Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  It is a song of indignation, but also a song of resolve—“I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.” Patti Smith showed that as she recovered and finished the song, which mattered in that moment, as surely it did back when Dylan wrote it. It is also a song of beauty. The tears that many shed as they watched Smith came from a place of human desire, or need, for what is beautiful.

  DYLAN’S NOBEL BANQUET SPEECH

  It had initially taken Dylan more than two weeks to respond to the announcement of the award. Sara Danius had seemed patient four days after the initial announcement, as she told the Telegraph on October 17. “Right now we are doing nothing,” said Danius. “I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now that is certainly enough.” In the two weeks since the October 13 announcement, Dylan performed eleven concerts in eight states, from California to Mississippi. He may just have been focused on what matters most to him: performing his songs. Eventually, on October 28, the Swedish Academy put out a press release under the heading “The Call from Bob Dylan”:

  “If I accept the Prize? Of course.” . . . This week Bob Dylan called the Swedish Academy. “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless,” he told Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy. “I appreciate the honor so much.”

  The next day the journalist Edna Gunderson published an interview with Dylan in the Telegraph, scheduled in connection with an upcoming exhibition of Dylan’s artwork in London. Gunderson, quoting Danius, asked Dylan how he felt about the permanent secretary’s connecting his songs to poetic texts of classical antiquity:

  “If you look back, far back, 2,500 years or so,” she [Danius] has said, “you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho . . . and we enjoy it, and same thing with Bob Dylan. He can be read, and should be read.”

  Dylan responds with some hesitation:

  “I suppose so, in some way. Some [of my own] songs—‘Blind Willie,’ ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown,’ ‘Joey,’ ‘A Hard Rain,’ ‘Hurricane,’ and some others—definitely are Homeric in value.” Of this Gunderson says, “He has, of course, never been one to explain his lyrics. ‘I’ll let other people decide what they are,’ he tells me. ‘The academics, they ought to know. I’m not really qualified. I don’t have any opinion.’ ”

  With this answer from Dylan, who is almost invariably silent on the meaning of his songs, the door opened a little, as he acknowledged that some of them might legitimately be considered “Homeric.” The fact that he chose to compare “Blind Willie [McTell],” a song about a blind blues singer, to Homer, another blind poet, was typical of Dylan’s sense of humor. In reality, he had, night after night since news of the award was released, been singing the words of Homer’s Odysseus from “Pay in Blood” and “Early Roman Kings”—truly Homeric songs—but he wasn’t about to let that out. Dylan goes back to Homer, but he also differs gently but surely from Danius in his Nobel lecture, honest to the end: “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read.” So much for that question.

  Eventually, on November 17, the Associated Press reported that Dylan had told the Swedish Academy that “he wishes he could receive the prize personally, but other commitments make it unfortunately impossible.” He did, however, send in an acceptance speech, a condition of receiving the Nobel. Read by Azita Raji, the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, it was a tour de force, a demonstration to anyone who needed it that they had the right man, coming across as sincerely grateful, and marked by elegance, wit, and humor. Raji delivered Dylan’s prose to the banqueters:

  Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

  The same gracious tone continues:

  I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize.

  Then things get interesting as Dylan’s speech begins to reveal its artistic purposes:

  From an early age, I’ve been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

  A few weeks earlier, Dylan had said that the award had left him “speechless,” and now the sentiment was “beyond words”—but this at the end of some fairly specific words from the man of whom Joan Baez sang, “you who’re so good with words, and at keeping things vague.” He chooses to cite six specific writers, now fellow laureates, as making an impression on him, George Bernard Shaw but no W. B. Yeats or Seamus Heaney. Hemingway but no William Faulkner or even John Steinbeck.

