Untold Dylan

• This article continues on from  Bob Dylan And Literary Allusions

By Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan opens up the gates of the music industry, allowing for mature subjects, rooted in traditional folk and blues music, and in the classics of literature, to be presented; teenage love themes no longer considered as the only product that will sell. Throughout the entertainment culture, the times are a-changing. Changing, with serious themes found in literary works transported to popular music and rocknroll:
.
And did those feet in modern times
Walk on soles made in China
Through the bright prosaic malls?
(Verve: Love Is Noise)

A comment on the inherent exploitative nature of the capitalist economy, as in the following song as well:

We walk through ancient forest lands
And light a thousand cities with our hands
Your dark Satanic Mills
(Sting: We Work The Black Seam)

In the following, a comment on the lack of spiritual responsibility:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
(Bob Dylan: Every Grain Of Sand)

The source:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen ….
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
(William Blake: Jerusalem, from the Preface to “Milton: A Poem in Two Books“)

A theme of many modern-day Romantics:

It’ a buck dancer’s choice, my friend; better take my advice
You know all the rules by now, and the fire from the ice
Will you come with me? Won’t you come with me?
(Grateful Dead: Uncle John’s Band)

The choice – the heat of pure love; the cold of selfishness:

Love is a burnin’ thing
And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire
(Johnny Cash : Ring Of Fire)

Expressed too in the following:

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

The source:

My love is like to ice, and I to fire
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire
But the harder grows the more I her entreat?
(Edmund Spenser: My Love Is Like To Ice And I To Fire)

Essentially a theme that the power of love may not be enough to overcome the politics of greed:

Ghettos to the left of us
Flowers to the right
There’ll be bread for all of us
If we can just bear the cross
(Prince: The Cross)

Nor the senselessness of war:

The bugle sounds as the charge begins
But on this battlefield no one wins
The smell of acrid smoke and horses’ breath
As I plunge on into certain death
(Iron Maiden: The Trooper)

Indeed, it just might be too late:

Tell ol’ Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I’m not alone
That the hour has come to do or die
(Bob Dylan: Tell Ol’ Bill)

The source:

Their’s not to reason why
Their’s but to do and die
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
Cannon to the the right of them
Cannon to the left of them
Lord Tennyson: The Charge Of The Light Brigade)

A theme expressed in the following song:

Gone insane from the pain that they surely know
For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls
(Metallica: For Whom The Bell Tolls)

And once again:

How many more children
Must die on the wall
They’ll never be free
Until the bell tolls
(Saxon: For Whom The Bell Tolls)

And again, that love itself may be dying:

Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief
It takes a thief to catch a thief
For whom does the bell toll for, love?
It tolls for you and me
(Bob Dylan: Moonlight)

The source:

Each man’s death diminishes me
For I am involved in mankind
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee
(John Donne: For Whom The Bell Tolls)

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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

Updated 3 January 2019

“Cry A While” from Love and Theft sounds to me like Bob Dylan pulling in references to all the blues songs he hasn’t referenced so far in his compositions, and in the end there seem to be so many origins and quotes that listing them all makes any review virtually unreadable.  It doesn’t make the song unlistenable – far from it – it just gives me a problem.

Worse, I am not sure they have any significant meaning within the song – they are just… references.

The first thing you notice is the rhythm change – and as many other reviewers have pointed out before me, that pulls together two different blues traditions.  It opens like a Delta Blues songs and then goes into a bouncy swing rhythm and then back to where it came from (although some live performances have changed this completely)

If we want one clear origin for it all Tommy Johnson’s Big Road Blues is as good a place to start as any.  The lines

Lord, ain’t goin’ down this big road by myself
If I don’t carry you, gon’ carry somebody else

Aren’t quoted by Dylan, but the feeling of those lines seems to permeate Bob’s song.  Here’s Tommy Johnson’s original…

The other song you might want to consider if looking at the background of this song is “Your funeral and my trial” by Sonny Boy Williamson – not least because Dylan quotes that title line in his song…

Dylan ends Cry a While with

Well, you bet on a horse and it ran on the wrong way
I always said you’d be sorry and today could be the day
I might need a good lawyer, could be your funeral, my trial
Well, I cried for you, now it’s your turn, you can cry awhile

I could go on with these links all day – but I fear I’d lose my readership, and ultimately I would finally bore myself, much as I like going back through all the old blues.  So here’s just one more.

Dope head blues contains the lines

Feel like a fightin’ rooster
Feel better than I ever felt

And our Bob added them in verse 3

Feel like a fighting rooster—feel better than I ever felt
But the Pennsylvania line’s in an awful mess and the Denver road is about to melt

In fact all sorts of bits and pieces pile up in the song, although not every reference is clear, and nor, I guess, was it meant to be.

So we are left with a multiplicity of questions, such as Who was Mr Goldsmith?

Well, I had to go down and see a guy named Mr. Goldsmith
A nasty, dirty, double-crossin’, backstabbin’ phony I didn’t wanna have to be dealin’ with
But I did it for you and all you gave me was a smile
Well, I cried for you—now it’s your turn to cry awhile

I have seen the suggestion that this was Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1730 – 4 April 1774) the novelist, playwright and poet.  We know him in England today for the play “She Stoops to Conquer” written in 1771 and he is reputed to have written “The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes”.

Jumping around (which is after all what the song does) after the rooster we also get

Last night ’cross the alley there was a pounding on the walls
It must have been Don Pasqualli makin’ a two A.M. booty call
To break a trusting heart like mine was just your style
Well, I cried for you—now it’s your turn to cry awhile

And Don Pasqualli is… presumably Don Pasquale from a comic opera by Donizetti.

Eventually I got the feeling Bob was struggling for rhymes within his penultimate rhyme…

I’m gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey—I’ll die before I turn senile
Well, I cried for you—now it’s your turn, you can cry awhile

feels a bit forced to me.   But hell, this is Bob – he can do what he likes, and who am I to criticise.   And anyway, he was clearly having fun.

Here’s a live performance

Bob Dylan And Literary Allusions

By Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan’s receives the Nobel Prize In Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

In his countless allusions to the themes of folk and blues songs as well as to works of literature from times past, Dylan perks up the ears of both producers and listeners in the entertainment industry, able to mass market its products through the innovations of electronic technology.

References to traditional folk and blues themes and to those of literary works increase within popular songs and rock ‘n’ roll as the wall between highbrow and lowbrow music comes tumbling down, cracked by the sounds of Dylan hammering away at his typewriter.

The culture of commercialism changes: simplistic songs of love, found or lost, now not the be-all and the end-all of the music industry.

Largely inspired by the works of Bob Dylan, here are some examples of literary allusions by popular singers and rock ‘n’ rollers:

But still the voices in my head
Are telling me that God is dead
The blood pours down
The the rain turns red
I don’t believe that God is dead
God is dead, God is dead
God Is dead
(Black Sabbath: God Is Dead)

Or do I?

Songsters’ boats drift farther away from the solid shore and farther into the foggy seas of nihilism:

I heard his best friend Frankie say, ‘He’s not
dead, he’s just asleep’
Then I saw the old man’s limousine head back
towards the grave
I guess he had to say one last goodbye to the son
that he could not save
(Bob Dylan: Joey)

Both the British Birmingham band and Dylan alluding to the following:

God is dead. God remains dead
And we have killed him
How shall we comfort ourselves, the
murderers of all murderers?
What was holiest and mightiest of all that
The world has yet owned has bled to death
under our knives
(Frederich Nietzsche: The Gay Science)

Another example of captain’s steering their ships of songs towards ambiguity and ambivalence; onto the rocks of jagged meaning:

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in the the fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire
I spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
(U2: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For)

Could be the Lord or could be the Devil, but you have to serve someone:

You’re the one that I admire
Every time we meet together
My soul feels like it’s on fire
Nothing matters to me
And there’s nothing I desire
‘Cept you, yeah, you
(Bob Dylan: ‘Cept You)

God or girl?

Both alluding to the following poem:

And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear; Of, let the clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire
(William Blake: And Did Those Feel in Ancient Time)

More nuggets from the same vein:

There’s a lady who’s sure
All that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven ….
There’s a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimes words
have two meanings
(Led Zeppelin: Stairway To Heaven)

Glittering too in the following tune:

Grama said, ‘Boy, go follow your heart
And you’ll be fine at the end of the line
All that’s gold doesn’t shine
Don’t you and your one true love ever part’
(Bob Dylan: Going, Going, Gone)

Love of writing or of a person?

