Living, Breathing Songs: Singing Along with Bob Dylan

Abstract

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,

‘Going through all these things twice’: the repeated phrase and the refrain in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

“…Chaucer presents this repetition in terms of the rotation of the wheel of fortune: at first the happy prince is affixed to the wheel's summit, but its spinning plunges him into his first despair, before his affair with Criseyde restores him to happiness. The wheel rolls forward again, and the love affair ends: he goes 'ffro wo to wele, and after out of ioie' ('from woe to happiness, and afterwards, out of joy', 1.4), ultimately being 'from [For-In an article concerned with literacy and orality, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that much scholarly work has focused on the oral aspects of Bob Dylan's work: for instance, his mode of singing (Daley 2007;Negus 2007), his debt to American Indian folklore (Désveaux 2007) and his debt to folk song traditions (Portelli 2022).…”

On the interaction of alliteration with rhythm and metre in popular music

“…Recent scholarship suggests that, even when a song's lyrics do convey literal meaning, that meaning does not necessarily remain intact when listeners participate. Negus (2007, pp. 78–9) observes how ‘singing along with choruses [of Bob Dylan songs] is also one of the clearest examples of how the words of pop songs become detached from their semantic significance within the song's lyrical narrative or argument’.…”