  Nor does Dylan mention T. S. Eliot, who famously appeared along with Ezra Pound in his 1965 song “Desolation Row,” whose words borrowed, or stole, from Eliot’s first poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as noted at the beginning of this book. In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan makes a distinction: “I never did read him [Pound]. I liked T. S. Eliot. He was worth reading.” It is curious that Dylan failed in his acceptance speech to mention the poet whose work he must have highly regarded, and who transformed poetic tradition in the 1920s in a way that’s comparable to Dylan’s transformation of songwriting traditions forty years later. I suspect that Dylan left Eliot out through real modesty. He knew what Eliot had done for English literature and was not quite ready to put himself on that pedestal. Even if that is where he belongs.

  Dylan’s tone is modest, but his typical allusiveness and humor are never far off:

  If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon.

  Is Dylan here alluding to Seamus Heaney’s 1995 Nobel acceptance speech, which also compared the prize to venturing into space? Or was “standing on the moon” just a nod to Robert Hunter, who wrote the Grateful Dead song of that title with Jerry Garcia, and who also cowrote most of the songs of Together Though Life and the first song on Tempest, “Duquesne Whistle,” with Dylan?

  Dylan’s next sentence also shows that humor is in the air:

  In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn’t anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

  No one was good enough in the literature category in 1941, the year Dylan was born? Or could it be that Sweden and the Swedish Academy had more pressing things going on in the difficult war years from 1940 to 1942, and that’s why they awarded no prizes in any category during this period? Dylan, a historian at heart, knew this full well. Good one, Bob!

  What about Dylan and Shakespeare? People have been connecting the two names for years, and rightly so. With modesty, style, and wit, Dylan gave us an answer in his address:

  I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “
Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”

  The point Dylan makes is a serious one, and it’s one that draws an interesting parallel between Shakespeare and himself as both concerned with performance, and not “literature.” But the fact that he makes it with humor, with poor Yorick’s skull carrying the punch line, removes any possibility for self-importance. “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” . . . “Where am I going to get a human skull?” Dylan loves the three-part parallel question, of which there are two sets here, and he will return to this device later in his speech. It belongs to the world of rhetoric and persuasive speech, going back to the Greeks and Romans, and it is at the core of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the song he positioned in first place on his first original album: “How many roads . . .” But it also belongs to the world of jest, vaudeville, and the punch line, worlds never far from Dylan’s mind. Before coming back to the triple question, Dylan first turns to his own song in performance, to what he has always cared most about:

  Well, I’ve been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I’ve made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it’s my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I’m grateful for that.

  Dylan’s expression of gratitude for the place he and his songs have found in the hearts of millions gives a rare glimpse, seldom seen in performance, of his appreciation for his fans. As he put it on the 1997 song “Mississippi,” “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me,” or in the words of the cover song with which he has closed many concerts in recent years, “Stay with me.”

  Soon his speech elegantly loops back to Shakespeare, and their shared concern with performance over creating high literature. This time, as Dylan returns to the three-part question, there is no joke. These are the questions he has been concerned with for years, the questions that go to the heart of his art:

  But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years.

  Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”

  In closing, Dylan’s speech comes full circle as he accepts the academy’s judgment and honors their answer, not his, to this question, which the world had been debating for the last two months:

  So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

  My best wishes to you all,

  BOB DYLAN

  The verdict is in. Yes, Dylan’s work is literature, in an expansive rather than a limiting sense of the word. He is rightly the holder of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016, and you can add his speech to the rest of his masterpieces. But at the same time, Dylan’s award gives us reason to call into question the way we define “great literature” in modern society. If literature is only something that gets written down, valued by literate societies, preserved in libraries, read in solitude and taught in schools, much of the material that went into Dylan’s songs—at least until his songwriting in the twenty-first century—is not itself great literature. And yet, how do we classify artistic work that springs from the oral tradition of the blues and folk, and that survives and thrives in illiterate and semiliterate cultures because what those traditions preserve is something human communities need? Is this work not literary until a Dylan, or a classical poet like Homer, comes along and the song is written down? It is a mark of Dylan’s art, and of his genius, that the song he has created—and performed—is something that matters as much as the more conventionally literary traditions that, like his song, convey solace, joy, and sadness to humanity.