Both songs, alluding to this poem:

All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost
The old that is strong does not wither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost
From the ashes a fire shall be woken
A light from the shadows shall spring
(JRR Tolkien: All That Is Gold)

A final example of how Bob Dylan broke the mould of the modern music industry:

Xanadu
Held within the pleasure dome
Decreed by Kubla Khan
To taste my bitter triumph
As a mad immortal man
Never more shall I return
Escape these caves of ice
For I have dined on honey dew
And drunk the milk of paradise
(Rush: Xanadu)

Expressing the oxymoronic effects of having fame, money, and access to all the girls, alcohol and hard drugs you want.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s quite unbelievable:

It’s undeniable what they’d have you to think
It’s indescribable, it can drive you to drink
They said it was the land of milk and honey
Now they say it’s the land of money
Who ever thought they could make that stick
It’s unbelievable that you can get this rich this quick
(Bob Dylan: Unbelievable)

Both the Canadian band and Dylan alluding to:

And all should cry, Beware, Beware
His flashing eyes, his floating hair
Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey dew hath fed
And drank the milk of Paradise
(Samuel Coleridge: Kubla Khan)

What’s on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this 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

Bob is known to have performed this song twice in 1962, and then left it behind, presumably both because he did not compose the music, and because his talent was evolving at such a rate that the song was quickly surpassed by other more impressive songs.

But also, as I hope to show in this little piece, because the message he offered was one that was even more troubling to record executives of the day than “Masters of War” and “With God on our side”.

At this time Dylan was not writing much music that was original.  If we look back to Man on the Street we can see both the basis of the lyrics and the musical construction have been purloined from early folk songs.  Rambling Gambling Willie for example was clearly related to Brennan on the Moor (although do be careful if going back to listen to this one as there are so many versions of this Irish song that many appear to have no relationship with Dylan’s subsequent work).

But what is interesting is that I am not sure there were any immediate antecedents to Ballad for a friend and it struck me recently that maybe “Ballad” was immediately dropped because it was too original. In short, Dylan had more interest in relating his work to the folk music of the past, rather than creating anything new in these early days.   After all the folk club were full of people singing versions of traditional songs, not people singing new music.

But things were moving very very quickly and whatever views Dylan held one week were likely to be transformed the next.  Here’s the chronology for 1962, as far as I can tell…

1. Ballad for a friend
2. Rambling Gambling Willie
3. Standing on the highway
4. Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues
5. Ballad of Donald White
6. Let me die in my footsteps
7. Blowing in the wind 

The immediate antecedents of the music come from The Ballad of Peter Amberly by John Calhoun in 1880 or thereabouts.

The death and disaster tradition of songs telling of appalling accidents at work was very popular in the 19th century, and those who have studied this branch of social science will undoubtedly have theories as to why.  But it has always struck me that writing such songs was a way to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves.  They are an attempt to make sense of the fact that the rich not only have all the luxury but also don’t get killed in industrial disasters.

It is reported in several places that Bob had heard Bonnie Dobson sing the song and indeed in this first recording of the song below Dylan’s brief comment appear to credit Bonnie Dobson, possibly as composer.

But the quality on this recording is poor – and I have only included it for this very brief commentary – there is a better version of the song’s performance in a moment.  Stay with me…

The composer of the original version John Calhoun (1845-1939, and not to be confused with the 7th vice president of the United States of the same name!) wrote what is referred to as “the best loved of Miramichi woods ballads”. (Miramichi being part of New Brunswick).

Calhoun lived at Gordon Vale, where he farmed and worked in the woods in the winter and according to the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, “Calhoun was one of those who helped take the young man out to the settlement by horse and sled, and he heard him speak fitfully along the way of his Island home, his stern father, and his loving mother.”

But Calhoun was himself only the author of the words, not the composer of the music, which in fact comes from the Irish tradition and can be traced back at least 100 year further through that tradition.

Also we should note that the last verse of Peter Emberley was not actually written by Calhoun, but was added later by performers who felt that a religious sentiment was needed – again presumably to make sense of a world that so often doesn’t make any sense at all.  Here is the added verse, which some publishers of the lyrics place in parenthesis to indicate its different origins.

And now before I pass away there is one more thing I crave,
That some good holy father will bless my mouldering grave.
Near by the city of Boiestown where my mouldering bones do lay.
A-waiting for my saviour’s call on that great Judgement Day.

Calhoun had three sons and two daughters living in 1939, and thus I guess his descendents are still with us, and hopefully fully aware of their great grandfather’s contribution to the folk music tradition.

By the 1960s the song was very much part of the repertoire of folk singers, and Dylan composed his lyrics after (or in some tellings, while) sitting in his apartment on 4th Street, watching “A volcano named White” – a TV programme about capital punishment in which Donald White was filmed on Death Row.

In subsequent conversations Bob reported that he had heard about White several years earlier – he was a man who was deeply troubled psychologically, and who, in his own testimony, resorted to murder simply to get the help he personally felt he desperately needed.

Overall I think that we can see this song as part of Dylan’s development as a song writer, and that he himself fully appreciated this.  The song was not put forward by Bob as a one that should be recorded for an album, and was quickly forgotten.

Dylan’s song opens with

My name is Donald White, you see
I stand before you all
I was judged by you a murderer
And the hangman’s knot must fall
I will die upon the gallows pole
When the moon is shining clear
And these are my final words
That you will ever hear

I have very little knowledge of how Donald White would have been put to death, or indeed if we was put to death from his crime of murder, but I was a little surprised to see, on returning to this song, that Dylan uses language that I associate with capital punishment in England, where hanging was the chosen method until 1965 when all capital punishment was abolished.

Dylan gives us a brief resume of White’s troubles…

Although I’d a-traveled many miles
I never made a friend
For I could never get along in life
With people that I met

And we hear the result

If I had some education
To give me a decent start
I might have been a doctor or
A master in the arts
But I used my hands for stealing
When I was very young
And they locked me down in jailhouse cells
That’s how my life begun

And the failure of the state in neither providing education nor psychological help nor even sufficient prison space adds to the problems.

Oh, the inmates and the prisoners
I found they were my kind
And it was there inside the bars
I found my peace of mind
But the jails they were too crowded
Institutions overflowed
So they turned me loose to walk upon
Life’s hurried tangled road

And there is a touch of the Dylan that we soon come to know and love

And there’s danger on the ocean
Where the salt sea waves split high
And there’s danger on the battlefield
Where the shells of bullets fly
And there’s danger in this open world
Where men strive to be free
And for me the greatest danger
Was in society

Thus the troubled young man asks to be returned to prison, but he is told the prisons are too overcrowded, resulting in White’s killing of a man in 1959 and offering himself up to the authorities, anxious to die, and knowing that society will be glad to be rid of him.

And then we have the moral…

But there’s just one question
Before they kill me dead
I’m wondering just how much
To you I really said
Concerning all the boys that come
Down a road like me
Are they enemies or victims
Of your society?

It’s not eloquent poetry, but it does put forward the issue that societies in general find impossible to tackle – the notion that the very social structures and institutions themselves can be as responsible for the behaviour of an individual as an individual.  It is the view of anarchism: society is to blame for the ills of mankind.

So fundamental is the question that it is a question that cannot even be debated, for even to acknowledge that it is a valid question, pulls down all the structures of the society.  The individual must be held responsible, for if not, then the teachers, the legislators, the parents, the food processors, the politicians, could all be held guilty.

Before you know what was happening, everyone would be guilty, and we can’t have that.

What’s on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this 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.

Bob Dylan: Threepenny Shelley Continues (Part II)

By Larry Fyffe

Said it has been that the wealthy create poverty, but can not stand looking at it:

We should be high, instead of low
But let’s be practical, it isn’t so ….
I’m glad we all see eye to eye
That life’s a bitch, and then you die
(Tenpenny Opera: Life’s A Bitch)

Bob Dylan lets no one completely off the hook of individual responsibility for the plight they find themselves in:

The next six seconds could be like an eternity
Gonna get low down, gonna fly high
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

His lyrics more often than not carry a double-edged message; the individual and the social structure both faulted:

If I had some education
To give me a decent start
I might have been a doctor or
A master of the arts
But I used my hands for stealing
When I was very young
And they locked me down in jailhouse cells
That’s how my life begun
(Dylan: The Ballad Of Donald White)

Even with the waves of the Universe uncaring, the human individual of either sex still has decision-making power (water being power’s Blakean symbol). The NeoRomantic poet Percy Shelley addresses the likes of shifty Miss Lucy Brown, who just wants to be on the side she thinks is winning:

When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore
Still recedes….
He’s ever drifted on
O’er the unreposing wave
To the haven of the grave
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)

Sings the songwriter Bob Dylan to Mr. Jinx of the cartoon cells:

I ain’t gonna get lost in the current
I don’t like playing cat and mouse games ….
I always thought you were straight, baby
But you’re drifting too far from shore
(Dylan: Driftin’ Too Far From Shore)

Fortunately, a little help and love from kindly, kindred spirits goes a long way:

Every time I think about him now
Lord, I just can’t keep from cryin’
‘Cause he was a friend of mine….
He never done no wrong
A thousand miles from home
And he never harmed no one
And he was a friend of mine
(Dylan: A Friend Of Mine)

The uncaring sand brings down the foot of pride:

And on the pedestal these words appear
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! ‘
Nothing beside remains. Round the dacay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
(Shelley: Ozymandias)

An updated version addresses the likes of Threepenny’s Knife who has teeth pearly white:

All the early Roman kings
In their shark-skin suits
Bow ties and buttons
High top boots
Drivin’ the spikes in
Blazin’ the rails
Nailed in their coffins
In top hats and tails
(Dylan: Early Roman Kings)

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this 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.

I would especially like to thank Pat Sludden for his tireless support and enthusiasm in keeping this project going, plus Larry Fyffe for the articles which take the whole site in new directions.

I am always happy to receive new material for the site and receive requests to look at specific songs from any era of Dylan’s writing – including looking again at songs already reviewed.   I love the challenge.   Email: Tony@schools.co.uk

Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

In traditional popular music, the central themes are love, lost love and dance.  Dylan is not known to be interested too much in dance, but love and lost love are certainly central to his interest.

But the range of themes within folk music is much broader: poverty, social issues, political matters, the environment, the move away from the old ways… anything in fact.

One such theme that has intrigued Dylan throughout his writing career has been the notion of moving on, not just moving on because one has to, but because that is what one does.   It is an intriguing concept, first because it is one that is prevalent in a lot of the folk music Bob has clearly listened to throughout his life (as well of course in other folk traditions) and because Bob Dylan himself seems to have embodied this notion with his desire to keep on touring.

Indeed as I have tried to show in  Bob Dylan year by year; decade by decade, even when Bob has not been writing anything new, he has kept on touring and touring.

So here, perhaps more than with any other topic that he writes about, Bob lives out his musical vision.   The Wanderer in Dylan can be himself or indeed a passer by walking off down the road and moving on (Shelter from the Storm, One too many mornings) or it can be a completely separated observed outsider like the Drifter in Drifter’s Escape.

It can be the man who can’t find his love as in Red River or it can be two lovers so in love that there is no other world beyond themselves gazing at each other: they have effectively wandered outside of the rest of reality such that she speaks like silence.

Thinking further on this topic that I have mentioned many times in my reviews I find it interesting that Dylan has expressed an interest in Ovid, because as I noted in the review of “Beyond here lies nothin'” Ovid, from whom the phrase comes suffered (or at least we think he suffered) from being sent into exile, and wrote about it in the works he created towards the end of his life.

Dylan however can get to the notion of leaving through any one of a number of steps.   In the aforementioned “One too many mornings” he just has to move on.  In It ain’t me babe the singer appears to feel hemmed in, not wanting to be part of this close relationship, not just saying that he isn’t the right man for this woman, but also that he isn’t this kind of guy at all.

In short he has to keep moving – exactly like Robert Johnson.

These songs of leaving come thick and fast in Dylan’s early writings.  Don’t think twice is perhaps the classic Dylan “song of leaving”.  “Look out your window and I’ll be gone – you’re the reason I’m travelling on…” but having listened to other songs from the era maybe we start to think that it’s not just her.  She’s the excuse.  It’s actually him.  He’s the one who just has to keep moving.

So the songs with this theme continue.   Most likely you go your way  adds a touch of disdain, but just a touch; it is still of the essence that he leaves her, he moves on, presumably just as happened when the young Bob got up and left the family home to make is fortune in New York.

I don’t know when Bob first discovered the aforementioned Ovid – much later than he discovered Robert Johnson I am sure – but I think what particularly appealed was the notion of exile.  Ovid was already an old man (by the standards of the day) when he was exiled aged 50, to Tomis on the Black Sea by Emperor Augustus, the first Roman Emperor after Julius Caesar overthrew the Republic.  While away he wrote Ibis, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto: the poems of exile.

He wrote about the awful conditions in Tomis, about how he was old and sick and just wished to see his family again, and expressing his deep sincere regard for the emperor and how whatever it was that caused his exile was all just a silly mistake – a misunderstanding.

“writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”

he said in his most famous aphorism which comes from this period.  And again…

There’s nothing further than this, except frost and foes, and the sea closed by the binding cold.

He had moved on so far he had reached the end of the world.

By the time Bob reached Ovid and “Beyond here lies nothing” he had indeed explored so many aspects of leaving.   Sometimes it wasn’t even he who did the leaving, as with Boots of Spanish Leather.   Sometimes it wasn’t even a person who left, as in Dignity.

Down the Highway, Drifter’s Escape, Only a hobo.. anyone and everyone can move on.  Indeed it is interesting that the novels Bob cited in his Nobel Prize speech focus on a lot of moving on – Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Odyssey; they all have the Drifter, the Wanderer, the guy moving on or forced to live far from home.

But it is not just moving on in the physical sense, although that is so often the point.  Farewell Angelina from way back in 1964/5 is the summation of this journey into the two worlds – the world of the everyday, and the explanation of what is going on underneath. A second type of journey combined with the more everyday walking away.

Consider

There’s no need for anger, there’s no need for blame
There’s nothing to prove, everything’s still the same

a summary of the “it’s not your fault, I just have to go” explanation given by a million lovers to a million souls left behind.

And so Dylan and his characters are endlessly moving on.  Girl from the North Country, I am a lonesome hobo, Isis everyone moves on.  Bob even wrote a song just about moving on: On the road again.  He’s gone so far nothing makes sense any more.  And really he’s just started. Just like Jack Kerouac.

Of course sometimes, early in his writing career maybe Bob did think there was somewhere he could get to, when he sang

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief.

But there wasn’t.  He kept moving on and on until in Tell Ol Bill he wandered away to the silent land, and ended up stuck out there in a nameless place.

The wanderer had taken on everything and everyone, travelled everywhere, tried everything.  But really he had no choice.  It was in his bones

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?

Or said differently, “Just gotta keep moving”.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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.

Bob Dylan And Percy Shelley

By Larry Fyffe

That the Utopian egalitarian society envisioned in the imagination of Romantic Percy Shelley is always being torn apart by the poet’s observations of reality much influences the song lyrics of Bob Dylan; that is, Nature shows itself to be quite indifferent to man’s existence though Romantic poets like William Wordsworth exalt the benevolence of a caring Universe:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear? ….
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat – nay, drink your blood?
(Percy Shelley: Men Of England)

The songwriter, however, points his finger at both the higher-ups and lower-downs in society for not properly appreciating the comforts provided by God’s green Earth:

Businessmen, they drink my wine
Ploughmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth
(Bob Dylan: All Along The Watchtower)

The ultimate responsibility for reconnecting mankind to the natural world, to regain a Paradise lost by acting as a go-between, Shelley and Dylan lay at the doorsteps of womankind:

And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea
What are all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
(Shelley: Love’s Philosophy)

Both writers rhyming ‘earth’ and ‘worth’.

Like the male poet, the songwriter seeks the female spirit, a Muse:

If not for you
The winter would hold no spring
Couldn’t hear the robin sing
If not for you
(Dylan: If Not For You)

The sweet sprite, a Blakean symbol that blows the poet’s trumpet, and ignites his imagination – as in the verse below:

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my word among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
( Shelley: Ode To The West Wind)

The spirit in the air manifests itself sometimes hot, sometimes cold:

Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can’t jump it
Sometimes it gets so hard you see
I’m just here beating on my trumpet
With all those promises you left for me
But where are you tonight Sweet Marie?
(Dylan: Absolutely Sweet Marie)

Mother Earth itself the source of a sparkling imagination, the Blakean symbol thereof:

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire
The blue deep thou wingest
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest
(Shelley: To A Skylark)

Not so hopeful as Shelley is Dylan concerning the prospect of an egalitarian Paradise outside the gates of the poetic imagination:

And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden
(Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Outside have always been kings, and it looks like there always will be.

Percy Shelley, phallic imagery abounding, draws heavily from the well of preRomantic William Blake, fire symbolizing sexual desire:

And before that chasm of light
As within a furnace bright Column, tower, and dome, and spire
Shine like obelisks of fire
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies
(Shelley: Euganean Hills)

However, flames are not necessarily a sign of Paradise, according to Dylan:

There’s a woman on my lap and she’s
drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes
I’m looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies
(Dylan: Things Have Changed)

The poet seeks a good, not dark, spirit to pilot him to a safe and secure shelter:

On some rock the wild wave wraps
With folded wings, they waiting sit
For my bark, to pilot it
To some calm and blooming cove
Where for me, and those I love
May a windless bower be built
(Shelley: Euganean Hills)

The singer/songwriter expresses the same sentiment:

Down along the cove
We walked together hand in hand ….
Everybody watchin’ us go by
Knows we’re in love, yes, and they understand
(Dylan: Down Along The Cove)

The lament for youthful innocence lost, a common theme of the Romantic poets:

Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent it’s envy vain
And the earth grow young again
( Shelley: Euganean Hills)

And of songwriters still clinging by their fingertips to Romantic notions:

May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
(Dylan: Forever Young)

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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.

Dylan: Things Have Changed Or Have They?

By Larry Fyffe

‘Things Have Changed’ by Bob Dylan references The Threepenny Opera, a satirical musical on self-interest, about money-hungry capitalists and left-behind poor folks endeavouring to follow the footprints of the golden calf, saddled as it is with the dog-eat-dog morality of diamond-fingered cowboys.

Dylan considers greed inherent in ‘human nature’, but alludes to Woody Guthrie who sings about the plight of the poor under an economic system that dresses up private profit in the robes of religion:

I went across the river and I laid down to sleep
When I woke up I had shackles on my feet….
I asked the judge, “What’s gonna be my fine?”
Twenty-one years on the Rocky Mountain Line….
The train pulled out, twenty-one coaches long
And the woman I love is on that train and gone
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long
(Woody Guthie: Worried Man Blues)

The traditional folksong does not lose all hope for the poor immigrant, finding a Romantic happy ending, though it may be by death only. The over-greedy rich may not be so lucky, sings Dylan:

A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind
There’s a woman on my lap and she’s drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes
I’m looking up into the sapphire tinted skies
I’m well dressed, waiting for the last train
Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose….
Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake
I’m not that eager to make a mistake
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

Referring to John Milton’s “Wherefore with thee/Came not all hell broke loose?”
While Jinx’s cat-and-mouse game makes life out to be a joke, Bob Dylan’s been through all that and prefers the more realistic lyrics of poet Francois Villon that are included in the Threepenny Opera and the ironic word-play of the musical with its Miss Lucy Brown:

They tell you the best of life is mental
Just starve yourself and do a lot of reading
Up in the garret where the rats are breeding
Should you survive, it’s purely accidental
(Villon: Ballad Of The Easy Life)

Assassin knives are flashing and the hangman’s rope a-swinging in the work of Brecht and Weill:

Oh, Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Yes, that line is forming on the right, babe
Now that Macky’s back in town
(Bobby Darin: Mack The Knife)

Dylan has sympathy and empathy for those who hold a losing hand, but not for those who take advantage of the downtrodden whether the exploiter is already living at the top of the hill or trying to get there by harming others:

The witchcraft scum exploiting the dumb
Turns children into crooks and slaves
Whose heroes and healers are real stoned dealers
Who should be put in their graves
(Hand Of The Band)

A theme long expressed by Bob Dylan:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger….
In the courtroom of honour, the judge pounded his gavel
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
(The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carrol)

No longer a poor boy, Dylan reminds himself and the well-off that money, without pity for others, will not save their souls:

I’ve been walking down forty miles of bad road
If the Bible is right, the world will explode
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

Explode, if not in the literal then in the figurative sense.

You might also enjoy:

• Bob Dylan in 1998/9: the road to the Oscar
• Things have changed: the meanings behind the song
• The Line Forms On The Right: Bobby’s Back In Town. Dylan & the Threepenny Opera

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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

Having completed his first collection of new songs in years and years, Bob wrote nothing between January 1997 and July 1999.   It was his only recording of a new song in 1999, but what a song.

It is clear that Dylan knew what was in the movie rather than just providing a song, and it is clear that he most certainly wanted to provide a song for the film, since unlike “Lay Lady Lay” the whole process of creation and recording was done on time.

The film’s director, Curtis Hanson, stated that he sat with Dylan in the editing suite, watched some of the rushes and discussed the story line and the characters.  He concluded by saying “weeks later a CD arrived in the mail.”

There is a lot to be said for the idea that Things have changed wouldn’t have existed without “Time out of mind” which cleared away five years of non-activity in the recording studio.  According to interviews, “Things have changed” was taught to the band, recorded and mixed in one afternoon.  There were two takes: the first had a New Orleans feel, the second is the one that won the Oscar.

There are several versions of Dylan’s acceptance speech, but this one is really worth watching – and it is followed by a live performance of Things of Changed.

And this is where he thanks the Academy for being “bold enough to gie me this award for this song, which is obviously a song which doesn’t pussyfoot around or turn a blind eye to human nature.”

And for once I am with Heylin when he says, “Ain’t that the truth”.

The review of Things Have Changed on this site was one of the very early reviews on the site.  I’ve learned a lot over the years, and have tidied it up a bit, and added a postscript or two along the way.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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

Before I started to gather materials for a review of Bob Dylan’s Po’ Boy I had not appreciated how oft-use the phrase “Po’ Boy” or “Poor Boy” is in American culture.  It doesn’t have the same resonance in the UK, which is probably why I’ve never quite got the song – until now.  And as you will see if you read on, even now I’m struggling.

What I did know was that there was an Elvis Presley song “Poor Boy” from 1965, so just in case you fancy a bit of Elvis here it is…

https://youtu.be/vZJYOcvSh70

And because I am a fan of David Byrne and Brian Eno I remember Poor Boy from Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

That song is not to everyone’s taste I am sure but it is certainly worth a listen if you feel like branching out.  The song changes as it progresses, so don’t take the opening as symptomatic of the whole thing.

There is a certain Dylanesque quality to the lyrics too…

Poor Boy-I walk into the river in my hat and shoes
Poor Boy-I'm sittin at the table with a knife and spoon

Live fast die happy- don't let your panties show
I trust market forces- it's the only song I know

Poor Boy- I'm wearin silver slippers and a long white gown
Poor boy- I picture in my mind the day the walls come down

Poor Boy- I'm livn in a country where I'm never free
Poor Boy- I'm writing down the names of all the things I see-

So it goes, songs and albums, all perhaps looking back over the shoulder to what I think might be the original Poor Boy Blues by Barbeque Bob.  The only recording I can find is pretty rough, but at least you can get the hang of how the title words were used.

I also discovered while having my meander around the phrase that Po’ boy, is a traditional sandwich common to New Orleans.  Wiki tells me it almost always consists of meat, which is usually sloppy roast beef or fried seafood which includes shrimp, crawfish, oysters and crab. The meat is served on baguette-like New Orleans French bread, known for its crisp crust and fluffy centre.

But I expect you knew that.

Also following this chain of thinking I found what for me was a very interesting experience for hearing Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler play together, which actually I really enjoyed.  I’m not overwhelmed by the Nashville Sound but I could listen to this quite a few times very happily.

But enough of this meander.  Now that I realise the phrase has meaning and context, I can understand the song a little better although I am still struggling.

It is of course from “Love and Theft” and was played by Bob 41 times between 2001 and 2010, and it is, for me, one of those 21st century Bob songs where Dylan gets all the chords that he doesn’t normally use and throws them all in to the mix and then places a melody over the top.   The opening lines of chords run

C, Bm7-5,  E7(-5),
Am, D9
Fmaj7, F6, C, Am/F#
F(maj7), G6, G, C

Even if you don’t know anything about music, if you have read a few reviews on this site you’ll know this is not normal either for Dylan or for popular music.  Indeed I had to go running to Eyolf Østrem’s, Dylan Chords site to get this right, as I was struggling to disentangle some of those on the piano.

As for playing them on the guitar, no I don’t think I want to give the morning over to that, because even with all that, the chords meander a bit later on, although without again reaching the outer limits of oddness and finger flexibility.  No wonder Bob has taken to playing the piano – it is a damn site easier there.

I say, “How much you want for that?” I go into the store,
Man says, “Three dollars.” “All right,” I say, “Will you take four?”
Po’ boy, never say die,
Things will be all right by and by.

I think the opening of the song gives us what for me turns out to be a very misleading bit of scene setting.  It seems to be a Tweedle Dum Tweedle Dee concoction giving a nod to “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” – two children’s books deeply embedded in English culture.

There are some great lines, even if they have turned up before.  The 1938 Max Brothers classic “Room Service” has the “Is that room service, right send up a room” joke, and I suspect “Freddy or not here I come” comes from somewhere else too.

If you see him as real, the “Po Boy” of the title is a sad case in need of protection, to stop himself being exploited; a village idiot who doesn’t know when people are taking advantage of him.

So I guess we are looking back to Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,   Talkin Hava Negeilah blues, and I shall be free number 10.

As for the melody woven around all those chords, its a sort of jazz of the 1950s I guess but I am certainly not an expert on that.

But that’s not all there is to it.

And as you will probably be aware there has been accusations of Dylan lifting lines from elsewhere, in particular Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza.  Although we must also note that when the issue was put to Saga he expressed surprise and delight that Bob would be quoting him.

Saga’s text at one point reads (in translation of course), “My mother…was the daughter of a wealthy farmer…(she) died when I was eleven…my father was a travelling salesman…I never met him. (my uncle) was a nice man, I won’t forget him…After my mother died, I decided it’d be best to go and try my luck there.”

Bob goes for

My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer
My father was a traveling salesman, I never met him
When my mother died, my uncle took me in—he ran a funeral parlor
He did a lot of nice things for me and I won’t forget him

So perhaps there should be a moment’s digression at this point into “Confessions of a Yakuza”    published in 1991.  The book is made up of stories from the life of Eiji Ijichi, a boss running the international crime syndicates (the Yakuza).  

Here’s Wiki’s summary of the plot…

The book starts with the teenage Ijichi running away from his family home in Utsunomiya to Tokyo, to find a judge’s mistress who he was having an affair with. The book follows Ijichi through his first job at a family coal merchant’s in the then district of Fukagawa, his various mistresses and treatment for syphilis, the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, his initiation into the gang that controlled gambling in the Asakusa entertainment area, his various stretches in prison, his overseas service in occupied Korea in the 1920s, his rise to the boss of the gang, and his experiences during and after World War II.

With the knowledge of this story we maybe can see that this is not necessarily all about a person who is too simple to understand the world around him (which is what many analyists seem to be saying), but rather it is a summary of scenes from the book.

I say, “How much you want for that?” I go into the store
The man says, “Three dollars.” “All right,” I say, “Will you take four?”

Could be a response to extortion.   The man under the influence of the criminal gangs at a local level no finds himself in a completely different game.

Been workin’ on the mainline—workin’ like the devil
The game is the same—it’s just on a different level
Poor boy—dressed in black
Police at your back

And then suddenly we are off to Othello, for no particular reason except the fact that betrayal and manipulation is everywhere

As for the Georgia laws – well, as I have said I am English, so I had to go a-searching but I did find an explanation of that phrase here.  I am not sure if it helps that much!

But then at the end we are back to the poor boy as nothing other than a poor boy…

Poor boy ’neath the stars that shine
Washin’ them dishes, feedin’ them swine

And that is about that.   Sorry I can’t offer any definitive answers, but I hope the above helps if you are trying to unravel the song.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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.

Carl Sandburg And Bob Dylan: Part II

By Larry Fyffe

Carl Sandburg’s soft socialistic poems mix so-called ‘lowbrow’ folk songs with what is often thought of as ‘highbrow’ poetry to bring themes of democracy back home to the alienated working class of America.

Bob Dylan, though sticking more with the politics of personal relationships, pays tribute to Sandburg in a number of song lyrics lest the efforts of the vagabond poet be forgotten:

Can’t you hear the Duquesne whistle blowing
Blowing like the sky’s gonna blow apart
You’re the only thing alive that keeps me going
You’re like a time bomb in my heart
(Bob Dylan: Duquesne Whistle)

Likewise, Sandburg contrasts the search for female shelter with the dull-weather life wrought by the economics of capitalism:

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
When fog trails and mist creeps
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly
Like some child lost
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbour’s breast
And the harbour’s eyes
(Carl Sandburg: Lost)

The influence of Sandburg’s poetry on Dylan’s lyrics is unmistakable:

I’m in Boston town in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Or maybe I do, but I’m just really not sure ….
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
I said ‘Tell me what I want’
She said ‘You probably want hard boiled eggs’
I said ‘That’s right, bring me some’
She says ‘We ain’t got any, you picked the wrong place to come’
(Dylan: Highlands)

Robert Burns’ thrill of the Highland hunt for deer lost to the demands of the
bourgeoisie:

Somewhere is a man looking for a red-headed girl
And someday maybe he will look into your eyes for a
restaurant cashier and find a lover maybe
Around and around go ten thousand men
Hunting a red-headed girl with two freckles on her chin
I have seen them hunting, hunting
Shake back your hair; let go your laughter
(Sandburg: Red-headed Restaurant Cashier)

Singer Bob Dyan too draws upon the children’s nursery alluded to by Sandburg that shows the futility of being a pawn in a king’s game:

Oh the grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again
(The Grand Old Duke Of York)

War, that is, be a poor man’s fight for the benefit the rich:

Ten thousand men on a hill
Ten thousand men on a hill
Some of’m goin’ down, some of ‘m
gonna get killed
(Dylan: Ten Thousand Men)

Sandburg refers to the nursery rhyme more than once to express exploitation of the many by the few:

Ten thousand men and boys twist on
their bodies in a red soak along a river edge
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some
rattling death in their throats
(Sandburg: Buttons)

Another reference by Dylan to Sandburg, as well as to Robert Frost, Lord Tennyson, and an American folk song:

The evenin’ sun is sinkin’ low
The woods are dark, the town isn’ t new
They’ll drag you down, they’ll run the show
Ain’t no telling what they’ll do
Tell ol’ Bill when he comes home
Any thing is worth a try
Tell him that I’m not alone
That the hour has come to do or die
(Dylan: Tell Ol’ Bill)

Alluding to Tennyson’s 600, not 10,000, men:

Theirs not to make reply
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die
Into the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
(Tennyson: The Charge Of The Light Brigade)

And to the Frosty woods:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
(Robert Frost: Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening)

The sleep of death.

Dylan’s Titanic song is sinking and dragging down because it has hit a Sandburg:

What do we see here, Bill, outside of what
the wiseman beat their heads on
Outside of what the poets cry for and the
soldiers drive on headlong and leave their
skulls in the sun for – what, Bill?
(Sandburg: Dunes)

Tell ol’ Bill Shakespeare in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells that to them nothing was delivered but Grains of Sand.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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

It seems to me that in suggesting that something is amiss, because some of Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize lecture was lifted from online critiques of the books Dylan mentions, those correspondents who make such a claim are a long way from understanding Bob Dylan, his work, the notions within his lecture and indeed the very essence of great art.

There are several points to make here, and so I’ll break them down into sections.

1:  The summaries of the three stories are not the important part of the lecture.

What happens in Moby Dick etc is not actually the essence of Bob’s Laureate lecture.  The point of citing the books is to say that he read them in his youth and they had a profound influence on him.

It could be argued that if he was going to cite these books that he read 50 or more years ago, he ought to go back and read them again, but as we all know, Bob has a touring commitments and a working lifestyle that can’t suddenly be interrupted.

And for what?  So that we have yet another summary of Moby Dick? What is the point of that?  If we are concerned about the books we can go back and read them ourselves, but that is not what Bob is suggesting we do.

2: The essence of the piece is that these weird stories showed him that anything is possible in story telling.

Listen again to Dylan’s work and one finds strange tales.  Popular music has rarely if ever told really weird stories within its restricted verse and chorus format, but Bob has repeatedly found a way to do that from Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues  to Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream  and onwards to Tin Angel.

I can’t think of anyone else who has tackled the issue of the outlandish and outrageous story form within the realms of popular music in such a diverse and divergent manner.  Of course the form existed way back with songs like Nottamun Town, but Dylan gives the whole form a totally new twist.

3: Dylan has never seen words as sacred.

Although all of Bob Dylan’s songs have been copyrighted, they have also been made available for all of us, by placing the lyrics on the internet on the official Bob Dylan site.   Yes, his publishing company requires that copies of the songs from his albums which are put on the internet are taken down, as otherwise he would work for nothing, but the lyrics – they are all there on line.  And as far as I know the publishers don’t take action over films made at Dylan concerts.

Also Bob Dylan is part of the tradition of reusing other works – indeed time and again on this site we’ve pointed out that the idea, the lyrics or the melody of a song is based on a much earlier piece.  I’ve mentioned Nottamun Town as the source of the notion of nonsense songs.  It was also the source of the melody for “Masters of War”.

To be surprised that Bob is lifting a summary of the books that he is quoting from an online review (if that is what he has done – I haven’t checked) seems to have missed the entire point of Bob’s work, which is that we are now within an incredibly rich tradition of music stretching back to the 15th century, and as it is there, then why not draw on it.

4: Are we to say that “Beyond here lies nothing” is of no value?

The phrase that is at the heart of that song is itself one that is lifted from classic literature.  Does that invalidate the song?

That is an argument that we can have, but it seems to me a rather unexciting point to debate.

In short I think that those who criticise the lifting of some text relating to books that Bob mentions that he read in his youth, are really not getting the point of Dylan’s music at all.

He has entered an art form that upon his arrival was pretty much restricted to writing songs about love, lost love, dance and (in the case of the blues) poverty, and he has given the form new topics that can be held and explored within these songs.

Indeed Bob Dylan has also given us the notion that songs don’t have to mean anything.  Rather as he says, ‘If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important… I don’t have to know what a song means.”

Judgements of lectures, rather like judgements of work of art, have to have a grid of standards upon which these judgements are made.   Yes it is possible to make up one’s own grid of standards and then say, “Bob Dylan is a failure because he doesn’t meet this standard which I have set up,” but in the end that is fairly pointless.  Why does your standard matter?  Why is this the right standard to evaluate Bob’s work against?

This doesn’t mean we don’t have standards, but rather that standards change all the time, and one needs to be clear that the standards of judgement one is using themselves have a validity.

All brilliant artists in all the arts, not only create works of art that move us in some way, they also rip up the rule book.  It is a bit of a shame that the people writing these criticisms don’t actually seem to understand that important point about art.  Nor indeed what is important in Dylan’s lecture.

5.  Schools teach us not to copy, artists teach us to copy

Go to school and your a told not to copy someone else’s work.  Read almost any book on creativity in any area of the arts, and you will find encouragement to copy.  All artists copy; the great artists move on from that copying and go somewhere new.

Bob Dylan has written over 100 songs based around the 12 bar blues format so these are all technically copies, but there is no reason to worry about this because in each case he gives us something new.

I have on the bookcase in my study where I write this blog, a copy of Austin Kleon’s bestseller, “Steal like an artist”.  It opens with two quotes:

“Art is theft” – Pablo Picasso

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.  The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn” – TS Eliot.

It would have been good if those who criticise Dylan over his lecture had considered what other artists have said about copying.  But then again, that might be asking too much.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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

The return to songwriting in 1996/7 did not reduce the level of touring that Bob and the band were doing.  But there was a break from the end of November 1996 until February 1997 when the tour started again in Japan.

This was the period when Bob finished off writing and recording all the songs that could be included in the album – this set being the five noted below.  I should add that since writing the review of 1996 I have slightly revised my view on when a couple of songs were written, and the 1996 report is amended accordingly.

The order for 1997 that I am left with is

• Cold Irons Bound
• Trying to get to heaven
• Make you feel my love
• Til I fell in love with you
• Love Sick

It is clear that by the time of the recording sessions in January 1997 Bob knew what the album as a whole was sounding like, and in my estimation (although this of course is a guess) he knew roughly the order he wanted the tracks to appear in.

The fact that Love Sick was the last song written, as far as one can tell from the information available, and yet is the first on the album suggests that the song in Dylan’s mind summed up the whole concept, and so was needed to launch it.

I have always found Love Sick the most amazing opening to an album – and one that very few composers could have got away with.  At the time of writing Dylan has performed the song 791 times live, making it the 17th most performed song by Dylan and his band, and the most performed song from this album.  (Cold Irons Bound is second with 423 live performances).

If one can just stand aside from the music for a moment and consider the lyrics, the sheer power of this song emerges as once.

I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping.

In fact the final three compositions required for the album all have the word “love” in the title, and love is clearly the curse.  As he says in “Til I fell in love with you”

I don’t know what I’m gonna do
I was all right ’til I fell in love with you

And what of “Make you feel my love?”   How does Dylan write “Love Sick” and “Make you feel my love”.  Just look at the opening

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love

Now, if you are still with me, go back and consider

I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping.

The total contradiction is overwhelming and so extraordinarily powerful these songs almost seem to defy description.

I am not in the group that thinks “Feel my love” is a mistake for this album or in any way an inferior song.  If I had written it, and never written anything else, I’d spend every day walking around saying to people “I wrote that”.   Of course I’d probably get carried off to a hospital at the same time, but even so…

Dylan is offering us both sides of love – the total and utter despair and the overwhelming yearning to express love.

“Make you feel my love” / “Love Sick” – which is the greatest song?  I have no idea.  It tends to depend what happened to me yesterday.  They are both my songs of the year.

But perhaps I may add a word as to what Dylan now did with the collection of songs in turning them into an album.   He started with “Love Sick” which sounds on first hearing as if it is about as low as things can get.  But then he takes us down, down and down again, until we reach death’s door with “Not Dark Yet”.   And then he brings us back up again until at the end he is with Burns in a mythical highlands of another time and place.

I have often wondered if the central character in the sequence of songs actually does die in “Not Dark Yet” and is spending the rest of the album making his way across the River Styx into the Underworld.  Fanciful I know, but even so…

And all achieved by crafting these songs together in a particular sequence.  For me the album was, and remains, a brilliant piece of work.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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

‘Untold’ received a plain brown paper envelope containing the acceptance speech Bob Dylan gave to a s select audience of bird watchers at the headquarters of the National Audubon Society in Manhattan. He had received an award from the Society “for having created new ornithological expression within the great American songbird tradition.”

Exclusive to our readers is the text of that speech:

Dear fellow birders:

I am going to explain, in a somewhat round-about fashion, how my songs relate to ornithology.

Before I left home, I read lots of guidebooks about wild birds, all the books I could get my hands on, one way or another. And I also delved into the history of the National Audubon Society.

My head exploded when I discovered the writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, one of your earliest members:

The wind blew east, we heard the roar
Of Ocean on his wintry shore
And felt the strong pulse throbbing there
Beat with low rhythm our inland air ….
While , peering down from his early perch
Upon the scaffold’s pole of birch
The cock his crested helmet bent
And down his querulous challenge sent
(John Whittier: Snow-Bound)

A shiver went down my spine; darkness turned to light. I felt as though the domesticated bird in Whittier’s poem was crowing right at me, transmitting a message to a brother rooster who still had a chance to escape from Maggie’s Farm. Which I eventually did. Never forgot John’s words though:

I ponder o’er the sacred word
I read the record of our Lord
And, weak and troubled, envy them
Who touched His seamless garment’s hem
(Whittier: Chapel Of Hermits)

I could repeat the birder-poet’s vocabulary like a parrot:

By marble slabs and in fields of stone
You make your humble wishes known
I touched the garment, but the hem was torn
In Scarlet Town, where I was born
(Bob Dylan: Scarlet Town)

You bird watchers in the audience know exactly what I’m talking about. You wait all day for some beautiful bird to show up, but no. She’s off with some other rooster in another barnyard somewhere. You wait for a slow train comin’ up around the bend ’cause she won’t let you jump her railway gate no more; you’re out of there:

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’ m tav’lin’ on
Don’ the think twice, it’ all right
(Dylan: Don’t Think Twice)

But things don’ t get no better:

Feel like a fighting rooster
But the Pennsylvania line’s in an awful mess, and
The Dever road is about to melt
(Dylan: Cry A While)

It’s thumbin’ a ride down Highway 66, or nothin’ , but it can get pretty lonesome out there at the crossroads …. you feel like Woody trying to escape from some cartoon cell, or to some rainbow movie where bluebirds fly:

Black crows in the meadow
Across a broad highway
Though it’s funny, honey
I’m out of touch, don’t feel much
Like a Scarecrow today
(Dylan: Black Crow Blues)

The American crow is a freewheeling bird, wary and intelligent; flourishes in spite of efforts to reduce its numbers; has the ability to adapt to a variety of habitats, even the desolate parts of a city:

Just then this cop comes down the street
Crazy as a loon
He throws us all in jail
For carrying harpoons
(Dylan: 115th Dream)

You’re looking for shelter from the storm, not for some screwed up, it-ain’t-me- babe-you’re-lookin’-for kind of babe:

The wind howls like a hammer
The night wind blows cold and rainy
My love, she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
(Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

Now the American male robin is an early-morning bird, an industrious and authoritarian worm-puller, running across lawns and standing erect. Flicking his tail feathers, and flinging flattery, this song bird has no trouble attracting a flying flock:

If not for you
Winter would have no spring
Couldn’t hear a robin sing
I wouldn’t have a clue
Anyway, it wouldn’t ring true
If not for you
(Dylan: If Not For You)

The flock lays eggs as blue as some people’s eyes.

The cuckoo is not a true-blue American bird. The female lays its eggs in the nest of other birds; sues the biological father for child support:

The cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles
when she flies
I’m preachin’ the word of God
I’m puttin’ out your eyes
(Dylan: High Water)

One final point, I don’t know what a lot of my songs mean, I just know that I like the way I sound when I’m singing them:

And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
(Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Well, that’s it, folks…….Anybody got a pair of binoculars ….Anybody?….Throw them all up!

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.  Also a list of the most read articles on this site.

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

I’m not really too sure why people make a fair bit of fuss about this song; it is very much the format that came about when country met rock met blues in the late 1940s and early 1950s.   Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” is mentioned as a source, and although Dylan’s song is certainly not a direct copy it is very much in the style and feel of Domino.

And if it wasn’t Fats Domino that Bob had been listening to that day, then it was someone like him, for although parts of the verse sound like Blueberry, the bridge section comes from somewhere else although annoyingly (for me, probably not for you) I can’t quite place it at the moment.  But I have heard it on an earlier song.

As to what it is all about – well, that’s anyone’s guess, if it is about anything at all.  And indeed I rather think that along with a number of Basement Tapes song it was indeed about nothing particular and so is about everything.  The failure of the political elite to deliver equality, deal with the starving farmers, solve the problems of the miners when their pit was shut, deliver an end to racial intolerance…  Or the church to deliver true redemption.  Or maybe just everything.

Actually that last one is the one I like best (although that is not to say I have any evidence for it).  The failure of all political, social and religious promises.  Given the borrowed nature of the music that really does work for me.   It makes the song a sort of “It’s all right ma” rockabilly blues. And why not?

Music critic Robert Shelton came up with the notion  that “nothing” “echoes the artists dilemma: death versus life, vacuum versus harvest, isolation versus people, silence versus sound, the void versus life-impulse”.  I’m not sure that Dylan was thinking that deeply at this point, but it’s a great fun theory when listening to the song again.

For some critics the lyrics are angry for other sad.  Who knows – and really I don’t think Bob did.  He wrote it in case anyone wanted to record it – one of the collection that was circulated to find takers with the guarantee that Bob would not record the song himself.

The Byrds recorded the song in March 1968 for Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and that version got a substantial amount of praise, and if you don’t know this version I would strongly recommend a listen – the band turns it into a totally different piece.  It also has the unusual approach of having a totally different feel for the bridge (the “middle 8”).  The whole thing is in conventional 4/4 time – it is what they do in each section that makes it feel so different.

Allmusic describes this version as “pure magic.”

Coming back to the song all these years later what strikes me now is that when I first heard the song all those decades ago I took the chorus as a piece of philosophy, and for me that became the central message.

Nothing is better, nothing is best
Take heed of this and get plenty of rest

In essence saying, there are no valid value judgements to be made.  Just accept the world as it is and live in it.  A sort of Zen message in fact.  So in this regard everyone who tells you what to think, how to behave, what to do, who to be, is just making it up.  Instead one should just try to be part of the world.

I’m not trying to say that is right.  It just was how I head it in my youth.  I found it a helpful tool in my attempts to calm my brain and not endlessly be rushing around trying to do, well, sort of, everything.

In that regards that simple chorus worked for me, but all these years later it all seems a bit… well, obvious.  Maybe I’ve become too cynical.  Maybe I’ve just grown up.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 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.

Villon And Dylan

By Larry Fyffe

In many of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics he takes on the persona of Francois Villon, a French vagabond poet of the 15th century, an autobiographical poet who turns the courtly values of his day upside down, viewing the world from the perspective of the downtrodden who inhabit Desolation Row of the late Middle Ages:

Tell me where, or in what country
Is Flora, the lovely Roman ….
The White Blanche of the Siren’s voice
White as a swan ….
Where are they, Virgin, you who reign?
Oh, where is last year’s snow?
Prince, don’t ask of me again
Where they are, this year or no
I only have this last refrain
Oh, where is last year’s snow?
(Villon: Ballad Of The Ladies In Times Past)

Dylan finds both Snow White and Cinderella:

Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window, for her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday, she already is an old maid …..
And the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go
Is Cinderella, sweeping up on Desolation Row

Characteristic of Dylan’s style, he takes end-rhyme from the original source (in this case a translation), and varies a bit –

Right now, I can’t read too good, don’t send me
no more letters – no
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

There be ‘no’ and ‘row’ instead of ‘no’ and ‘snow’.

In his poetry Villon, based on his own experiences, observes that laws are made by and for the protection of the powerful, and the powers-that-be have the material means to enforce and maintain order that includes the legitimate use of violence and control over the sanctifying propaganda of religion right on down to fairy tales; indeed, to keep their feet upon the tight-rope rather than having it around their necks, the downtrodden may even turn against one another:

My brothers who live after us
Don’t harden your hearts against us too
If you have mercy on us
God may have mercy upon you
Five, six, you see us, hung out to view
(Villon: Ballad Of The Hanged)

The message, somewhat softened by accompanying music, in the following:

They’re selling post cards of the hanging,
they’re painting the passports brown
Here comes the blind commissioner,
they’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker,
the other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless,
they need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight,
from Desolation Row
(Dylan: Desolation Row)

Brown passports being the mark of military personnel.

Given the consequences for not doing so, walking the line is an option worth considering, says the poet:

Now here, now there, the changing breeze
Swings, as it wishes, ceaselessly
Beaks pricking us more than a cobbler’s awl
So don’t you join our fraternity
But pray that God absolves us all
(Villon: Ballad Of The Hanged)

There is the option, however, chosen by some of the powerless, to imitate the leaders of mainstream society. That is, gaining authority through the power of material wealth, backed by violence. Hard drugs, the means thereto. Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, to quote poet John Milton.

Sung by Dylan, the ballad of the hanged becomes the band of the hand, the brotherhood of the slums:

Down these streets the fools rule
There’s no freedom or self respect
A knife’s point or a trip to the joint
Is about all you can expect
They kill people who stand up for their rights
The system’s just too damned corrupt
It’s always the same, the name of the game
It’s who do you know higher up
It’s Hell time, man
(Dylan: Band Of The Hand)

Not a right-wing song, it’s a variation on the Dylanesque theme against violence:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your death bed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Till I’m sure that you’re dead
(Dylan: Masters Of War)

What’s good for the early Roman kings is good for the king-pins of war, and what’s good for them is good for the masters of the hard drug trade.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 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

Article amended 15 June 2017

Bob Dylan toured consistently in 1996 from April through to August, before finally taking a break.  And at this point, for the first time in over five years, he started writing and recording new songs again, and from this we have the first set of songs that became Time out of Mind.  

The re-writing of the songs, plus the addition of new compositions, continued through to 1997, but 1996 clearly marks not just the end of Dylan’s longest period without writing songs at all but the emergence of a new way of writing songs about moving on – and despair. 

According to Daniel Lanois who produced the album with Dylan (reported via Wiki), Dylan and he used to go the car park to discuss the recording in absence of the band. Lanois elaborated their discussion on the song “Standing In The Doorway”. “I said ‘listen, I love “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands“. Can we steal that feel for this song?’ And he’d say ‘you think that’d work?’ Then we’d sit on the fender of a truck, in this parking lot in Miami, and I’d often think, if people see this they won’t believe it.”

15 songs were recorded for the album of which ten were written in this year.

• Dirt Road Blues
• Can’t Wait
• Mississippi
• Highlands
• Dreamin of you
• Marchin to the City (Doing alright)
• Million Miles
• Not Dark Yet
• Red River Shore
• Standing in the doorway

Dirt Road Blues, the song that started Dylan’s return to songwriting after all these years is an improvised 12 bar country blues: a good place to start.  For  how incredibly appropriate that the whole process re-started not just with “Gon’ walk down that dirt road, ’til someone lets me ride” – a reflection on the endless “moving on” that had been part of Dylan’s writing and his life on the road, all these years.

And he tells quite clearly that this life is not stopping with “Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed”.

But let us not forget how this song ends: “Gon’ walk on down until I’m right beside the sun, I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone.”  And there are certainly moments in this collection of songs that tell us that is absolutely what he is doing.  In many ways he is writing again because he’s had enough.  Of everything.

If this were just another Dylan song I’d perhaps not even think of these lines in this context, but this is the first Dylan song in years and years.  And then it gets worse…

If I ever saw you coming I don’t know what I would do
I’d like to think I could control myself, but it isn’t true
That’s how it is when things disintegrate
And I don’t know how much longer I can wait

Then Dylan wrote Mississippi but as we know, was unhappy with the recorded versions so dropped it from the album, and after that he moved onto writing Highlands.  It is an extraordinary set of jumps both lyrically and musically – but the theme of the influence of the environment on how you feel is in both songs.

And true, Dylan is still writing about travelling and wishing to be elsewhere.  Mississippi, the Aberdeen waters…we are moving on and on… “I crossed that river just to be where you are” onto “I’m going there when I’m good enough to go”; Dylan still feels like a prisoner.

Dreaming of You didn’t make the album, perhaps because of its lines which are derivative from Standing in the Doorway, but it is a truly remarkable piece of music and really deserved to be given a place.  After all, couldn’t he have just re-written those lines if they popped up by mistake?

Marching to the City came next – and this is the one that I think was out of phase with the rest of the writing, and so in my view it was right to drop from the album.  But then Dylan was back on form with Million Miles.  He’s still writing about being lost with this 12 bar blues, but at least he’s trying to get back rather that just disintigrate.  The mood has changed.  Not totally but quite a bit.

And then, and then, and then… suddenly, having not written for so many years, Bob writes not just one masterpiece (Mississippi being the first of this period in my view) but another with Not Dark Yet.

What is extraordinary is how much Not Dark Yet stands out from the rest of Dylan’s work this year.   Yes, it is still utterly black (if you’ll forgive that word for a song with this title) but black in a different way.  A different kind of black – which I know sounds pretentious, but I find it hard to locate other words that express my feelings.

Something happened between “Million Miles” and “Not Dark Yet”.    I wish I could tell you what, but I wasn’t there so I can’t.   Maybe this is because I have always been so overwhelmed by Not Dark Yet.  For even after all these years of living with Not Dark Yet I still get tears in my eyes.  I can also still remember exactly, in every detail, my reaction on playing Not Dark Yet for the first time – where I was and what I was doing and who I was.   It is a song that from the moment I first heard it, took me over and wrapped itself around my life.  And yes I think too of my parents, no longer with us, and that too makes me cry.

It is a song that seems to have come from the general feeling of the songs Dylan wrote this year, but it also stands apart in every way.   Just listen not to the lyrics, but to how Dylan sings it.

There is a link between “Not Dark Yet” and “Red River Shore”, the final composition of the year, but it is the nature of that final song that led it to being cut from the whole album.  If you just take the line “we’re living in the shadows of a fading past” there is a strong connection with Not Dark Yet, but the style and approach is out of phase with what had gone before, and what was to happen in the following year as the writing of the album was concluded.  I think it was absolutely right to drop “Red River Shore” from the album.  Not because it is not a worthy song, but because it just doesn’t fit.

But could Mississippi have fitted into the album?   Looked at now from this far on, I once again don’t think so.  Of the versions we have the first version on Bootleg 8 is the one that still makes me stop what I am doing and listen again and again, but for this album, no, Mississippi doesn’t work.

The songs of the year were clearly Mississippi and Not Dark Yet but I think we also had a forgotten masterpiece with Dreamin of You.  It is most certainly a song worth re-visiting.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 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

Unlike many of the Romantic Transcendentalist poets, who seek to express through words an actual link they feel with Nature, Modernist poets often use language as a tool to make looser associations, comparisons, and analoies with natural events like the changing seasons to graphically represent  thoughts about mankind’s existence on the planet; the reader is given some leeway in the  interpretation of lyrics.

That life itself, and the day-to-day doings of humans, be as complex as the structure of language itself, is the overhanging theme. Though a Postmodernist might toss pieces of paper printed with words into the air in order to conjure up a striking new way of expressing a thought, the Modernist poet seeks original meaning through the mind’s processing of a fluid language, the rules of its structure not capable of being written down in solid stone.

A poet may even quote another’s line because he likes the way it sounds though he does not fully understand its meaning, but still he intuits that it fits his own poem because he generally understands, or at least feels,  what the original author is trying to express.

Those who try to establish hard and fast rules to follow, ie, elitist and academic poets, vagabond-poet Carl Sandburg challenges along with the objective language used by the empirical-based works of Darwin and that of the historical-documented writings of Marx.

Sandburg, a pseudo-Darwinian poet like Carlos Williams, melts the lot into a poetic pot, filled with earth, wind, air, and fire, creating a language that struggles to survive for the benefit of the contemporary common man by its giving meaning to the plight of the working class under capitalism; not in an impersonal language, but in a sensual one that conveys emotion  – but most of all, is open to interpretation:

The earth is a forgotten cinder
A heaving fireball cooled off
Thus the story of the rocks
Each river came later than the cooling
Next comes the freezing of the globe
A heaving iceball will travel alone
The rivers will be too cold to move
Each flowering valley will be a memory
The autobiography of a wild rose will run
My leaves pressed between the the times
of a fireball and an iceball
(Carl Sandburg: Timesweep)

Squeezed between the thoughts of geologists and evolutionists are writings of Burns that loves a wild rose, and Frost that undermines a wall and so needs mending.

The Sandburg poem reminds one of …..”

In the jagged flames green
To red, instant and alive. Green!
Those sure abutments gone …Gone!
Lost to mind
(William Carlos Williams: Burning The Christmas Greens)

Song lyrics of Bob Dylan reveal the influence of poet Sandburg, both in content and style:

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true like ice, like fire
People carry roses
And make promises by the hour
My love laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

Language creates it’s own world; takes on a life of its own; flows and beats along like music:

Relationship of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden
(Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

The gates to the Eden of the human mind opened by the keys of language to release prisoners from the chains of alienating capitalism or from any authoritarian society for that matter:

Can love be locked away and hid?
Yes and it gathers dust and mildew
And shrivels itself in shadows
Unless it learns the sun can help
Snow, rain, storms can help –
Birds in their one-room family nests
Shaken by winds cruel and crazy –
They can help:
Lock not away your love nor keep it hid
(Carl Sandburg: Honey And Salt)

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What is on the site

1: Over 400 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.

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What Bob Dylan’s Nobel acceptance speech tells us about Dylan’s songwriting.

By Tony Attwood

Until now I have felt that the speech Bob Dylan gave at the Music Cares festival (and which I have often quoted elsewhere) was the most important key to our understanding of Bob’s compositions.

Now with his speech to the Nobel Prize Committee, Bob has given us a second real insight into his work.  I believe these two speeches, both of which were prepared in advance, are much more important than the off the cuff answers he has given to journalists about his songs in the past.  These are our two main sources of information concerning what Dylan thinks about his work, and I think they do indeed inform us in a way that can easily be lost if we either just listen to the songs in isolation from each other, or worse start from a position of believing that Bob is thinking about this or that, or has a specific point of view to relate.

In the speech Bob lays down three fundamentals that we need to note.

First the simple statement: ‘If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important’.  Briefly he is saying, songs are methods of conveying emotions, not logical messages or polemics.  Emotional points can have many contexts – love, lost love, desire, anger, pain, jealousy, rage, humility etc, and so if you experience, as a result of hearing any of these songs, a strong emotional surge, the song has worked.

When Bob has engaged in polemics such as “With God on our Side” he is still using an emotional approach to express the horrors of the defence industry, he’s not quoting figures.  He is appealing to us to be moved to outrage by what the defence industry does, he’s not counting the number of people that have been killed as a result of their search for profit.

Second Bob says, “I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard” – which gives us some insight into his musical approach, but also further illuminates his choice of themes.  He said at the MusicCares speech “These songs of mine, they’re like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they’re on the fringes now.”  The same theme is present again.

Of course Bob doesn’t always do this – his endless fascination with the 12 bar blues could make us think that he is often far from this ideal in his writing.  But pieces such as “I once knew a man” and “Ballad for a friend” show just how far he can stretch the style, when he is on the top of his game.

Third Bob cites his sources.  In the early part of the lecture, as with the MusiCares lecture he talks about the music he listened to in his youth and how important that influence was, and went as far as saying, “Big Bill Broonzy had a song called “Key to the Highway.” I’ve got a key to the highway / I’m booked and I’m bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin’ because walking is most too slow. I sang that a lot. If you sing that a lot, you just might write, Highway 61.”

But now Bob has said, “Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school”.  The books are Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.”

Bob is saying that his reading has influenced him – and of course we know this in one real sense because of the number of times he quotes from books – be it the Bible, or a line from a novel.

Moby Dick is a fascinating book, a book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward….

This gives us something of a clue – it is the book that makes demands of its readers.  My immediate thought here was that so many of Bob’s greatest songs make demands of the audience.  And it is not the storyline that makes those demands.  Just think of two masterpieces from either end of Dylan’s career: “Visions of Johnanna” and “Tell Ol Bill”.  In neither case is there a plot, there is no storyline.  And my goodness, those songs make demands of the audience.

And then Dylan talks about the characters – which is incredibly interesting to anyone who has studied Bob’s characters in his tales.

The ship’s crew is made up of men of different races, and any one of them who sights the whale will be given the reward of a gold coin. A lot of Zodiac symbols, religious allegory, stereotypes. Ahab encounters other whaling vessels, presses the captains for details about Moby. Have they seen him? There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels, and he predicts Ahab’s doom. Says Moby is the incarnate of a Shaker god, and that any dealings with him will lead to disaster. He says that to Captain Ahab. Another ship’s captain – Captain Boomer – he lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.

This book tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience….

Everything is mixed in. All the myths: the Judeo Christian bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they’re all whalers. Greek mythology…

And then

We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here’s a face. I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.

All one has to do is go to any one of a hundred Dylan songs to see where this all fits in.  Try “The Drifters Escape” – one line of music in a song that pulls you every way imaginable.

Moving on to All Quiet on the Western Front Bob says,  This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You’re defending yourself from elimination.

It is not only the horror of the events but the horror that the events are endless.

Who knows how long this mess will go on? Warfare has no limits. You’re being annihilated, and that leg of yours is bleeding too much. You killed a man yesterday, and you spoke to his corpse. You told him after this is over, you’ll spend the rest of your life looking after his family.

This is real Dylan.  I can completely imagine a Dylan song in which he says

Or later “Death is everywhere. Nothing else is possible. Someone will kill you and use your dead body for target practice.”

At  the end of his description Dylan breaks off and says, “Charlie Poole from North Carolina had a song that connected to all this. It’s called “You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me,” and the lyrics go like this:

I saw a sign in a window walking up town one day.
Join the army, see the world is what it had to say.
You’ll see exciting places with a jolly crew,
You’ll meet interesting people, and learn to kill them too…

And so Bob is linking the literature he has loved with the blues songs he knows, and seeking to join them together to allow himself explore new worlds that other writers of songs have not yet ventured into.

Finally Bob moves onto the last book, The Odyssey and here he does relate the book even more firmly to songs.  And undoubtedly the linkage Bob sees here is with the eternal traveller, the wanderer who is so much part of his songs.  We are back to The Drifter’s Escape, as well as Restless Farewell, One too many mornings and all the other songs of moving on.

He angers people he shouldn’t. There’s troublemakers in his crew. Treachery. His men are turned into pigs and then are turned back into younger, more handsome men. He’s always trying to rescue somebody. He’s a travelin’ man, but he’s making a lot of stops.

Or shall we say, The Never Ending Tour.

He goes into the narrow straits with foaming whirlpools that swallow him. Meets six-headed monsters with sharp fangs. Thunderbolts strike at him. Overhanging branches that he makes a leap to reach for to save himself from a raging river. Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. He changes identities. He’s exhausted.

And then a perfect Dylan line, thrown into the mix, just for fun

his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will.

We think perhaps of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

And so finally he reveals all.

I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.

And to make it quite clear what he is saying Bob concludes with a couple of examples.

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, “The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests.” I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

And he concludes…

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory –  tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.

That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

And now I think we know for sure.

“Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”  

As it turns out, for Bob (and maybe for most of us) that is one hell of a lot better than “I just died, that’s all”.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 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.