by Sean Wilentz
With this album, though, Dylan’s adaptations of earlier songs intensified a renewed controversy that had fitfully been building for years. Accusations about Dylan plagiarizing melodies had not ended with Dominic Behan’s complaints in the 1960s about how he stole “The Patriot Game.” It did not take much expertise in the blues to hear similarities such as those between “Pledging My Time” from Blonde on Blonde and Elmore James’s “It Hurts Me Too.” Some folk fans alleged that Dylan had based his arrangement of “Canadee-i-o” on Good as I Been to You from the one recorded by the exceptional British folk revivalist Nic Jones (allegations that, though almost certainly correct, also had limited force, as Jones, by far the superior guitarist, played an instrumental line completely different from and better than Dylan’s). But the charges had recurred after 2001 and concerned Dylan’s lyrics as well as his melodies.
In 2003, an alert reader and listener noticed similarities between a few lines on “Love and Theft” and the English-language edition of an obscure oral history of a Japanese gangster, translated as Confessions of a Yakuza, written by a physician and writer, Junichi Saga, from a small town north of Tokyo. A closer look, especially at “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” showed that about a dozen brief fragments from Saga’s book ended up, without attribution, on Dylan’s album. The news became a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal and caused the critic Christopher Ricks, normally a defender of Dylan’s creative processes, to step back and say that this time the accumulation was “quite striking.” The release of Modern Times three years later sent listeners scurrying to find more, and they did: numerous lines from the poems of Henry Timrod (following up on the snippet from Timrod in “Cross the Green Mountain”); passages from poetry of Ovid’s, written while the poet was in exile on the Black Sea. Dylan’s literary references apparently knew no bounds of time and space. Even the much-noted, up-to-date shout-out to the rising star Alicia Keys in “Thunder on the Mountain” (whose title alluded to the voice of God in the book of Exodus) turned out to be a rephrasing of Memphis Minnie’s tribute song “Ma Rainey,” recorded in 1940. And so, even though Modern Times enjoyed huge sales and critical acclaim, and earned Dylan two Grammys, it also brought a renewed clamor, much of it from Internet postings but also from the New York Times, that he was not simply a magpie but a plagiarist.
Cover of the translated American edition of Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld (1991, 1995). (photo credit 11.3)
The controversy was, in fact, very much of the digitized Internet age. Thanks to the increased sophistication of general-use search engines such as Google, as well as scanning technology and the appearance of literary and musical concordances online, censorious sleuths could track down the tiniest pieces of Dylan’s lyrics without having to spend months at the library. The rapid circulation of information and music on the Internet had also panicked music publishers, record companies, and some artists, who worried whether they would ever again be able to sell their work for profit, and also fretted over how copyrights could be secured for performances as well as songs. The use of sampling techniques by rap artists, which had begun in the 1980s and raised hackles from the start, intensified these worries. Some high-profile cases of plagiarism through Internet downloading at newspapers and magazines, and widely publicized accusations of more old-fashioned forms of plagiarism and fabrication among celebrated journalists, memoir writers, and historians, added to the frenzy. It appeared that the information superhighway, for all of its wonders, had created new opportunities for cultural counterfeiting—and it had also created new ways to track down the most recondite allusions. The discoveries of Dylan’s quoting became, in this climate, whipped up into something potentially sensational.
At the most basic legal level, the charges of plagiarism were groundless. Many of the words as well as melodies that Dylan appropriated had long ago passed into the public domain and were free for appropriation by anyone. The exceptions, like the Yakuza borrowing, involved isolated lines—images and turns of phrase—that hardly represented passing off another person’s memoir as his own. According to American copyright law, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, transforming the meaning of a copyrighted work can constitute fair use.* Obviously, Dylan’s songs were not about Japanese gangsters; it came as no surprise when journalists reported that Junichi Saga, when informed about Dylan’s use of his words, felt honored, not abused. Much of the literary lifting sounded as if Dylan had simply jotted down little phrases he found compelling in books or in songs, saved them up, then used them for his own very different purposes in his own work. Indeed, Joni Mitchell (years before she accused Dylan of plagiarism in 2010) is reported to have told an interviewer that Dylan had explained to her that this was exactly how he worked in order to spark his ideas.
Yet there remained an uneasy feeling among some detractors that Dylan, whose reputation had derived from his poetic originality, was a faker unless everything he wrote came out of his own imagination, word for word, note for note. And many more charged that if Dylan used the words as well as the melodies of others on an album of supposedly original material, he ought to find some way of acknowledging as much, instead of claiming them under his own copyright. Adaptation, after all, is not simply a matter of law; it is also a matter of ethics.
