Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan (review)

Forty years after his first record, Bob Dylan continues to interest folklorists who study the interaction of traditional and popular music, since his career began in the urban folk music revival during the early 1960s. Dylan's early contributions to the folk revival were the original songs he wrote, and his initial significance was more as a songwriter than as a performer. While praising him as a songwriter, Mitch Jayne, bass player in the bluegrass band the Dillards, commented that Dylan's singing sounded "very much like a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire" (Live Almost, Electra Records, EKS 7265). This joking remark nevertheless indicates how nonmusical Dylan's voice seemed to some listeners at that time.

By 1965, though, Dylan had performed his own national hit, "Like a Rolling Stone," a song memorable as much for his sarcastic singing performance as for the startling lyrics. In Performed Literature, Betsy Bowden discusses the importance of singing and musical accompaniment, as well as lyrics, in several of Dylan's best-known compositions from the 1960s and 1970s, including "Like a Rolling Stone." She begins with two earlier songs from Dylan's period as a social protest singer, "Oxford Town" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," composed for his 1963 Freewheelin' album.

Bowden does not regard Dylan as a poet, at least in the sense of a writer whose primary medium is the printed page. In "A Hard Rain," for example, she notes poetic devices such as alliteration and personification (e.g., "a dozen dead oceans" in the first stanza) that "look overdone on paper" (p. 17). When they are performed, though, the words prepare the listener for more effective images that occur later in the song. Bowden, also a Chaucer scholar, mentions oral devices familiar to ballad scholars, such as incremental repetition, which Dylan borrowed from "Lord Randal," (Child ballad no. 12) with its repeated questions, "O where ha' you been, Lord Randal, my son / And where ha' you been my handsome young man?" (p. 17).

She then contrasts Dylan's Freewheelin' performance of "A Hard Rain" with the British pop singer Bryan Ferry's 1973 recording, particularly with regard to their different singing styles. Her basic point is to demonstrate that the same lyrics can mean different things to a listener, based on such variations as the words a singer chooses to emphasize in performing the text.

Bowden's study is most assured when she explores various levels of meaning to be found in Dylan's lyrics. While discussing "Idiot Wind," from the 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, she convincingly explicates the multiple meanings and simultaneous references in many lines. A comment like "I can't help it if I'm lucky," which ends the first verse, is a joking reference to a romantic conquest and further hints at the singer-narrator's status as a hero manufactured by popular culture (p. 140). Bowden's affection and familiarity with Dylan's work also appear in the occasional note of humor in an otherwise straightforward analysis of a song.

Bowden's consideration of Dylan's songs ends with recordings he made in 1976. Performed Literature was first published in 1982, and the current edition is the same, except for a brief preface and two updated appendices. Since the time she wrote her book, there have been more technical and music-centered studies of rock songs. Dylan's sixtieth birthday in 2001 was marked in print by a number of biographies and retrospectives, as well as this reissue of Bowden's book. Her discussion of selected songs from the 1960s and 1970s still contains valid insights. Its limitations are due in part to Dylan's active career over the intervening years, as well as more recent and thorough studies of the music of popular performers. Since I...