Dylan's Song Research Articles

Part-of-Speech Features in Bob Dylan's Song Lyrics: A Stylometric Analysis

Honoured as a Nobel Laureate in 2016, Bob Dylan's song lyrics have garnered well-deserved recognition and appreciation for their themes, content and artistic performances. Part-of-speech characteristics are effective in denoting stylistic features of texts in stylometric studies. The present study carried out a quantitative observation of stylistic features of Dylan's lyrics. Specifically, the study focuses on parts of speech like verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and pronouns. Results of the present study reveal that: (1) Based on the distribution of verbs and adjectives, Dylan's lyrics are significantly active texts, and the activity sequences (Q-sequences) have validated the result in a dynamic way; (2) Dylan's lyrics tend to present the characteristics of a written body; (3) Individualism is prominent in Dylan's lyrics accompanied by the wide use of the first-person singular pronouns.

Investigating the Social Change of BOB Dylan on a Song “The Times They are a Changing”: A Case on Discourse Analysis

This research employs discourse analysis to investigate the social change depicted in Bob Dylan's song, "The Times They Are a-Changin'." Language, as a powerful tool reflecting and influencing societal shifts, is explored through the lens of discourse analysis. The study delves into the meaning construction, reproduction and resistance, identity construction, power and ideology, and media and public opinion within the lyrics, uncovering nuanced perspectives on unity, resistance, political identity, generational power shifts, and media influence. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how song lyrics, particularly Dylan's, articulate the challenges and opportunities embedded in the ever-changing social landscape.

Reply to Joachim Krueger's Review of Rationality

I enjoyed Joachim Krueger's thoughtful and good-natured review of Rationality. As fellow students of rationality and irrationality, including self-serving biases, neither of us will be surprised that I wish to defend myself in the face of some of his gentle critical remarks.Krueger suggests that I anchored my story in the mainstream heuristics-and-biases school of reasoning. But members of that school beg to differ: Some have given me a hard time for being too nice to their adversaries such as Gerd Gigerenzer, Ralph Hertwig, Daniel Kahan, and Leda Cosmides. While acknowledging the monumental contributions of Tversky, Kahneman, Slovic, and others, my own portrait of the human mind is more charitable to our species than the bag-of-biases and reflexive-caveman images that are often associated with that school. Starting from the first chapter, in which I tout the rationality of the San hunter–gatherers of the Kalahari (including their Bayesian reasoning), I present many defenses of human reasoning in ecologically natural circumstances, together with suggestions on how people's intuitions can be enhanced to grasp normative principles, a prospect about which the heuristics-and-biases theorists tend to be pessimistic.Overall, I agree with Krueger's approach to rationality more than his review suggests. I agree that trust, together with other social emotions such as sympathy, evolved as adaptations to solve prisoner's dilemmas, and I wrote as much on p. 242 (and in greater depth in How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of Our Nature). The problem, of course, is that the solutions don't scale well beyond close-knit social networks. In larger societies, and on the international scale, cheaters can exploit others’ trust, and the temptations for defection can be enormous. Here the famous Russian watchword applies: Trust but verify.I agree, too, that ignorance can be rational (see the section “Rational Ignorance,” pp. 56–58), that loss aversion is an adaptation to the singularity of death, and that individual rationality can subvert collective welfare. I disagree, though, with the suggestion that “methodological individualism” is a “sacred tenet of the Enlightenment.” Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with the tension between self-interested rationality and collective welfare, as we see in analyses of the social contract by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, and the framers of the American Constitution. For apposite quotes, see the epigraph to the chapter on game theory from Hume and, bracketing the chapter, the quote in the penultimate sentence from Hobbes.I also appreciated Krueger's own epigraph, from one of my favorite Dylan songs, “Things have changed.”

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.