Dylan’s many defenders counterattacked that the critics completely misunderstood what he was doing. Dylan’s supposed plagiarism, some claimed, was simply part of the folk process that Dylan had inherited from Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Blind Willie McTell, and the centuries of troubadours before them, and that had been central to Dylan’s art since he turned “1913 Massacre” into “Song to Woody,” and “No More Auction Block” into “Blowin’ in the Wind.” (For that matter, it was not too different from Robert Burns borrowing from Scots folk songs for his verse, or Aaron Copland adapting cowboy songs and fiddle tunes for his orchestral suites.) Everybody took things from everybody else and made those things his or her own. Dylan was simply, as Pete Seeger had described himself, “a link in a chain” of folksingers.1
Much of what sounded, to an unpracticed ear, like lifting amounted to no more than Dylan using commonplace phrases—sometimes known as floaters—that recur in innumerable blues, country, and folk songs, serving the singers as a sort of shorthand. Lines on Modern Times such as “couldn’t keep from crying,” “what’s the matter with this cruel world today,” “put some sugar in my bowl” are among the standards, about as familiar in various forms of American traditional song as “woke up this morning,” “back-door man,” and “brown-skinned woman.” If these lines made Dylan a plagiarist, his defenders claimed, then the charge could be lodged against practically every American blues, country, and folk artist who ever performed in public.
This all made a great deal of sense, especially regarding Dylan’s obvious recycling of the work of Memphis Minnie and of songs like “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” But was adapting the melody of “Snuggled on Your Shoulder,” a nearly forgotten Bing Crosby tune from 1932, for a song on “Love and Theft” an example of the folk process? Without a credit line, was it a silent allusion and tribute to Crosby and the song’s composers, Joe Young and Carmen Lombardo? Perhaps not—but two years before Modern Times appeared, Dylan told a reporter from Newsweek that he was working on a song based on a Bing Crosby melody, which may have been “When the Deal Goes Down,” and nobody objected. Dylan’s borrowing from older pop music was certainly in the tradition of earlier honored songsters like Blind Willie McTell. (Pop songwriters, meanwhile, regularly borrow from the classics with impunity.) What about, though, the literary sophistication of so many of the uncredited quotations in Dylan’s recent lyrics? The Bible had always been common currency for all of American song, Dylan’s included—but not until Dylan did folksingers snatch bits from a Japanese true-crime paperback, let alone from shrouded poems by Ovid. There is something impressive about this as a literary marker—but some purists wondered if it was an authentic variation of the fol
k process.
The suggestion (ventured, but then rejected, by the folksinger Suzanne Vega in an op-ed for the New York Times) that it was all unintentional, that Dylan hadn’t truly meant to appropriate these lines, that they had just stuck in his mind, did not stand serious consideration, especially given how often Dylan used other writers’ lines, and given how often he used certain favorite writers’ lines. Closer to the mark was the critic Jon Pareles’s observation that all art, and not just folk art, involves conversations with the past, battening on all that the artist can find in culture and history instead of acting as if culture and history don’t exist. Pretending to an utterly pristine originality is not just impossible; it is itself the basest kind of fakery. Pareles’s term for Dylan’s work—one form of “information collage”—was inelegant, but it moved the debate beyond the clichés about the folk process.2 It also offered a more exact defense against the accusations of plagiarism, calling Dylan’s songs “new work that in no way affects the integrity of the existing one and that only draws attention to it.”
Yet to locate Dylan’s new songs within a more refined understanding of artistic originality—while countercharging, in the words of the poet and critic Robert Polito, that to accuse Dylan of “possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper”—still left Dylan’s style and purposes vague.3 Polito’s invocation of what he called “Modernist collages,” dating back to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, was more precise. Dylan’s borrowed lyrics certainly bumped up against his own words and reverberated with them, as Polito observed—evoking, say, the Civil War America of the 1860s through the odd Confederate verse of Henry Timrod, sentimental yet darkling, and meshing it with the polarized, pained America of 2006 (as suggested earlier in Masked and Anonymous). Dylan’s preservation of shards from a bygone world—including the world of his younger self, a world being overtaken by virtual reality—while embedding them in a wholly different context recalled Eliot’s dictum that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”4 None of Dylan’s songs are about the modern Tokyo underground, but the strangely historical tough-guy phrases of Saga’s yakuza—with references to feudal lords and wealthy farmers—are appropriate to some of the things the songs are about, including bullying, fear, and friendship. Dylan makes them new and different.
What about, though, the lack of acknowledgment? When Eliot, Pound, and the modernists spoke of stealing and renewing, the renewing was supposed to be in part an overt allusion to the stolen object: hence, for example, the notes that Eliot appended to The Waste Land to explicate the poem. Much of Dylan’s borrowing—“Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” for example—was so obvious that it required no explanation. But Dylan also deployed fragments from poetry and song so obscure that they remained unidentified until some obsessed blogger, using the latest technological wizardry, came along to do so. Literalists concluded that Dylan deliberately chose obscure material in purposeful acts of artistic deception. But that made little sense. Had Dylan’s original purpose been to deceive, he made a lousy job of it, and as soon as the first commentaries on “Love and Theft” appeared, he would have known he could not succeed for very long. Yet he became more blatant.
Although reminiscent of the modernists’ collages, Dylan’s method aimed not simply at allusion but at something very different, essential to his recent work—a more emphatic, at times risky dissolution of distinctions between past and present as well as between high art and low, scholarly and popular, exotic and familiar, moving between and among them as if it required no effort. The origins of the technique could have dated back to his discoveries at the New York Public Library in the early 1960s, as described in Chronicles:
The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way.5 Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature.
Having been instructed about the obliteration of time and space by Norman Raeben, unnerved by the apprehension that soon no one would remember any of the old songs, and convinced that a manufactured, ahistorical virtual reality was becoming omnipotent, Dylan created a new magic zone where it was 1933 and 1863 and 2006 all at once, and where the full complexity of human nature might still be glimpsed. Quoting, without credit, bits of a Henry Timrod poem or adapting a Bing Crosby melody was not, by these lights, an act of plagiarism, and it involved more than recycling the forgotten. It was part of an act of conjuring.
Yet accounting for the poetics of Dylan’s form of renewing did not fully describe what he had accomplished on “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, and how it compared with his earlier work. Merely to say that Dylan had always borrowed did not mean that he borrowed in precisely the same way, or that the balance between what was original and what was not was the same, or that the finished work was of similar, let alone equal, quality. The great producer Phil Spector pointed out in a famous interview in 1969 that “Like a Rolling Stone” took its chord structure from the Ritchie Valens song “La Bamba”; the writer Roy Harris has recently added that Dylan’s opening words come from every fairy tale ever told—and it is a far better song than anything on Dylan’s recent albums. The same could be said of much of Dylan’s work, now and then. Remarkable as it could be, with its new aesthetic aims, Dylan’s work of the 1990s and after certainly lacked the emotional fire of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.
Likewise, judged musically as well as poetically, Modern Times fell short of what Dylan had achieved on “Love and Theft.” The sound of the later album suffered because Dylan recorded it with some new musicians who, for all of their talents, sounded as if they were still feeling their way in the recording studio with him, unlike the combination of Garnier, Campbell, and Sexton that grounded “Love and Theft.” But the songs were not as strong either, and would not hold up as well over the first years after the album’s release. The brand-new lyrics to “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” did not create a remarkable new composition. The same held for “The Levee’s Gonna Break.” (As a blurring of old and new, various reprises of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” including one performed by Newman himself on a televised benefit show, proved more powerful than any other musical reflection on Hurricane Katrina. Had Dylan wanted to offer a similar reference, he might have rerecorded “Down in the Flood” or added it to his regular concert set list. But the idea of a televised benefit might have felt a little too much like a theme of Masked and Anonymous come to life.) The refurbished Bing Crosby selection, “When the Deal Goes Down,” did turn into an effective song of an older man’s love, but not into a major piece of work. The dark, brooding “Ain’t Talkin’ ” was an arresting mystery that told of the yearning that does not disappear with age, and that also, to my ear, sounded at one level like a narrative of Christ’s last days. (By that reading, the sudden switch to a glowing, hopeful major chord that concludes the song, and the album, might convey the hope that is the Resurrection.) One track, though, stood out as a sublime piece of modern minstrelsy, and later became a highlight of Dylan’s concert shows: “Nettie Moore.”
The song’s title and the opening lines of its refrain come from a minstrel melody that became a parlor song, “Gentle Nettie Moore” (also known as “The Little White Cottage”), written in 1857 by the blackface performer and lyricist Marshall Pike and James Lord Pierpont, the composer (during that same year) of “Jingle Bells.” In Pike and Pierpont’s original, the singer is a South Carolina slave pining for his departed wife, the gentle Nettie Moore, who has been sold by their master—sold, literally, down the river, to a Louisiana slave trader. The theme of heartbreak intermingled with a Civil War–era story right out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fit perfectly with Dylan’s masked minstrel patterns of love and
theft. But there was a very different Old West connection—for in 1934, backed by a prairie fiddle, a cowboy band, the Sons of the Pioneers (who, at the time, featured the later TV star Roy Rogers), recorded the song for the radio in Los Angeles and then released it on a 33⅓ rpm record. Either version could have been on Dylan’s mind; it’s likely that both were. And even though the rest of Dylan’s lyrics, and his lovely melody, bear no resemblance to “Gentle Nettie Moore,” his “Nettie Moore” contains several more appropriations and permutations.
Sheet music for Marshall Spring Pike and James Lord Pierpont’s “The Little White Cottage (Gentle Nettie Moore),” 1857. (photo credit 11.4)
A gentle, syncopated, guitar-and-piano-led setting ascends from an E minor chord to G, then pauses, and then rises again and descends; throughout, without pausing, George Recile’s bass drum booms to the rhythm of a heartbeat, in 2/4 time. Except during the choruses, the booming continues, never racing, never quieting, always insistent—the telltale heart that will not stop and that drives the tale that the singer sings. The instrumental introduction gives way to Dylan’s leathery voice, supple but also weathered in patches, gently singing the opening lines: