I Find the Religiosity and Philosophy in the Music
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HRC Poetry on the Plaza Lyrics March 1, 2006 12 Noon p. 1 Bob Dylan Our Homer REVISED FINALVERSION Tom Palaima [email protected] —“I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. … I don‘t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I‘ve learned more from the songs than I‘ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe in the songs" (BD Newsweek, Oct 6, 1997). — “If you take whatever there is to the song away—the beat, the melody—I could still recite it.” BD 1965 —“It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They punctuate it.” BD 1977 The thesis of this presentation is that (1) more than any other American popular artist during the last half century, Bob Dylan has the qualities of an oral poet; and (2) Dylan’s songs serve the same functions of social enculturation and witness to key realities of life that were the hallmark of ancient Greek oral poetry like Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Works and Days. Hesiod’s work falls into the parainetic (advice) tradition of ‘oral poetics’—and Homer’s contains strains of it, too. Hesiod’s Works and Days has been compared to the work of Old Testament prophets. Dylan, although often accused of having given up on socially oriented ‘protest music’ by 1965, i.e., very early in his career, falls into this category. For a prophetes to be timeless or universal, his words have to transcend specific historical events. As Christopher Ricks has pointed out, Dylan’s best ‘protest’ songs, e.g., “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and even “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” achieve this. The prophetes is an ‘agent of speaking forth’ poetic advice that causes listeners to think about their lives and how they are being lived. There is a strong concern for life’s realities in Dylan’s lyrics right up to the latest official verses in the songs from his Love and Theft album. Social criticism permeates such songs as “Serve Somebody,” “Foot of Pride,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Clean Cut Kid,” “I and I,” “Senor,” “Ring Them Bells,” “TV Talking Song,” “Not Dark Yet,” and, as we shall see and hear here today, “High Water (for Charley Patton).” Many other songs could be added to this list. Even more than this, however, Dylan reveals his oral poetic nature in his reverence for folk, blues, bluegrass, gospel, spirituals, rock and roll, Irish and Scottish ballads, country and western and other forms of popular music. He is a devotee of the real music of the people, the music that expresses their real concerns. In his staggering number of live concerts on his Never Ending Tour, he has played at least as many traditional folk, blues and popular songs as the hundreds he himself has written (over 460 at last official count), often infusing them with his own dramatic feelings of honesty and truth and what is real. Dylan’s own musical compositions are deeply indebted to and saturated with elements of traditional song. Dylan, like any good songster (compare Texas’s own Mance Lipscomb) respects the genuine need we have to hear simple truths sung, our joys and sorrows expressed, and our troubles, frustrations and tragedies shared with others. The lyrics and music of Bob Dylan and his sources within different traditions speak for themselves. Folk songs are the way I explored the universe. They were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could connect the pieces.... Most of the other performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song, but...with me, it was putting the song across. B. Dylan, Chronicles. Volume One (New York 2004) 18 Tom and I are gonna do a song for you right now. We used to hear these songs all the time when we were growing up. You can't hear them anymore. Very seldom you hear real songs anymore. Well, we were lucky to grow up, when you could hear them all the time. All you had to do was switch on the radio and you could hear them. BD February 24, 1986 during a concert tour with Tom Petty and introducing a pop song “I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know” wherein the narrator tells the new lover of his old girl friend what he is in for. http://www.bjorner.com/DSN07660%20-%201986%20Down%20Under%20Tour.htm#DSN07810 p. 2 “I Was Young When I Left Home” No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (The Bootleg Series Vol. 7) This Dylan song is based on the old folk song “900 Miles”. The pathos in his voice belies the fact that he was a mere 20 years old when this was composed and recorded (December 12, 1961). The realization of the song’s nostalgia, in the literal Greek meaning of an intense and painful (algos cf. English analgesic) longing for returning home (nostos), comes from Dylan’s ability to, as he says, ‘put across the song’. It is a quality shared by few popular singers in the last sixty years. Frank Sinatra was another singer who had this quality, despite having no gift for writing songs. It is no accident that Sinatra invited Dylan to sing at his 80th birthday concert—he sang his own “Restless Farewell”. Dylan is also able to place himself inside the narrator and capture for us his longing and his sense of loss. Dylan has what I would call a profound sense of emotional visualization and expression. The narrator here finds himself with mother dead, baby sister gone down a ruinous path in life, daddy in great need, but himself impoverished and embarrassed by his own circumstances and lack of resources to do anything to help. Dylan evokes the narrator’s own flashes of childhood memories—natural when he hears the news from home— of how his mother used to care for him when he was a boy playing along the railroad tracks. This heightens the pathos, as does his declaration of wanting a shelter from the wind, a safe haven, a home, none of which he has. His aching loss is worsened by the fact that he never wrote home since he left. Again listen and feel: Dylan is 20 years old and already has an uncanny imaginative empathy, derived from being steeped in popular music, for people in life’s direst circumstances. “900 Miles” TRADITIONAL FOLK SONG (royalty free) http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-songs-with-chords/900%20Miles.htm I'm a walking down the track, I've got tears in my eyes, I'm tryin' to read a letter from my home; If that train runs me right, I'll be home Saturday night, Cause I'm nine hundred miles from my home. And I hate to hear that lonesome whistle blow, That long lonesome train whistlin' down. Well this train I ride on, Is a hundred coaches long, You can hear her whistle blow a hundred miles; And if this train runs me right, I'll see my woman Saturday night, 'Cause I'm nine hundred miles from my home. And I hate to hear that lonesome whistle blow, That long lonesome train whistling down. I will pawn you my wagon, I will pawn you my team, I will pawn you my watch and my chain; And if tins train runs me right, I'll be home Saturday night, 'Cause I'm nine hundred miles from my home. And I hate to hear that lonesome whistle blow, That long lonesome train whistling down. p. 3 1. “I Was Young When I Left Home” Dylan LYRICS un-copyrighted 12/12/1961 I sorta made it up on a train. Huh, oh I'm here. This must be good for somebody, this sad song. I know it's good for somebody. If it ain't for me, it's good for somebody. I just talked about it, huh huh. I was young when I left home and I been a-rambling 'round. And I never wrote a letter to my home. To my home, lord to my home. And I never wrote a letter to my home. It was just the other day, I was bringing home my pay when I met an old friend I used to know. Said your mother's dead and gone, baby sister's all gone wrong and your daddy needs you home right away. Not a shirt on my back, not a penny on my name. But I can't go home thisaway. Thisaway, lord lord lord. And I can't go home thisaway. If you miss the train I'm on, count the days I'm gone. You will hear that whistle blow a hundred miles. Hundred miles, honey baby, lord lord lord, and you'll hear that whistle blow a hundred miles. I'm playing on a track, ma would come and whoop me back on them trussels down by old Jim McKay's. When I pay the debt I owe to the commissary store, I will pawn my watch and chain and go home. Go home, lord lord lord. I will pawn my watch and chain and go home. Used to tell ma sometimes when I see them riding blind, gonna make me a home out in the wind. In the wind, lord in the wind. Make me a home out in the wind. I don't like it in the wind, Gonna go back home again, but I can't go home thisaway.