'You That Build the Death Planes': Bob Dylan, War and International Affairs

Several years ago, I wrote that Bob Dylan was “a scholar with a well-developed jurisprudence on a range of topics including civil, criminal, public, and private law” (Perlin, 2011, p.1396). In that article, I discussed and analyzed Dylan songs that dealt with, variously, civil rights, inequality in the criminal and civil justice systems, institutions, governmental/judicial corruption, equality and emancipation, and the role of lawyers in the legal process. (Id.). But I noted that I was omitting – for space considerations – any discussion of Dylan songs dealing with war and international affairs (Id., p. 1398, n. 15). In this paper, I will address some of those songs that confront these topics directly (from John Brown, Highway 61, Masters of War, With God on Our Side, and Let Me Die in My Footsteps, to Slow Train and Neighborhood Bully), as well as others that do so more metaphorically or symbolically (e.g., It’s Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; Gates of Eden; Pay in Blood). I will conclude that, beyond the anthemic anti-war core of songs such as Masters, Dylan’s work reflects a keen understanding of geopolitics – why there is war, how profiteering is inevitably part of any pro-war movement, how alliances forged in war time are fragile in the aftermath, and how wars are, inevitably, “mistakes of a past history” (Footsteps) – all a reflection of the Political World in which we live. I also look at these issues through the lens of therapeutic jurisprudence, a model of looking at the law and the legal system to determine that system’s impact on the individuals whose lives are regulated.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Reviewed by: Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and: Hamlet by William Shakespeare David Román HAMLET. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Robert Icke. Harold Pinter Theatre, London. June 27, 2017. HAMLET. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Sam Gold. Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater, New York City. July 20, 2017. The Almeida Theater’s 2017 production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet had three major stars, each offering his own singular and revelatory contribution: Robert Icke, the director; Andrew Scott, the actor; and Bob Dylan, the songwriter. These three figures worked with, and against, Shakespeare’s play to create an evening of mystery and surprise. While highlighting [End Page 563] Shakespeare’s language and dramaturgy, each called attention to their own artistic genius. This production, which transferred to the West End after its initial sold-out run, respected Shakespeare’s canonical status while making refreshingly innovative choices, including the use of video cameras and monitors; a Hamlet, as performed by Scott, whose defining attribute was love; and the bold incorporation of several recorded Dylan songs. This production was full of “shock and awe” moments of interpretive beauty, beginning with the sounds of rumbling as the audience entered the theatre. The soundscape set off an aura of daunting suspense, which only increased as the volume grew louder. Icke used sound cues to connote the contemporary period, suggesting that his version of Hamlet would be a departure from both conventional costume dramas, which trade on Shakespeare as cultural capital, and productions pursuing early modern authenticity, which claim historical veracity. Not this Hamlet. The mise en scène, a simple yet elegant living room with a three-sectioned glass-pane wall-divider backdrop—think Danish contemporary—included several strategically elevated video monitors placed throughout the theatre. The set and costume design by Hildegard Bechtler enhanced the sense of the contemporary that infused the performance. This Hamlet was informed by twenty-first-century technologies of surveillance and twenty-four-hour televised communications. The guitar chords of Dylan’s song ”One More Cup of Coffee,” from his album Desire (1976), announced the beginning of the play, as news coverage of King Hamlet’s funeral was broadcast on video monitors. Before we saw any of the actors, the Royal Family appeared to us on televised cable-news programs as mediated public figures. These prefatory moments—sound cues, popular music, visual images—unveiled a Hamlet set in our immediate moment. The play begins once again with nine screen monitors tracking the whereabouts of the castle. We are in a surveillance room in which security guards screen the monitors to track any suspect activity. It is here, on one of these screens, where the ghost of Hamlet’s father has previously appeared. And it is here where Shakespeare’s Hamlet meets up finally with Icke’s Hamlet. Horatio and the guards meet in the surveillance room to anticipate the ghost’s return. Icke’s Hamlet foregrounded the technologies of surveillance we use to observe and deceive one another: hidden microphones, CCTV cameras, and just plain spying. These devices composed some of the main visual language for the production, although never at the expense of the play. The next four hours unfolded with surprising reverence for the text. Shakespeare’s language was made accessible primarily through the conversational style of the actors. This was true especially of Scott, whose performance of Hamlet, including the soliloquies, refused the lofty heritage of the role in favor of a more casual intimacy. Scott spoke with simplicity and clarity, and his vocal inflections and bodily gestures, especially his facial expressions, suggested a Hamlet completely at home with himself. Scott’s Hamlet, as the heir apparent, was formal and intelligent, but as the young man he was buoyant, lively, and at times emotionally unrestrained. He was an immensely likable Hamlet, and his warmth toward others was fully on display. When he first appeared, however, he was pouty, obviously annoyed with the King and Queen for their tasteless urgency to wed so quickly on the eve of his father’s funeral. But among his intra-generational friends and associates, he was playful and affectionate: full of fist-bumps, bear hugs, and big smiles. If there was a guiding...

The Times are Changing. Is it Time to Change your Major?

This essay is adapted from two articles that first appeared in the Fall 2015 and Winter 2016 issues of AdNews, the newsletter for the Advertising Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.The times they are a-changin'.- Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin', 1964They call the 1960s the decade because of all the changes that happened. This sentiment was summed up nicely in Bob Dylan's song of that decade. This fall, my department set out to revise our major and minor curriculum. In researching academic programs, industry statistics and education research to inform and justify our modifications, I found that we are living through one of the most turbulent times in marketing, advertising and public relations history.As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Journal of Advertising Education, it is appropriate to consider the changes in the advertising field and advertising education that have occurred since the first issue of this journal in 1996. Anniversaries are for reflection, so let's take a moment to consider what has changed in and around the advertising discipline, and how those changes affect our instruction and curriculum.First, we must acknowledge that the name 'advertising' itself is changing. The Billy I. Ross and Jef. I. Richards (2015) Where Shall I Go to Study Advertising and Public Relations? is the directory to help students select a college or university where a program in advertising or public relations education is offered. The 49th annual edition listed more than 110 college or university programs, yet a look at the names of the programs or departments reveals nearly 50 different versions of names for advertising education.Yes, there are still departments of advertising and public relations, but many programs have changed their names. The specific wording differs, but a wide variety of words are now used to describe our programs, including media, communication arts, communication studies, communication information, communication design, mass communications, mass media, media and culture, and strategic communication. Integration of disciplines and inclusion of marketing seem to be themes, with other variations, including integrated strategic communication, integrated marketing communication, marketing communication and a department of advertising, marketing and public relations.Changes in academic department or program names follow a similar trend in the industry. Agencies have moved away from the name 'advertising,' as they have integrated disciplines and moved into digital and social media. Many ad agencies have rebranded themselves, using terms such as 'digital,' 'integrated,' 'brand,' 'communications,' 'engagement,' 'ideation,' 'consumer connection' and 'experience.' These new words all have a sense of indicating a broader set of capabilities beyond traditional advertising and mass media, with an integration of brand strategy and new specialties in digital media.Many advertising programs and agencies have changed their names, because so much has changed in practice. In the last two decades, marketing communications has experienced significant changes in the field. Unless your program is fairly new, marketing, advertising and public relations have changed dramatically since your major was created. The extent of these changes became very apparent to me as we set out to review our own major and minor, which was developed many decades ago. I knew the facts outlined below, but it really changed my perspective when placing them on a timeline in contrast to when our existing courses and curriculum were de- signed.The World Wide Web has only been around since 1996. Albeit a short-lived existence by most measures, it has changed so much in the profession. Important areas such as digital marketing and e-commerce have grown from zero impact to great importance in the last 15 years.Social media have changed everything even faster. …

The times they are a-changin': the Cachexia Conference goes annual.

The field of cachexia and muscle wasting research has started to move, slowly but steadily, and large and small companies alike are increasing their efforts into the development of new drug therapies for cachexia, sarcopenia and frailty. Recent research has focused on novel screening tools1 and biomarker research to enable an early diagnosis of wasting,2, 3 but also on the pathophysiological understanding of the wasting process4, 5 nutrition,6, 7 exercise, particularly in cachectic cancer patients,8, 9, 10 and novel therapeutic approaches.11, 12, 13 Even though the pathophysiological understanding is making rapid progress – if not by the minute or day, then by the week for sure – recent phase III trials have failed unfortunately to translate gain in muscle mass into gain in muscle function, i.e. more exercise capacity or strength or better stair climbing power. The Cachexia Conference, closely affiliated with this journal and the Society of Sarcopenia, Cachexia and Wasting Disorders (SCWD), until recently held ist conferences only every other year in a different location. The Cachexia Conferences closely follow the rapid progress in the field of cachexia research. Therefore, as of this coming December, the conference will be held annually. Indeed, the 9th Cachexia Conference is due to take place on December 10‐11, 2016, in Berlin, Germany. Berlin is a city that is changing as quickly as the field of cachexia research. Following the lines of Bob Dylan's song The Times They Are A‐changin’, we invite researchers to come to Berlin to share their enthusiam and insight: ‘Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's a battle outside And it is ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a‐changin'. Bob Dylan We would like to make the conference a very hands‐on meeting with (likely) no parallel sessions and a programme made by the audience. We hereby call for your session proposals to be send to Mrs Monika Diek at the SCWD office (ofni.aixehcac@6102ecnerefnoc). Please do so by 15th April, 2016. As we start to go annual, we will still hold a big Cachexia Conference for 3 full days (as done in Paris) every 2 years, and every other 2 years the meeting is a 2‐day affair. As the field gains momentum, we may change this in the future, but fort he time being this seems tob e prudent. So please, safe the date and come to Berlin on 10/11 December, 2016. And send us your session proposals.

Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960sJohnHughes. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.

Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s John Hughes. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.Perhaps no American musician has been so scrutinized or difficult to scrutinize as Bob Dylan who, even after all these years, continues to confound. subject of countless books, biographies, documentaries, interviews, essays, articles, and reviews spanning more than five decades of American history, arguably no American popular culture icon has elicited so much discussion from so many sides of the American cultural, social, and political landscape. For all of his time in the spotlight, Dylan remains a mystery to many-a master of words who, over a lifetime of and productions, is still as tricky to decipher as ever. Of course, this hasn't prevented a multitude of admirers and detractors from trying, producing a rich body of scholarly work in Dyanalysis over the years with John Hughes's Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s providing the latest addition to this collection.Focusing on Dylan's development as an artist during the pivotal decade of the Hughes's analysis of that development sidesteps many of the more familiar trappings of Dylan's personal life and legacy to present, instead, a portrait of Dylan in the Sixties as an evolving, experimenting, improvising, self-discovering performer who used his performances to create a persona that wouldn't and, therefore, couldn't be pinned down. Splitting his book into two parts, Themes and The 1960s, Hughes first lays out his major premises in a series of short interpretive readings of Dylan's many distinctive, yet elusive, presentations of in the Sixties addressing, specifically, his voice, humor, mannerisms, interviews, photographs, press conference and concert appearances before turning, in the second half of his book, to a more lengthy, yearby-year, critical chronological analysis of Dylan's songs and albums from 1961 to 1969.By any scholarly standards, this is a carefully researched, meticulously documented, thoroughly informed piece of academic work that is, at times, both illuminating and obscuring. On the plus side, Hughes does a outstanding job of introducing and linking the changing nature of Dylan's presentations, appearances, arrangements, and productions in the 1960s to the progressions in Dylan's sense of self and self-meaning, and, in so doing, he provides readers with many insightful explanations and motivations for these progressions. Empirically backing up his close readings and interpretive analyses with an abundance of source material while critically drawing from multiple disciplinary perspectives including, among others, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology, Hughes convincingly lays out his book's major contention that Dylan's transformations and vagaries as a person, personality, and performer from 1961 to 1969 were neither chameleon-like nor indefinable. If the essential Bob Dylan was always hard to see, Hughes argues, it was because that essence-forever emerging, inventing, and becoming-was continually leaving behind to move on.Juxtaposing the transitory and the emancipatory, Hughes methodically lays out the linkages between Dylan's temporality and essentiality in page after page of scholarly analyses. …

Tangled up in grief: Bob Dylan's songs of separation.

This article argues that much can be learned about the ways in which individuals grieve through a careful analysis of the presentation of loss in creative fiction, especially in terms of unconscious and uncensored responses presented indirectly through figurative language and structural patterns. It takes Bob Dylan's collection of songs about the anguish caused by lost love, Blood on the Tracks, as an example. An examination of the songs included in, and some rejected for, the album reveals developing responses to grief resulting from relationship breakdown, including the search for the absent one and for reconciliation; the intrusion of deep pain into everyday situations; the problem of infidelity and guilt; the attempt to reach a more detached perspective; the consequences of the pain becoming unbearable; and the attempt at a kind of closure. Taken together, the songs reveal how complex and contradictory responses to the agony of loss can be.

Provocation: James Ahnt Aune, Master Rhetorician

Part of what made James Arnt Aune's scholarship so compelling was its style as well as content. Academic writing tends to be impersonal, only occasionally acknowledging the author, and creates its ethos through a formal, somewhat literary style. To be accepted and understood as academic writing, and to generate the ethos appropriate to such writing, the style needs to be serious and formal. And often pretty boring. However, there are a few--very few--academic writers who manage to flout these stylistic constraints, producing writing that is simultaneously formal and casual, closely argued, yet utilizing the callbacks of the standup comedian and the riffing of the rock guitarist. Jim Aune's prose did all of these things. He produced scholarship that was as rigorous and insightful as it was engaging and entertaining. In his work, the personal, pedagogical, and political came together as one, offering readers the chance to know him through his prose. One distinctive aspect of Aune's prose style was its movement between high and low cultural references. In the realm of high culture, for example, he pulled lessons on the democratic political style from musings on the period styles of classical music--baroque, romantic, and modern--nodding to Beethoven's and Schoenberg's use of dissonance along the way (Aune, 2008a). In the realm of low culture, he began a chapter in his 2001 book Selling the Free Market with an imaginary, Libertarian-themed episode of Star Trek: Next Generation: Captain's Log: Stardate 13256.8. Enterprise is on its way to Planet Libertas in the Hobbesian system. We have received a distress call from a Robert Nozick, who claims to be a professor at a Harvard University, and he is demanding that we rescue him. (p. 77) Of course, to appreciate the richness of this reference, one needs to have some knowledge of Star Trek, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Nozick. Indeed, this is where Aune's cultural references truly displayed their brilliance. He adeptly blended high and low culture into often-humorous, always-revealing scholarly insights. Consider the movement of his essay The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: Piacular Rite (Aune, 2006), which positioned the study of rhetoric as a form of mourning for the failed quest to incorporate the lost desire signified by the Athenian polis (p. 69). On the second page of the essay, Aune captured the Romantic longing for ancient Athens by quoting--first in the original German, then in English translation--Friedrich von Schiller's The Gods of Greece. presence of the German verses (not to mention the unusual word in the title) mark the essay as a formal, refined, perhaps even elitist take on nostalgia. quotation from Proust on the following page reinforces this appearance. But by the end of the essay, Aune had trodden from the snobbish to the familiar, as his insights on the status anxiety of rhetorical studies culminated with a personal reference and a set of song lyrics. A few weeks ago, when turned fifty, Aune recounted, I ran across the following song from Bob Dylan's Love and Theft, entitled 'Mississippi.' In its mature acceptance of mourning and loss, Dylan's song captures something of a fitting mood for the piacular rites of the rhetorician facing the uncertainties of a new century and a radically changing university context. Aune then demonstrates how weaving works, by offering twenty lines from Dylan's song and changing the chorus slightly to make his point: Well got here following the southern star / crossed that river just to be where you are / Only one thing did wrong / Stayed in rhetorical studies a day too long (p. 75). To Aune, academic writing was supposed to be continuous with one's life--close to the rhythms, peculiarities, sorrows, and joys that one experienced on a daily basis. Humor was one of the many stylistic tools he used to tie his scholarship to the rhythms of life, and his humor was often dry and biting, in a typically Scandinavian way. …

Bob, Pop, Bibel - die Spuren der Bibel in den Songtexten Bob Dylans

Bob, Pop, Bible - Traces of the Bible in Bob Dylan's Song Texts. The article analyses how Bob Dylan makes reference to the Bible in his songs. Dylan is a gifted poet who likes to contradict himself again and again, and who's biography also includes a phase of presenting himself to the public as a born again evangelical Christian. From the perspective of intertextuality the author shows how the song texts in the different phases of Dylan's journey are situated in biblical pretexts and posttexts. This provides - except for the first years after his conversion - an open play of associations by the recipients as well.

Tangled Up in Law: The Jurisprudence of Bob Dylan

A a careful examination of Bob Dylan’s lyrics reveals a writer - a scholar - with a well-developed jurisprudence, ranging over a broad array of topics that relate to civil and criminal law, public and private law. His lyrics reflect the work of a thinker who takes “the law” seriously in multiple iterations - the role of lawyers, the role of judges, the disparities between the ways the law treats the rich and the poor, the inequality of the criminal and civil justice systems, the corruption of government, the police, and the judiciary, and more. In this paper, I seek to create a topography of Dylan-as-jurisprudential scholar, and will seek to do this by looking at selected Dylan songs in these discrete areas of law (and law-and-society):• Civil rights• Inequality of the criminal justice system• Institutions• Governmental/judicial corruption• Equality and emancipation (political and economic) • Poverty, the environment, and Inequality of the civil justice system, and• The role of lawyers and the legal process.

Phonography, and: Forward Sestina (Dylanesque)

Phonography, and: Forward Sestina (Dylanesque) Sharon Dolin (bio) Phonography The first time, early morning, he asked to hear—no, to see, really—how the phonograph worked: how the arm with the needle moved across the turntable then down onto the huge spinning licorice disc. I pulled out the three-album recording from Woodstock, slid out the middle record, then put down the side where Jefferson Airplane sings, always half-intelligibly to me: Look what’s happening out in thestreets: Got a revolution. Got to Revolution. With Grace Slick I did the monkey there in my bedroom at 8:30 in the morning in the early days of 2005 nearly thirty-six years later, as my six-year-old looked on. What could he understand from that time—too young to realize we were there all over again: the young men, and women this time, dying in ambush in the desert instead of the jungle, the massacres, the tortures, and we still needing some music to magnify our passion? Why does that moment with him looking on have a shimmer, even an aura around it, so years from now as years from back then, when I was thirteen and just slightly too young to have been there, still I was there even as I physically wasn’t—was caught in Brooklyn, not yet smoking marijuana? Why is that yearning still palpable— that moment all these years later, whatever there was to remember I still remember: the deceit in high places, our need for a revolution so that in twelve years my own son won’t have to dodge the draft with his long hair and his wild ideas he’ll be sure I can’t conceive of, but will contain echoes of something I have nearly lived. [End Page 91] Forward Sestina (Dylanesque) I Want You So Bad Honey Honey I’m Bad to Want So much of You You are not my Honey So what can I do but Want to be Bad Bad I am with or without You who Wants only Honey and that’s what I am would give you So so so tongue-tied am I So lip-stitched so Bad at say-signaling I would do for to with You who are nothing but Honey, and how I Want to oh how I [End Page 92] Want So . . . (Honey, Coney) Bad You and I Sharon Dolin Sharon Dolin’s fourth book of poems, Burn and Dodge, won the 2007 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was recently published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. New poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Barrow Street tenth anniversary issue, New American Writing, 5 AM, Laurel Review, Guernica, and Court Green. “As a late Boomer (I was just 13 when Woodstock happened; 3 years older, I would have been there), I always feel like I’m a voyeur when it comes to the cultural moment, standing outside of it or else belatedly coming upon its highlights. I first encountered ‘I Want You’ and other Dylan songs from Blonde on Blonde (released in 1966) when I was in high school in the early 70s. I still have my collection of buttons from the era, including the iconic Peace sign buttons and the Woodstock Peace & Music button with the dove perched on the neck of a guitar. Nothing since has equaled the color, the intensity, the music, and the sense of being part of a movement of the Sixties and Seventies.” Copyright © 2009 University of Nebraska Press

Emotional Fluctuations in Bob Dylan's Lyrics Measured by the Dictionary of Affect Accompany Events and Phases in his Life

Lyrics for Bob Dylan's songs between 1962 and 2001 (close to 100,000 words) were scored with the help of the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell, 2006). Means for Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery are reported for 22 Blocks characterizing this time span. Significant but weak differences across Blocks were found for all three measures at the level of individual words. Emotional fluctuations in words included in Bob Dylan's lyrics accompanied events and phases in his life, although they were not entirely dictated by these events. Dylan used more highly Imaged and more Active words at times when his work was critically acclaimed. More Passive word choices characterized times of prolonged stress, and more Pleasant choices times of experimentation. Dylan's three popularity peaks were used to divide the singer's career into three stages (rhetor, poet, sage) which differed in terms of pronouns used.

A Face like a Mask and a Voice that Croaks: An Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan's Voice, Personae, and Lyrics

A Face like a Mask and a Voice that Croaks:An Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan's Voice, Personae, and Lyrics Christophe Lebold (bio) This paper seeks to more closely examine the specific literary pleasures experienced by listeners of Bob Dylan's songs. In doing so, this analysis posits that such pleasure is a response to the concurrence of three literary activities: Dylan's poetic texts are first written and then performed; Dylan's poetry is rhythmically re-written by the voice; and Dylan uses the songs to write himself—in other words, to construct a series of numerous and competing personae. This essay argues that close reading of the lyrics must therefore be supplemented by a "poetics of the voice" and a detailed analysis of the theatricality of what might be called Dylan's "games of masks." While a stylistic approach to Dylan's lyrics reveals a thrust towards writerly openness and new poetical idioms that fuse oral traditions with "high" poetry, the aesthetic and semantic uses Dylan makes of his voice are equally sophisticated. In this analysis, Dylan's voice will be approached from several angles: as an object of pleasure; as an instrument of writing that allows Dylan to create a form of oral free verse; and as a complex sign that the artist uses for pathos, self-parody, and/or to enhance his fatalistic and stoic vision of a fallen world in which "everything is broken." The study of Dylan's "masks" will show that the musician uses archetypal poetic identities (prophet, trickster, man of sorrow, and so forth) as fictional figurations of himself that he then offers to the audience. These lyrical personae can be approached as texts that may become objects of analysis in their own right. A persona is indeed an enclosed structure with an internal coherence, an artifact composed of signs, codes, and discourses. In Dylan's case, the personae emerge from the lyrics and interact with his public image, constantly ratifying or parodying it, thus enabling the artist to ceaselessly construct and deconstruct a fictional "Bob Dylan." The songs thus eventually come to fictionalize his biography in a theater of identities that brings into play a participatory game: the audience is made to interrogate Dylan's postures and impostures and to construct apocryphal [End Page 57] versions of his life/lives, thus further enriching in fiction the many literary pleasures derived from the songs. Today, the critical recognition of Bob Dylan stands at an all-time high. Yet his primary artistic medium, songwriting, is still largely spurned by mainstream literary studies. For many, it remains hard to conceive that an oral form that is hybrid by definition—and, in this case, popular—might turn out to be as artistically challenging and rewarding for the audience and the critic—in terms of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure—as the open forms advocated by the poetical avant-garde of the twentieth century. In the past fifty years in mainstream academia—especially in Europe—all dominant critical discourses have held the written word in higher regard than the oral; experimentation has been favored over tradition and the "impersonal" mode thought more worthy than the "lyrical" mode. More generally, academic opinion-makers have been partial to so-called "difficult" texts: the literary merits of a given literary work have been thought proportional to its resistance to reading, and the violence with which it attacked linguistic and artistic structure has been thought to be the ultimate test of poetical strength. Within this ideology of the arts—an inheritance of modernism, no doubt—the song as an artistic form was obviously deemed of less than secondary importance. The three well-known faults of that musical medium for literary critics can be summarized as follows: first, the fact that the historical affinity with the lyrical mode makes songs the ideal vehicle for complacent, second-rate romantic poetry; second, that songs are not meant for the page and therefore, their literary potential is restrained by the corset of a traditional poetical system (stanza-rhyme-meter) that can be easily put to music; and finally, that as a performer, the songwriter establishes no clear barrier between "entertainment" and "art"—his potential...

Never Quite Sung in this Fashion Before: Bob Dylan's "Man of Constant Sorrow"

Never Quite Sung in this Fashion Before:Bob Dylan's "Man of Constant Sorrow" Todd Harvey (bio) In the liner notes to Bob Dylan's first, self-titled record, Robert Shelton (1962) writes: "'Man of Constant Sorrow' is a traditional Southern mountain folk song of considerable popularity and age but probably never sung quite in this fashion before." This statement suggests two main points for researching the song that I will examine in the course of this paper. I will first describe how "Man of Constant Sorrow" evolved up to the time of Dylan's recording, followed by a discussion of the process through which Dylan learned his version and internalized the song, making it his own. Parallel to this discussion of musical influences, I will talk about intellectual property and copyright, issues of central importance to folk music in the twentieth century. Shelton's statement holds great value both as an aesthetic and as a legal evaluation. My scholarship about Dylan dates to the early 1990s, at the end of my graduate work in music composition, when I became interested in the 1960s folk music revival. Dylan represented an obvious choice for study because his output has been documented practically from the beginning of his career. As I began to collect Dylan recordings it became obvious that the vast majority of his early repertoire was drawn directly and mimetically from traditional American roots music. Through these recordings I had the opportunity to listen, in a sense, as Dylan learned his repertoire, at first imitating sources and then composing original songs. In 1999, I became a post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The Center operates Folkways, the legendary folk record label, and houses an extensive folk music archive. The tangible result of my fellowship was the 2001 book The Formative Dylan: Transmission and Stylistic Influences, 1961-1963. In the book, I attempt to demonstrate the root material for 70 early Dylan songs: the first three Columbia LPs, songs subsequently issued by Columbia from [End Page 99] these studio sessions, publishers, demos, and the Folkways releases. In this discussion, however, I have taken a minimalist approach, and will focus on a single song, "Man of Constant Sorrow." Methodology To understand the development of "Man of Constant Sorrow" and to establish Dylan's place in that development, I have gathered all available documentation, scouring discographies and indexes for the purpose of analysis and comparison. Somewhat akin to the historic-geographic approach that a number of early twentieth-century folklorists applied to tales and songs, my methodology is perhaps more closely related Bernard Bronson's The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (1959-72), which indexed and categorized extant print and recorded sources for each member of the ballad canon. My approach has five steps: 1) gather versions of the song; 2) transcribe and compare the melody and lyrics (as they are available) of these versions; 3) organize versions of melodies and lyrics first separately and then together to arrive at variant groups; 4) look for historical or geographic connections first between individual versions and then variant groups; and 5) construct a history of the song from this research. To date, I have identified 54 print and recorded versions of the song that might influence my study. I have compiled these into a "biblio-discography" and graphed them onto a lyric/melodic matrix. If my source is a recording, I transcribe the text and the melody using Western musical notation. Conceptually, I divide musical elements into first- and second-level categories. Melody and lyrics are first-level elements because they are the traits most often transmitted from performer to performer. I separate melody and lyrics because a performer may have a gift for remembering lyrics, yet have a limited vocal range. In this case, the melody would be altered greatly in the transmission process while the lyrics would remain intact. I consider mode, range, contour, and rhythm to be the identifying characteristics of melody, but their importance, relative to one another, varies. Many of the pre-1950 versions of "Man of Constant Sorrow," for example, utilize a Dorian mode, while many of the post-1950...

Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation "All along the Watchtower"

A comparison of recordings of Bob Dylan's "All along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix offers a vivid case study of what Samuel Floyd characterizes as "the complementary oppositions of African- and European-derived musical processes and events." The song itself draws together elements of ballad and blues traditions; and the two recordings treat this synthesis in very different ways even as they share the common ground of late 1960s rock. Dylan's is a spare, acoustic folk-rock rendition, while Hendrix's is an opulent electric spectacle whose sonic and syntactic conception unpacks the latent drama only suggested by the original. In the process, Hendrix offers an alternative answer to the song's existential dilemma implied in its lyrics and emphasized in its musical setting. This paper examines the elements and the workings of the dialogic interaction represented first of all in Dylan's song, and then in the transformation it undergoes in Hendrix's version.

Bob Dylan: a bio-bibliography

Portrait of the Artist Boy from the North Country The Whole World is Watching Song and Dance Man Bob Dylan's Songs and His Influence Writing on His Favorite Wall Something is Happening Here Bibliography Words and Music Performances Recordings Film, Television, and Video Concerts Chronology Notes from a Life-in-Progress Index

Ballad of the apocalypse: Another look at Bob Dylan's “hard rain”

Bob Dylan's musical and textual eclecticism is unusual in popular culture, where a single, recognizable persona and style is usually a precondition for success. Dylan's career can be analyzed as a continual shifting and synthesis between seemingly incompatible musical and textual genres, creating a “noise” which has political ramifications. Though Dylan's song “A Hard Rain's A‐Gonna Fall” is often considered to belong to his “protest” phase, there has been little investigation of what sort of musical and communicative structures such generic designations really entail. Though many critics have mentioned the apocalyptic strain in the music of Bob Dylan, and nearly everyone recognizes the influence of Anglo‐American folk music on his early work, this is the first detailed analysis of how Dylan is able to accommodate two such radically different traditions—the biblical imagery and anaphoric lyricisim of apocalypse vs. the hard‐nosed realist narratives of the English ballad—within a single work, and of how th...