  DYLAN’S NOBEL LECTURE

  On June 5, 2017, days before the deadline of June 10, the Swedish Academy announced that Bob Dylan had delivered a video of the 2016 Nobel Lecture in Literature, taped in Los Angeles on June 4. The week before, as reported in the New York Times on June 7, jazz pianist Alan Pasqua, who had briefly played for Dylan in the late seventies, was contacted by Dylan’s business manager:

  “Have you ever watched those old clips of Steve Allen interviewing people, when he plays the piano?” And I was like, yeah! And he said, “Well, we need some of that kind of music. You know, not really melodic, not cocktail, not super jazzy, but sort of background-y piano music.”

  Pasqua obliged, and the music can be heard gently and unobtrusively in the background. Its presence should be one clue that the lecture would not be conventional. It is however highly informative, with Dylan talking about Buddy Holly at the “dawning of it all,” the singer whose intertwining of country western, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues into one genre showed the seventeen-year-old Bob Zimmerman what was possible, as did the “beautiful melodies and imaginative verses” Holly created. In the drama of Dylan’s lecture—clearly a work of creative imagination as well as actual truth—right around the time Holly died in the plane crash of 1959, someone hands him a Leadbelly record. This transports him “into a world I’d never known,” the world of work songs, prison songs, gospel, the blues. A leaflet that came with the Leadbelly record introduced him to Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Jean Ritchie, all on the same label as Leadbelly, and therefore bound to be worth listening to, he informs us. A neat way of describing or constructing his genesis as folksinger!

  Dylan then moves on to a fascinating description of how he gained a mastery over the “vernacular” of the early folk artists by singing the songs: “You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea chanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.” These are important observations for those wishing to understand how Dylan’s songwriting genius came to be, the experience and observation that go along with his imagination. There follows a magnificent paragraph in which the lecture enters into the worlds of these old traditions, and the use of the pronoun “you,” pointing to Bob Dylan the songwriter, anticipates what we already saw with respect to the Odyssey at the end of the lecture, where “you” included Dylan and Odysseus:

  You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.

  Just as he becomes Odysseus later in the lecture—“You too have had drugs dropped in your wine”—so too here he has entered into the folk songs and ballads which he has hardwired and whose world he inhabits. This is what it means to live inside the world of literature and song. Dylan’s words are crowded with lines of songs: “Stagger Lee was a bad man” (“Stagger Lee”), “Frankie was a good girl” (“Frankie and Albert”), “the fife that played lowly” (“Streets of Laredo”), and the absurdism of what Dylan’s songwriting can do is on full display: “you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek.” He may even be having a little political fun. In the song “Mattie Groves,” which goes back to the early seventeenth century and is known by various other titles, Mattie, aka “Little Musgrave,” goes to bed with Lady Barnard. Lord Barnard catches the two in flagrante delicto, kills Mattie, and then kills his wife after she expresses a pref
erence for Mattie—sounds like the situation in the 2012 song “Tin Angel.” Mattie would rightly be called the “lusty” one in this ballad. Lord Barnard, who has a number of variant names, including “Lord Donald” is the cuckold. But Dylan’s “lusty Lord Donald” may have appealed to him for contemporary political reasons.

  The bulk of the lecture focuses on three books out of many, read back in “grammar school,” from which Dylan had acquired “principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world.” Along with the Odyssey, he names Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). For the former Dylan particularly focuses on character and on the book’s “scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue,” with a rousing conclusion at the end of the hunt for the great white whale. His thoughts here seem to revolve around faith and creeds, resurrection and survival, and in the most eclectic way: “Everything is mixed in. All the myths: the Judeo-Christian Bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules—they’re all whalers.” He also explores how to respond to the hand fate deals us, how “different men react in different ways to the same experience.” The lesson for Dylan is in the contrast between Ahab, obsessed and driven by Moby, and Captain Boomer, who “lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.” The narration here is straightforward, without that autobiographical use of “you,” but also deals in masks and personas:

  We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here’s a face. I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.