You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs.
Some songs were intimate, some you had to shout to be heard.īy listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You had to have a wide repertoire, and you had to know what to play and when. I was playing for small crowds, sometimes no more than four or five people in a room or on a street corner. I had a natural feeling for the ancient ballads and country blues, but everything else I had to learn from scratch. All you had to do was be well-versed and be able to play the melody. With radio songs, a performer might get a hit with a roll of the dice or a fall of the cards, but that didn't matter in the folk world.
They were more vibrant and truthful to life. They were different than the radio songs that I'd been listening to all along. Eventually, I did leave, and I did learn to play those songs. I wanted to learn this music and meet the people who played it. I hadn't left home yet, but I couldn't wait to. After some ramblings about country blues, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Dylan utters the following, At this show, where young Robert Zimmerman, like a Deadhead, traveled a great distance, Buddy Holly looked him in the eye! A few days later, Holly’s plane went down, and Dylan, perhaps serendipitously was handed a record by the folksinger Leadbelly. His reverence for Holly was as much for his look as for his sound Dylan repeatedly refers to him as an archetype. He tells a story about how it all started with him travelling a hundred miles to see Buddy Holly. It follows an opening section in which Dylan puzzles over his work being “literature” and hopes what he is to say is useful. Dylan’s Nobel lecture contains a section, that to my mind, proverbially, “says it all.” Folk logicīut Dylan threw in a much more honest self-portrait as a joker/thief that was virtually ignored by those now making age or junkie jokes about Dylan (as if artifice was not part of who he was from the beginning). Like a first year student, he dazzled the bourgeoisie with brilliance and baffled them with bullshit. And not just from an esoteric source that some such Hardy Boys would find in the darkness of night. And like with probably every great work that he has ever produced – from his renaming a Celtic folk song “Girl from the North Country” and then even stealing from himself by using the same music for “Boots of Spanish Leather,” through to his lack of denial that he cribbed from Civil War poets on his 2001 album “Love and Theft” – he stole, he thieved, he did it in a way that he would obviously get caught. So Dylan, just before the six month cut-off date sent them a speech that is absolutely brilliant in every way imaginable. I have some differences with this analysis, as we will see, and one reason is that it fails to allow us to contextualize Dylan’s continued epic punking of the Nobel Prize committee by submitting a speech that contained obvious plagiarism – the kind that those of us who have taught university can find in less than five minutes with Google.īut is it plagiarism when Dylan does it? When an artist wins an award that he doesn’t really want – but could use that sweet money that comes with it – he fulfills his barest responsibilities in the best ways he can. This largely follows Mike Marqusee’s work, which situates Dylan as sympathetic, but someone who should ultimately be seen as a “renegade” of sorts, compared with, say, Phil Ochs (who loved Dylan and always understood the politics of his “post-political” mid-sixties art). As Bill Crane put it last fall, “The middlebrow literary establishment in this country, as may have been predicted, has completely failed to understand the significance any of this.”Ĭrane makes an exquisite formal and substantive argument in defense of Bob Dylan as a poet, though takes a position typical of the Left regarding Dylan’s “turns” after his classic activist period. First, they had to put up with the very fact that a “rock singer” (or however we label him) is winning a prize that is supposed to be for literature. The intelligentsia has been re-traumatized by that dastardly Dylan. Hey, hey” – “All Along the Watchtower,” 1968 “There must be some kind of way outta here
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