the whole range, ending (even if there are a few extras to put in first) with the utter masterpiece.

Which makes Ain’t gonna grieve even more interesting as the song that appears to have preceded the masterpiece.   Interesting because it is a short derivative piece that doesn’t really seem to say too much that wasn’t being said elsewhere.

The Whitmark recording lasts just one minute 27 seconds, and was probably written for Broadside magazine.   It is based on the spiritual “Ain’t gonna grieve my lord no more.”

There are many variants on the song. Here’ a popular alternative…

Oh, the Deacon went down to the cellar to pray,
He found a jug and he stayed all day,
Ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more.
I ain’t a-gonna grieve my Lord no more.
I ain’t a-gonna grieve my lord no more.
Ain’t a-gonna grieve my Lord no more.
You can’t get to Heaven on roller skates,
You’ll roll right by them pearly gates.
You can’t get to Heaven on a rocking chair,
‘Cause the Lord don’t want no lazybones there.

Woody Guthrie also recorded the song with the copyright note “Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Jeff Tweedy & Jay Bennett”.  Here is an extract from his version.

I long to fly away to heaven
Pass beyond that shining door
See my master and my savior
High away to heaven soar

I have made myself my promise
Never again to grieve my lord
I will live his gospel story
Sweetest story ever told

CHORUS:
Ain’ta gonna grieve my lord no more
Ain’ta gonna grieve my lord no more
Ain’ta gonna grieve my lord any more, not any more.

Dylan went elsewhere with his version – if you don’t have the Whitmark album it is on Spotify – at least it is in the UK and as the lyrics show, he took matters in a slightly different way

Well, I ain’t a-gonna grieve no more, no more
Ain’t a-gonna grieve no more, no more
Ain’t a-gonna grieve no more, no more
And ain’t a-gonna grieve no more

Brown and blue and white and black
All one color on the one-way track
We got this far and ain’t a-goin’ back
And I ain’t a-gonna grieve no more

Thus what was a spiritual now becomes a civil rights piece.  A clever twist.  But it was a passing notion, because with the next song the world caught fire.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

Bob Dylan’s songs often crunch past and present and future time into a singularity.

To give listeners a linear time perspective on America poets or writers that Dylan actually or seemingly alludes to in his lyrics, here are birth and death dates of writers that I’ve referred to in my articles.

The writers cited are listed in chronological order by date of birth, and in each case followed by a one line summary of their position in literature.  Beneath that is a link to an article on this site that includes mention of this poet – although please do note that these range from articles that are primarily dedicated to the link between the poet and Bob Dylan, to articles that touch upon the writer in less detail.

We are aware from correspondence both from academics and students that this site is being used for the purposes of studying Bob Dylan’s work, and of course we find that incredibly gratifying.  Indeed we hope that this list might be of help in that work.

All that we ask in return is that if you do utilise this page, or indeed extract data from any other page from this site, you do cite the author of the page and the website “Untold Dylan” as the source.

Sigourney   1791-1865

Pocohantas: The Christian escape from a world of woe.

• Bob Dylan And Henry Longfellow: Desire (Part II)

Hawthorne 1804-1864

The Scarlet Letter: Puritan use of shame and stigma.

• Bob Dylan And Henry Longfellow: Conclusion

Longfellow 1807-1882

Courtship of Miles Standish: A love triangle in early a Puritan colony

Whittier       1807-1892

Chapel Of Hermits: Quaker abolitionist and a lover of nature

• Dylan’s Other Speech

Poe              1809-1849

The Raven: Haunted by thoughts of past love

• Bob Dylan And Edgar Allan Poe: the howl in the songs

Melville       1819-1891

Moby Dick: The unknowable purpose of existence

•  Gnosticism: Bob Dylan: Mixed-Up Confusion

Whitman     1819-1892

Leaves Of Grass: The triumph and terror of technology

•  Bob Dylan And Walt Whitman: Writing In The Captain’s Tower

Timrod        1829-1867

Charleston: Celebration of the Confederate States

• Bob Dylan And Henry Timrod: The Country Coleridge Rambles

Dickinson    1830-1886

Wind Like A Bugle: Ominous signs of death in nature

•  My Ruth’s In The Highlands

Frost            1874-1963

Road Not Taken:The lasting effects of decisions made

• Frost Fills The Window; Dylan’s Knocking On The Door

London        1876-1916

Call Of The Wild: Exploitation of animals and workers

•  Bob Dylan and Lord Tennyson, flagging down the Double E

Sandburg     1878-1967

Honey And Salt: The quest for love under capitalist economics

• Bob Dylan And Carl Sandburg
• Carl Sandburg And Bob Dylan: Part II

Lindsay        1879-1931

The Congo: Racist exploitation by colonialism

•  Bob Dylan And The Beat Poetry Of Vachel Lindsay

Stevens        1879-1955

Sunday Morning: Making comfort out of chaos

•  Charles Swinburne, Wallace Stevens, And The Jack Of Hearts

Runyon         1880-1946

Lily Of St. Pierre: The honest man outside of the law

•  Bob Dylan and Damon Runyon.  Bob Dylan and the Jack of Hearts part II.

