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That Bob Dylan has many voices will be an idea familiar to all readers who have followed his musical career. The wise country singer of the early recordings, the sneering hipster of the first electric phase, the weirdly rounded country voice after the “motorcycle accident,” the gruff, dejected old man of recent years—these voices are inseparable from the many style shifts in Dylan’s singing persona over the years. Yet there is another aspect of Dylan’s many voices—the moment-to-moment changes in timbre, inflection, and accent that comprise the basis of his singing style. While one aspect of this essay will be to characterize Dylan’s multiple and shifting identities, his cast of musical personae, our principal concern, focusing primarily on The Freewheelin ’ Bob Dylan (1963), will be the frequent changes in his voice within individual songs, the often subtle and mercurial inflections that embody his creative thought process. Dylan’s changing voice serves multiple expressive functions, enacts shifts in poetic imagery, and highlights sonic associations among words. Greenwich Village Ventriloquism, ca. 1963 Understood within the context of the aesthetic and cultural divides of the folk revival, Dylan’s use of his voice would appear to be a dialectical response to the Greenwich Village scene that was rooted in the realities of post–World War II racial formation and mass culture in the United States and seems to have played a fundamental role in facilitating Dylan’s own performances and songwriting. When Dylan encountered the Greenwich Village folk revival in full swing in the early 1960s, the scene was divided into two streams: the college-campus and mediafriendly “clean” tendency, in which the presumed universality of the folk song was reflected in an apparently neutral voice bespeaking a young, white, middle-class sensibility, and the ethnic particularist perspective, in which musicians attempted to re-create the sound of traditional music rather than abstracting it into some “purer” style.1 If Peter, Paul and Mary were exemplars of the first group, Dylan’s own mentors and influences, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, might be 225 18. “Somewhere down in the United States”: The Art of Bob Dylan’s Ventriloquism Michael Cherlin and Sumanth Gopinath included in the second. Perhaps the distinguishing musical feature of these two tendencies was the use of the singing voice, in which clear tone and clear, regionally neutral speech were characteristic of the “clean” folk revival style, whereas an imitation of the gruff voices and unusual accents in singing styles of rural-vernacular music were the hallmark of ethnic particularism in the folk revival. In Dylan’s own self-conception, he would seem to have broken through this opposition, which resulted in a hardening of performance styles into atomized musical practices that prevented genre crossing and mixing. In his words, “Folk music was a strict and rigid establishment. If you sang Southern Mountain Blues, you didn’t sing Southern Mountain Ballads and you didn’t sing City Blues. If you sang Texas cowboy songs, you didn’t play English ballads. It was really pathetic.”2 It could be argued that Dylan adopted the practice of genre crossing in a self-conscious manner , which originated in tentative and timid imitations of his favorite musicians, genres, and accents, like those of Jimmy Rogers, rockabilly singers, Woody Guthrie, the Everly Brothers, Scots-Irish ballads, and blues singers like Robert Johnson and Sleepy John Estes. But genre crossing might also find its determination in an imitation of the songster tradition, in which rural musicians developed a capacity for multi-hour performances and, in the process of developing repertoire, drew on a wide range of source genres.3 And as a child of the post–World War II period and its new mass media and culture, Dylan’s generic and vocal shifts evoke the switching of channels—on the radio and even the television—that facilitated an immediate access to a new sound or sensibility. Such switching is not only associated with a postwar, postmodern fragmentation of consciousness and identity but also recalls specific mass cultural forms frequently mediated through radio and television, particularly prewar comedy.The latter draws on ethnic comedy and theater traditions emerging from the second major wave of migration to the United States, from southern and eastern Europe around the turn of the century. As a theatrical form, comedy , which often involves vocal imitation (of stereotyped ethnic accents, particular individuals, etc.), plays into the distinction between acting and singing, in which...

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