Living, Breathing Songs: Singing Along with Bob Dylan

Resonances and retentions of a living oral tradition are activated each night when Bob Dylan performs in concert and are continually renewed and referenced in his vocalizing and in the breath of the audiences who sing with him. In some respects, Bob Dylan might not seem to be the most obvious artist to sing along with—after all, he is not usually perceived as someone who goes out on stage to entertain and engage in dialogue with a crowd. Yet in other respects he is heir to the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that refracts from contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodic observations of medieval troubadours, and the sacred rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. There are many characteristics common to the rich sonic tradition that I am attempting to signal with these brief words; the most notable of these is the way melody in popular song works at the intersection of speech and singing, the elevated and the mundane. Here song begins where talk becomes music, where the ordinary becomes special.

Despite the fact that Dylan's songs have very singable and memorable melodies, most of the writing about Dylan's art has been concerned solely with the words. In many studies, Dylan's lyrics are often interpreted as providing insight into his life. Yet we only have to look at a range of musical biographies to know how little the life of the artist seems to tell us about the art. In this regard, many accounts of Dylan's life are simultaneously perplexing and reassuring by revealing the ordinariness of his early years as well as how large periods of his life have consisted of normal, everyday routine. After all, many people have experienced traumatic marital breakups. However, very few of them have produced anything remotely like Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.

Many writers manage to discuss Dylan's songs with barely a mention of his vocal gestures, let alone the more traditional concerns of ethnomusicology and musicology such as melody, rhythm, chords, texture, timbre, and so on. The assumption in many of the writings on Dylan is that the words are more important than the music. This is apparent in the writings of two of the most prominent and frequently cited of professional Dylanologists, Oxford Professor of poetry Christopher Ricks (2003) and independent Dylan scholar Michael Gray (2000). There are, of course, many others who have devoted their energies to studying Dylan's lyrics on the page—as I write, the most recent addition to this literature is Larry Smith's Writing Dylan (2005). Having trawled through numerous books on Dylan, it has been interesting to register just how many authors do acknowledge that the songs are more than words, but then quickly and conveniently ignore this fact in order to discuss the songs purely in terms of the lyrics set out on the page.

I will examine one example as an indication of this methodological oversight and the possible reasoning behind it. Michael Gilmour (2004) sets out to understand the significance of biblical references in Dylan's art. In explaining his approach he makes reference to the following comment made by Dylan: "Some people, when it comes to me, extrapolate only the lyrics from the music. But . . . the music has just as far-reaching effect" (cited in Gilmour 2004:7). Dylan remarks on how people neglect the performance and the "feel" of the music. Gilmour then decides to ignore such views, patronizingly remarking, "But with all due respect to the songwriter . . . we will focus on the written word in this book" (7). Gilmour then explains why he prefers to do this, using a type of reasoning that is typical of writers who dissect Dylan's lyrics (idem):

One advantage of the written format is that the reader has the opportunity to slow down, reflect, and cross-reference in a way that the recorded songs do not permit, much less the live performance of a song in concert. Oddly enough, we might even have an advantage over the songwriter...