Bob Dylan and The Emperor Jones Revisited
Rent from DeepDyve- Bob Dylan and The Emperor Jones Revisited
Bob Dylan's "Sweetheart Like You" (1983) includes the following lines: "Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king."1 Michael Gray identifies prior iterations of this "commonplace," including one from The Emperor Jones: "For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you Emperor."2
Gray perhaps stopped short. Another passage from the song better encapsulates O'Neill's theme: "Well, the pressure's down, the boss ain't here/ He gone North for awhile/They say that vanity got the best of him/But he sure left here in style." These lines recall O'Neill's soi-disant "boss," redolent of vanity (e.g., "Think these ign'rent bush niggers dat ain't got brains enuff to know their own names even can catch Brutus Jones?") and stylishness (e.g., "He reaches in under the throne and pulls out an expensive Panama hat with a bright multi-colored band and sets it jauntily on his head"). In The Emperor Jones, vanity and style, figured sartorially, follow identical downward trajectories. But the nearly naked Jones "leaves" with his panache intact. "Gawd blimey," declares Smithers in his curtain-speech, "but yer died in the 'eighth o' style."3
A rewrite of the lyric from Dylan's website reframes the connection: "He gone North, he ain't around/. . . But he sure left here after sundown."4 Jones hurries to reach the forest while light remains; at least by the time he arrives there, darkness has descended, much to his disadvantage.
Dylan's only overt statement about O'Neill concerns a circa 1988 performance of Long Day's Journey Into Night. "The play was hard to bear, family life at its worst, self-centered morphine addicts, I was glad when it [End Page 273] was over," he writes, "I felt sorry for these people, but none of them touched me."5 We do know, however, that Dylan sometimes responded more generously to modern drama.6 And on at least one occasion he may have incorporated a line from a modern play into a song: the title of his early, unrecorded "Love Is Just a Four Letter Word" perhaps derives from Tennessee Williams—not, as Gray suggests (550), from the 1968 screenplay of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which Williams did not write), but from "Block Twelve" of Camino Real (1953). The Emperor Jones, like Camino Real, seems more Dylan's "style" than Long Day's Journey into Night (and Cat).7
Recent work emphasizes the allusiveness of Dylan's lyrics, and the publication of his Chronicles showed Dylan to be a broad reader. It would not be remarkable if he had been aware of The Emperor Jones, nor would it be odd if he had responded positively to this first manifestation of O'Neill's "Dylanesque" tendency to jettison his own recent and successful artistic formulae.
Alexander Pettit is professor of English at the University of North Texas. His critical edition of Samuel Richardson's Early Works was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
James Baird, recently retired, taught a course on the lyrics of Bob Dylan at the University of North Texas for over thirty years and has published on Dylan and other popular artists. His main squeeze in literary studies is Robinson Jeffers.
Jacqueline Vanhoutte is associate professor of English at the University of North Texas. Her book, Strange Communion: Motherland and Masculinity in Tudor Plays, Pamphlets, and Politics, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2003.
Notes
1. Bob Dylan, "Sweetheart Like You," Infidels, CD, Columbia CK 92392, © 1983, Special Rider Music.
2. Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones, in Complete Plays 1913-1920 (New York: Library of America, 1988), 1035; Michael Gray, Song & Dance Man III (New York: Continuum, 2002), 468.
3. O'Neill, Emperor Jones, 1034, 1040, 1042, 1061. See also Smithers in act 1: "You'll bump yourself orf in style, won't yer?" (1041).
4. Bob Dylan, "Sweetheart Like You...
