Listening to "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" While Reading The Confidence-Man

Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has frequently evoked "American Renaissance" writers in his work, including Herman Melville, to whom he paid tribute in his Nobel Prize lecture. Against the backdrop of general affinities between Dylan's shape-shifting persona and Melville's Confidence Man, this essay explores "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," from the John Wesley Harding album, as a variation on the themes and techniques of Melville's novel. For instance, both deploy "sketchy" characters, in the sense of being untrustworthy and as purposefully only sketched out, not fully developed. Both use these characters as quasi-allegorical figures to satirize social relationships based on "trust" while exploring larger issues of faith. And both foreground their avoidance of any transcendent wisdom from these strange, sketchy encounters and parable-like episodes: as one character in Dylan's song aptly proclaims, "Nothing is revealed." The comparison yields new ways of appreciating both Dylan and Melville, placing the former more firmly within the American literary tradition and approaching the latter as the composer of a literary concept album.