Williams       1883-1963

Paderson: Darwinism reformulated as Creationism

• Bob Dylan and William Carlos Williams

Pound           1885-1972

The Cantos: The whirlwind revolt against nihilism

• TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Bob Dylan Fighting In The Captain’s Tower 
• Eden Is Where You Find It

Millay            1892-1950

Dirge Without Music: The injustice of an uncaring God

•  Time Out Of Mind: Bob Dylan Paints His Masterpiece

MacLeish       1892 -1982

End Of The World: The capitalist creation of nihilism

•  Bob Dylan And Archibald MacLeish

Cummings   1894-1962

May I Feel Said He: The postmodern second coming of William Blake

• Bob Dylan and Edward Cummings: The Romantic Revival

Fitzgerald     1896-1940

The Great Gatsby: The futility of romanticism in a layered society

• Bob Dylan And F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby and Summer Days

Crane            1899-1932

The River: An attempt to escape from established authority

• Hart Crane: The Hart Of The Matter

Hughes         1906-1967

I Too: The fight for civil rights in America

• Bob Dylan And Walt Whitman: Writing In The Captain’s Tower

Ferlinghetti   1919-

In Goya’s Great Scenes: allusion to famous paintings

•   Bob Dylan And Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ginsberg       1926-1997

Howl: Criticism of capitalism and conformity

• Rebellion Of The Devil
• Bob Dylan And Allen Ginsberg

Corso            1930-2001

Boom, Boom, Boom: Ironic tweatment of the Nuclear Age

• Bob Dylan And Gregory Corso: The Owl Of Minerva And The Skylark

Bremster       1934-1998

City Madness: The chaos of modern city living

• Bob Dylan And Ray Bremser : Post-Modernism

To come: List of British And French poets and writers alluded to by Bob Dylan

You might also find the index “Poets and Themes within Dylan’s work” to be of help.

What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews

By Tony Attwood

I recently wrote a little piece about people’s top ten Dylan songs, and it drew a number of replies, with some readers kindly providing their own top tens).

There were a few choices in there (and you can go back and find them after the original article of course) that surprised me, but then that’s the nature of the music and the people who listen.  One of Bob Dylan’s almighty strengths is the way he has been able to vary his music over time, and that of course leads to varied choices for his best songs.

(And let me add that yes, I know that some people do feel that such an exercise is futile when considering an artist who has written over 500 songs, but I still found it interesting).

Anyway, since I am currently still on holiday in Cyprus, and since it has clouded over this morning with occasional showers, meaning I can’t go for my morning constitutional, I thought it might be interesting to look and see if there was any pattern to be found in the songs that were chosen.

There turned out to be quite a liking for Dylan’s songs of the 1960s, which I guess is not too surprising.  And certain songs turned up several times over, which has led me to list the songs that got more than one inclusion in the varied personal top tens, showing the number of times that song was mentioned until this morning  (28 November 2017).

Now let me stress I am not trying to prove anything.  Rather I am just musing over what people who are kind enough to spend a few moments on this site and then bother to write in have said.   Here we go…

1: With four inclusions

• Vision of Johanna
• Mississippi

2: With three inclusions

• Where Are You Tonight
• Shelter from the Storm
• Jokerman
• It’s Alright, Ma
• Every grain of sand

3: The songs with two inclusions in personal top tens…

• Tangled Up in Blue
• Simple twist of fate
• Ring Them Bells
• Not Dark Yet
• Mr. Tambourine Man
• Like a Rolling Stone
• In the garden
• Idiot wind
• Hazel
• Don’t Think Twice
• Chimes of freedom
• Ballad of a thin man
• Abandoned Love

For me, and of course like this whole exercise it is all very personal, there were a few surprises.  I was delighted to find a couple of inclusions for “Abandoned Love” and most of all for the high ranking of Mississippi, which didn’t come out too well in the journalists’ listings, which is where this little game started.  Likewise “Where are you tonight?” scored on the readers’ list but not the journalists’ list.

But perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the inclusion of “Shelter from the storm” – which is a great song indeed but not one I even contemplated as I tried to whittle my own personal list down to ten.   And if nothing else, seeing this song turn up means that the moment I get home (well, not exactly the moment I get home because it will be the middle of the night, but the next day) I shall be playing that song a few times and going back to the review on this site, and seeing what it was I missed, which others found so alluring.

Anyway, I don’t mean this to be other than a little exercise in looking at other people’s point of view.  And in that regard here is a final comparison – the list of songs (which I published a few days back) based on the number of times the page relating to each song has been accessed by readers in the past year.   Here’s that list again, this time noting the number of votes from the magazines in the earlier article, and now the number of times it has featured in a personal top ten.

To stop matters getting out of hand I’ve only listed personal and magazine votes when two or more readers / journalists have listed the song in their personal top ten.

1. Hard Rain’s a gonna fall (3 magazine votes)
2. To fall in love with you
3. Make you feel my love
4. Tangled up in blue (4 magazine votes; inclusion in 2 personal lists)
5. Times they are a changing
6. Jokerman  (inclusion in 3 personal lists)
7. Visions of Johanna (4 magazine votes; inclusion in 4 personal lists)
8. Blowing in the wind (2 magazine votes)
9. I shall be released
10. Only a pawn in their game

Nothing here is meant to prove anything, except that we all have different views of the best Dylan songs, and I most certainly am not trying to say one song is in some way better than another just because it appears on any list.

But just in case you fancy taking this a stage further I would be delighted to hear of any Dylan songs that you rate very highly indeed which don’t seem to be turning up on these lists at all.   If you have read my ramblings on this site and on our Facebook group (Untold Dylan if you have not joined) my entry at the very top of every list would be “Tell Ol’ Bill”.  I’ve not convinced many people about that yet, but there’s still time…

So, given that the rain is still falling I shall sit here and contemplate my ten favourite obscure Dylan songs – or versions thereof.  And in case you are wondering what has happened to the reviews of songs not yet covered in our list of 450+ reviews, they will resume once I get home and have my books and CDs to hand, and won’t disturb anyone playing the same song 20 times over.

I hope the sun is shining where you are.

by Larry Fyffe

The song lyrics of Bob Dylan are often taken by listeners and music critics to be those of a dyed-in-the-wool apocalyptic visionary. Some of these listeners and critics accept the words of the Bible as the be-all and end-all of what the future has in store for mankind, ie, do what you might, it’s all over now, baby blue. So best to become a ‘true believer’ – you might be lucky enough to make it to Heaven.

Dylanologist Kees de Graaf, as far as I can tell, takes this view:

Again Dylan may had in mind Revelation 20:8, the battle of Gog and Magog.

May the Lord have mercy on us indeed when this war begins (de Graaf: The Cat’s In The Well)

It’s a plausible interpretation of the particular song lyrics in question. But put in the context of Dylan’s works as a whole, matters are not so clear:

(Bob Dylan: With God On Our Side)

Listening to Dylan’s songs that relate to canonised religion reveals he’s honestly confused.  More than that, as an artist who feels compelled to rebel against orthodox teachings, including religious dogma, the singer/songwriter proclaims that ignorance stops ‘true believers’ from confronting God – to get Him to change His mind; to get Him to stop the apocalypse:

(The Gospel Of Thomas)

Little wonder, many Gnostic gospels are omitted from official biblical canon. A God made in the image of man is surely blasphemous. That mankind can change the course of history for the good, even if there are setbacks, jeopardises the established authority of Christian leaders – their walls could come a-tumbling down:

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

Dylan sings a Ballad, not for the Thin Man who drowns living things, but for the Brave Man who saves them:

(Nursery Rhyme: Ding, Dong, Bell)

Dylan ding-dongs the bells of alarm: where is the brave God that’ll stop the next war? Weary he is of the thin God at whose feet the bloodhounds kneel:

(Bob Dylan: Cat’s In The Well)

Dylan is anything but an a an apocalyptic prophet who throws up his hands in surrender to inevitable fate:

(Bob Dyan: Idiot Wind)

Waiting for Shelley perhaps: all is not lost – if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Placed in the context of his songs as a coherent vision, there’s a slow train coming up around the bend. Slow it be, but it’s coming:

(Bob Dylan: Slow Train)

That is, in time, rather than man being separated from God as he is now, he will be united with Him:

(Bob Dylan: When You Gonna Wake Up)

All visionary writings of the Gnostics have not been left out of the Bible -Jesus saith:

(Revelation 3:2)

As we have already seen, Dylan himself speaks with a Gnostic tongue. One that that says any spark of goodness that remains within the human body is in danger of dying out.

Trinitized Christianity, he metaphorically envisions as a religion of slaves, of bloodhounds that kneel – in need of a reformulation:

(Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window)

A kindred poet-spirit, the singer/songwriter has: