Resonances and retentions of a living oral tradition are activated each night when Bob Dylan performs in concert and are continually renewed and referenced in his vocalizing and in the breath of the audiences who sing with him. In some respects, Bob Dylan might not seem to be the most obvious artist to sing along with-after all, he is not usually perceived as someone who goes out on stage to entertain and engage in dialogue with a crowd. Yet in other respects he is heir to the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that refracts from contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodic observations of medieval troubadours, and the sacred rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. There are many characteristics common to the rich sonic tradition that I am attempting to signal with these brief words; the most notable of these is the way melody in popular song works at the intersection of speech and singing, the elevated and the mundane. Here song begins where talk becomes music, where the ordinary becomes special.Despite the fact that Dylan's songs have very singable and memorable melodies, most of the writing about Dylan's art has been concerned solely with the words. In many studies, Dylan's lyrics are often interpreted as providing insight into his life. Yet we only have to look at a range of musical biographies to know how little the life of the artist seems to tell us about the art. In this regard, many accounts of Dylan's life are simultaneously perplexing and reassuring by revealing the ordinariness of his early years as well as how large periods of his life have consisted of normal, everyday routine. After all, many people have experienced traumatic marital breakups. However, very few of them have produced anything remotely like Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.Many writers manage to discuss Dylan's songs with barely a mention of his vocal gestures, let alone the more traditional concerns of ethnomusicology and musicology such as melody, rhythm, chords, texture,