Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  About a year later I went to a library in Rome and I found a book about transfiguration, because it’s nothing you really hear about every day, and it’s in the mystical realm, and I found out only enough to know that, uh, OK, I’m not an authority on it, but it kind of sets you straight on what sets you apart.

  The focus of the interview at one point turns from Tempest to the quality and staying power of his last five albums. Everything since Time Out of Mind, notes Gilmore, “is a body of work that can stand on its own.” Dylan uses this as an opportunity to talk about his music in a way that is at the heart of what this book is about:

  The thing about it is that there is the old and the new, and you have to connect with them both. The old goes out and the new comes in, but there is no sharp borderline. The old is still happening while the new enters the scene, sometimes unnoticed. The new is overlapping at the same time the old is weakening its hold. It goes on and on like that. Forever through the centuries.

  There are different ways of interpreting this, and Dylan goes on to talk about the shifts in his work from the 1950s to the 1960s, but the words “forever through the centuries” are pretty explicit, and in sync with what is happening with his songs. Later in the interview he will talk in the same way about his performance practices: “[i]t’s always been this way for everybody who’s ever done it, going back to those ancient days.”

  In 2017, when Dylan was about to release his thirty-eighth studio album Triplicate, he did another of the carefully scheduled interviews that occur on such occasions, with Bill Flanagan, who at one point says: “No one can hear ‘As Time Goes By’ and not think of Casablanca. What are some movies that have inspired your own songs?” Like the songs he sings on these albums, Dylan’s response takes us back to his teenage years in Hibbing and the world of Roman centurions, gladiators, and biblical epics: “The Robe, King of Kings, Samson and Delilah.” He could have seen The Robe at the State Theater in Hibbing in January 1954. The end of the interview moves from the Roman to the Greek world, as Flanagan asks whether the title Triplicate brings to mind Frank Sinatra’s trilogy of 1980, Past Present Future. “Yeah, in some ways, the idea of it,” Dylan replies, adding, “I was thinking in triads anyway, like Aeschylus, The Oresteia, the three linked Greeks plays. I envisioned something like that.” A follow-up would have been interesting, but the interview instead moved on. We will return to triads.

  BOB DYLAN, ROMAN HISTORY TEACHER

  Following on from the readings in Ray Gooch’s library, in a 2009 interview with historian Douglas Brinkley, Dylan is asked about the importance of Christian scripture in his life. He redirects the discussion to more works from the Greek and Roman canon:

  [T]hose other first books I read were really biblical stuff. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Those were the books that I remembered reading and finding religion in. Later on, I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus, and Marcus Aurelius . . . I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can’t legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things. Wisdom, Justice, Moderation and Courage. All of these are the elements that would make up the depth of a person’s morality. And then that would dictate the types of behavior patterns you’d use to respond in any given situation. I don’t look at morality as a religious thing.

  I suspect Dylan picked Brinkley as an interviewer—his only interview with a full-time academic—because it was important that his words on this topic, which are fully coherent and have the ring of truth and sincerity, not be garbled or misread.

  In 2015, Dylan did a very smart and musically engaged interview with the editor in chief of AARP The Magazine, Robert Love. The interview itself appeared in the March/April issue. To find the theme that has been running through the other recent interviews, to get back to Rome, you have to do some digging and locate the version of the interview on AARP’s website, along with its accompanying photo slide show. In the last of a gallery of twelve slides revealing themes from the interview and its primary subject is a photo with the following caption:

  Bob Dylan: His True Calling

  “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a schoolteacher—probably teach Roman history or theology.”

  That sounds about right. As for the slide itself, all it shows is an open book, resting on a stack of four other books. Three of the four dog-eared volumes in the stack look old, going back to the nineteenth or early twentieth century, the sort of books a teacher of Roman history or theology would use, also the sort of books you might have found in the library of Ray Gooch, old editions of Cicero, Tacitus, and Plutarch. The website is that of the AARP, but the hand of Bob Dylan is at work here.

  5

  THE EARLY THEFTS: “MINE’VE BEEN LIKE VERLAINE’S AND RIMBAUD’S”

  SOME STUFF I’VE WRITTEN, SOME STUFF I’VE DISCOVERED,

  SOME STUFF I STOLE.

  —DYLAN TO JOHN HAMMOND

  Allusion, reference, plagiarism—these are all names for the phenomenon known as “intertextuality,” a term that is most convenient in its neutrality for describing the process by which poets, songwriters, painters, composers, or artists of any genre produce new meaning through the creative reuse of existing texts, images, or sound. In its truest sense, intertextuality is as far as you can get from plagiarism, which is a practice meant to escape notice. Plagiarism is about passing off as your own what belongs to others. In contrast, the most powerful and evocative instances of intertextuality enrich a work precisely because, when the reader or listener notices the layered text and recognizes what the artist is reusing, that recognition activates the context of the stolen object, thereby deepening meaning in the new text.

  This is a very old phenomenon, as Dylan came to realize. In Homer’s Odyssey, the Greek hero goes down to the Underworld to consult the ghost of the seer Tiresias about how he is to get back home to Ithaca. There Odysseus also meets the ghost of his mother. He talks with her, then tries to embrace her:

  Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her,

  Three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away

  Like a shadow, dissolving like a dream.

  —Odyssey 11.235–37, tr. Fagles

  Seven hundred years later, in the Aeneid, published in 19 BC, the Roman poet Virgil sends his hero Aeneas down to the underworld, where he meets the shade of his father, at which point he tries and fails to carry out a similar embrace, with a similar result:

  Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck,

  Three times he embraced—nothing, the phantom

  Sifting through his fingers,

  Light as wind, quick as a dream in flight

  —Virgil, Aeneid 6.808–11, tr. Fagles

  Virgil, accused of plagiarizing Homer in his own day, has in a sense done so, though from one language to another, and he means us to recognize the intertextuality, to see the loss of Greek Odysseus in the loss of Roman Aeneas, two heroes grieving for their parents, a universal scene of shared humanity. Additionally, Virgil had already put the lines to work at the end of his Aeneid 2, where he used them to describe Aeneas’s attempt to embrace the ghost of his wife Creusa, lost in the flames of Troy. Virgil wants the reader to notice his borrowings, and to be enriched by those added intertexts: the loss of a mother, a father, a wife, each is a new version of the others, expressed in the same lines to convey the same grief. This is how literature works, and it is how Dylan’s song works when it takes on the songs and texts that are in his tradition.

  Much has been made of Dylan’s “borrowings,” from early on, and how you look on them in part depends on how you think literature and art in general should work, particularly on whether you insist on notions of “originality,” as if anything rooted in folk, blues, and poetry at large is ever wholly original. Dylan is in a tradition that is old and his connecting to those traditions is a big
part of what his art is about.

  Let’s look at a couple of early cases, one with Dylan stealing, the other with Dylan being stolen from, and look at the difference. In 1963, for the song “Masters of War,” Dylan took the striking melody of folksinger Jean Ritchie’s “Nottamun Town,” a song that Ritchie herself considered one of her “family songs,” a proprietary artifact. It had been collected by the English folk song collector and folk dance promoter Cecil Sharp in 1917. His primary source? Jean Ritchie’s great-aunt Una. Apparently brought to America by her great-great-grandfather Crockett, the song was duly recorded by Jean on her self-titled 1960 album. Ritchie was none too pleased when Dylan borrowed the melody for his song, a song whose lyrics bore no resemblance to the words of the song that Ritchie saw as her property. The melody had been around for decades in Appalachia, and for centuries back in the English Midlands. “Nottamun” is most likely a dialect version of “Nottingham,” and the song perhaps goes back to the seventeenth century and the time of the English civil wars. Folk song does not belong to anyone, and even though Ritchie claimed Dylan settled the case out of court, Dylan did not acknowledge the justice of her case. By any standard, it is a good thing that Dylan heard that tune, which was filtered through his own genius and gave us the song “Masters of War.”

  Both songs will ultimately survive and stand the test of time. “Nottamun Town,” an ancient and eerie song that goes back to the Middle Ages, is beautiful and archaic sounding, as sung not just by Ritchie, but also for instance by the English folk group Fairport Convention. But “Masters of War” is a song that has been around for the past fifty-five years and still feels timely and immediate in its relevance, and will feel so for as long as older men profit from the wars in which young men die. Dylan saw that the melody he stole was right for this song, so he stole it. And can the melody of a folk song like “Nottamun Town” really belong to anyone? Yet modern copyright laws do exist to avoid disputes like this one.

  The tables would turn in 1995, when, according to the cable television network VH1, Dylan was said to have settled out of court with Darius Rucker of Hootie & the Blowfish over the use of lyrics from “Tangled Up in Blue” in Darius’s song “Only Wanna Be with You”:

  Put on a little Dylan sitting on a fence

  I say that line is great, you ask me what I meant by

  Said, I shot a man named Gray, took his wife to Italy

  She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me

  I can’t help it if I’m lucky

  I only wanna be with you

  Ain’t Bobby so cool

  I only wanna be with you

  Yeah I’m tangled up and blue

  I only wanna be with you

  Artistically, there is a world of difference between this instance of direct quotation, the italicized words, from “Tangled Up in Blue,” and Dylan’s borrowing in “Masters of War.” In Rucker’s song, Dylan’s words have no new life of their own, and no artistic function other than as direct, unauthorized quotation in a context that was purely commercial in nature.

  Dylan has been stealing since the very beginning. On May 1, 1960, three weeks before his nineteenth birthday, at the time a freshman at the University of Minnesota, Dylan performed twenty-seven songs in the home of Karen Wallace, in St. Paul. This was at the start of his folksinging phase, and none of these songs was a Dylan original; they were just folk songs. Dylan had recently read Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory and he was soaking up Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, and other folksingers. He had stopped going to class, in favor of spending time listening, talking, performing at the Ten O’Clock Scholar, a coffeehouse in bohemian Dinkytown, a few blocks from the university. The songs Dylan sang for Wallace were mostly traditional pieces—cowboy songs, traveling songs, gambling songs, girls-left-behind songs, prison songs, gospel, and blues. Some were Guthrie originals, notably “This Land Is Your Land” and “Pastures of Plenty,” and others had been recorded by Guthrie or other folksingers the young Dylan was assimilating. There is nothing remarkable about his singing of those songs. He was “covering” them as singers have always done with traditional material. But as his art developed, that would all change. They would provide the elements of his original songwriting, their traces visible but transformed in the process of his own songwriting.

  One of those twenty-seven songs, “Columbus Stockade,” goes back to the 1930s and beyond. Dylan had surely heard the Hank Williams or the Guthrie version, which eventually came out on Guthrie’s 1964 album, The Early Years. In the song, the narrator is in jail in Columbus, Georgia, and he seems to have been let down, betrayed by friends and by a lover who’s gone off with another man:

  Way down in Columbus Stockade

  Oh to be back in Tennessee

  Way down in Columbus Stockade

  Where my friends went back on me

  You can go and leave me if you want to

  Never let me cross your mind

  In your heart you love another

  Leave me darling, I don’t mind

  Way down in Columbus Stockade

  Left me there to lose my mind

  Thinking about my blue-eyed honey

  Purtiest girl that I left behind

  You can go and leave me if you want to

  Never let me cross your mind

  In your heart you love another

  Leave me darling, I don’t mind

  The song stayed in Dylan’s repertoire after this first performance in 1960, and he would play it when he arrived in New York the next year. As he explains in Chronicles: Volume One (18):

  Folk songs were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could easily connect the pieces. It meant nothing for me to rattle off things like “Columbus Stockade,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Brother in Korea,” and “If I Lose, Let Me Lose” all back-to-back like it was one long song.

  Dylan’s first live-in (in her apartment) girlfriend in New York was a dancer from California named Avril. In the spring of 1961, we know that he left her alone in New York to head back home to Minnesota for a month. She had apparently told him that she too would be making a trip home to California while he was gone, but he seems to have been surprised and upset when he returned to find her gone, and he wrote her a song in response. “California Brown-Eyed Baby” was one of his earliest original songs, and he sang it to her over the phone, an emotional event as recalled by Eve MacKenzie, in whose Greenwich Village apartment Dylan was living off and on in 1961. Dylan’s song is written to the tune of “Columbus Stockade”:

  The rain is fallin’ at my window

  My thoughts are sad forever more

  I’m thinkin’ about my brown-eyed darlin’

  The only one that I adore

  She’s my California brown-eyed baby

  The only one I think about today

  She’s my California brown-eyed baby

  Livin’ down San Francisco way

  Sadly I look out of my window

  Where I can hear the raindrops fall

  My heart is many thousand miles away

  Where I can hear my true love call

  Now boys don’t you start to ramble

  Stay right there in your home town

  Find you a gal that really loves you

  Stay right there and settle down.

  This song is more than a simple ploy to get his girl back. It is an early example of the art of his songwriting, traditional but also original. Dylan’s narrator is “thinkin’ about my brown-eyed darlin’ ” as the jailed narrator in Columbus Stockade is “thinking about my blue-eyed honey.” Those words and their rhythm, along with the tune, are the main markers of the theft and the sign of intertextuality, the invitation to examine the intertext, in this case “Columbus Stockade,” and see if any of its lyrics are activated by the new version or elsewhere in Dylan’s early songbook.

  “Columbus Stockade”
finds much of its power and interest in the bitterness of its repeated refrain: “In your heart you love another / Leave me darling, I don’t mind.” The absence of any such bitterness from “California Brown-Eyed Baby” suggests a more casual attitude to Avril, whose main appeal may have had to do with her apartment, a welcome upgrade from the couches and spare rooms he found to lay his weary head in New York City in 1961. But things would change when he met Suze Rotolo, Muse and real girlfriend, later in the year. The song that he wrote the next year when she left him, to study in Italy, was one of the greatest he ever wrote, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” It had a different tune, but the last line from “Columbus Stockade,” held back from the song to Avril—“Leave me darling, I don’t mind”—turns up first in the title of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”: in each we find an order followed by a reason, comma in between, three words on either side of it. If Dylan alludes to and therefore invokes the context of the folk song with his title, he actually comes out and quotes words and sentiment that he had not bothered about with Avril’s song: “You could have done better but I don’t mind.”

  “Columbus Stockade”

  “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”

  You can go and leave me if you want to

  Never let me cross your mind

  In your heart you love another

  Leave me darling, I don’t mind

  I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind

  You could have done better but I don’t mind

  You just kind wasted my precious time

  But don’t think twice, it’s all right

  In “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” Dylan shows his genius and mastery of songwriting, but he also shows that what is understood by intertextuality is at the heart of it. The words and the thought those words express come from a continuum of texts and songs, connected by melody, lyrics, or even word arrangement of song title.

  The same may be said of the intertexts in “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” a song that Dylan wrote in 1963, before his twenty-second birthday, about nostalgia and yearning for the friends of one’s youth, long scattered to the winds: