Happy 84th Birthday to Bob Dylan!

When I first started off on Vocal, there was a time where I would write articles about Bob Dylan. A constant reminder of times gone by and a poet of the ever-present, Bob Dylan basically sums up American Folk Culture. I will spare you details of his life because I think everyone can use a Wikipedia page, this article is my opinion and so, you will be subjected to a discussion on what I have found to be some of Bob Dylan's greatest songs.

Keep reading for more cool Dylan stuff!

YouTube links in the song titles 🎶

Part 1: Five Songs

Song: Mississippi

Album: Love and Theft

First and foremost we have the song Mississippi which is perhaps not only my favourite song by Bob Dylan, but is also my favourite song by anyone ever. It is a representation of old American Folk music which definitely has a modern feel to it as Bob Dylan sings about how he has "stayed in Mississippi for a day too long". Some years' ago I published an article on my favourite Bob Dylan songs (they have shifted a bit since but not by much surprisingly) and just reading it makes it sound like that scene out of American Pie (the song, not the film) where he talks about how the music was no longer playing or something. It really wasn't like that at all, but it brings back some really vivid memories. I even still remember what the shop was called...

Let's just say that when Richard F. Thomas stands Bob Dylan next to writers like Ovid in his book Why Dylan Matters, he is definitely not being hyperbolic about Dylan's talents. Listening to Mississippi can prove that to you if you're not sure.

Another great song on the album is obviously the one that Bob Dylan made as a tribute to the great Charley Patton: High Water. (If you ever get the chance to listen to Patton, I would take it. You will not regret it one bit. No, the sound quality isn't great but the music is something else entirely).

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Song: Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight

Album: Infidels

If you know anything about me then you will know that my favourite Bob Dylan album is Infidels. Released in the 1980s, Bob Dylan seemed to return to form after his 'Born-Again' era even though whatever the critics thought 'form' was for the multi-layered Dylan happened not to be quite what they were expecting when the album was released. Unfortunately not containing the much awaited Blind Willie McTell (which would be released on the Bootlegs later on), Infidels is still a huge hit with the song Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight being the best song on the album.

I was once like you, perhaps at one time I too thought the best song on the album was Jokerman but then I saw clarity and realised it is a close second with Neighbourhood Bully. But Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight has seriously some of the most sentimental lyrics that Bob Dylan has ever written along with some most incredible imagery. As noted in Andrew McCarron's book Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan, this is Dylan clearly between his Christian era and his 'elder statesman' era. It still has that key religious imagery that we associate with albums like Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love - but then we can also easily apply to the album Street-Legal.

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Song: I'm Not There

Album: The Basement Tapes Raw

I know, this song also happens to be the name of my favourite film of all time that tells an episodic mash-up half-story of Bob Dylan's life and personas. The song is often not everyone's favourite but it is exactly how the bootleg album title suggests: it's raw. The fact that the film took this song as it's influence for structure and form, I think that Lee Marshall was right when he stated that Dylan changes with the cultural contexts in his book Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star. This is a song that perfectly reflects that with it's refrain of 'I'm not there, I'm gone...'

The lack of love for the album has always been a concern for me. Yes, it does have some stuff that perhaps isn't so great compared to other Dylan works, but it does have Dress It Up, Better Have it All and so, that is the reason you should listen to the album.

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Song: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts

Album: Blood on the Tracks

I can almost hear the united groan amongst Bob Dylan fans for me choosing this song out of all the songs on Blood on the Tracks to feature on this list. But unfortunately enough for them, it is my list and only I need to justify this. You have to admit that in comparison to the rest of the album, this song is a real curve-ball. From You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go where he sings about the relations between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud in a soft folk song to the dark and brooding narrative of Idiot Wind (which is arguably the best song on the album): it is clear that Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts needs to be the one I refer to here.

I think Simon Armitage says something about it in his essay 'Rock of Ages' somewhere in the book Do You Mr. Jones by Neil Corcoran but he's wrong, the song isn't terrible. (He also stated that Shot of Love was an album impossible to carry about on the street out of fear of being beaten up but that's a whole different conversation). The song is simply different. I appreciate when Dylan tries to experiment on the album and this song definitely feels like an experiment in narrative songwriting. I think it works. It works very well.

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Song: Changing of the Guards

Album: Street-Legal

Street-Legal is a severely underrated Bob Dylan album. It has some of what I like to call 'dark-folk' music. Songs like No Time to Think and Changing of the Guards have some brilliant narratives that have a whole new level of depth to them. In his Nobel Prize Lecture in 2016, Bob Dylan talks about The Odyssey and I think it's safe to say at this point the Bobcats definitely associate him with Odysseus. But, the main thing we're looking at here is the epic ballad. Bob Dylan definitely knows how to write them, he knows how to perform them and he knows as well, how to make them multi-layered. Changing of the Guards with its dark, layered narrative is definitely one of the best examples of that.

In what is possibly the greatest work on Bob Dylan that there is out there, Michael Gray's Song and Dance Man details how Street-Legal became Dylan's album which was clearly a cross between romantic love and Christianity. Some of these would be explored only a short time later when he went into his 'Born-Again' era.

Honourable Mentions:

1. Romance in Durango (Album: Desire)
2. Take a Message to Mary (Album: Self Portrait)
3. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine (Album: John Wesley Harding)
4. Masters of War (Album: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan)
5. In the Summertime (Album: Shot of Love)
6. My Back Pages (Album: Another Side of Bob Dylan)
7. Chimes of Freedom (Album: Another Side of Bob Dylan)
8. Huck's Tune (Album: Tell Tale Signs)
9. Spanish is the Loving Tongue (Album: Another Self Portrait)
10. Pay in Blood (Album: Tempest)
11. In the Garden (Album: Saved)

Now we are going to move on to books about Bob Dylan. For context, a Dylanologist is someone who researches Bob Dylan and writes books/articles about them. If you would like to read more about the articles and research written about Bob Dylan then I suggest you check out the website 'Expecting Rain'.

Part 2: Five Books 📚

Now let's have a look at five of my favourite books about Bob Dylan. I went through a thing at university in those few years where I read as many books as I possibly could about Bob Dylan and his songs so, here you are going to see my favourites. But I have read probably close to forty (which if you know the circle of Dylanologists is practically nothing compared to the amount of reading that's going on over there when it comes to Bob Dylan).

I won't say too much about these because honestly, this article is getting a bit longer than I had predicted. But I will include a small summary of what to expect when you read the texts. They are in no particular order, they are simply five I have enjoyed the most.

Amazon links in the titles ❤️

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Do You Mr. Jones? Edited by Neil Corcoran

I owned this throughout university and read it almost religiously. I think I've already stated that there's a really good essay by Simon Armitage in there. But I also enjoyed Christopher Butler's essay on Bob Dylan and the Academics. If you're up for an anthology of essays on Dylan where they can get a bit personal to the writer, then I think this would be a great read for you.

Friends and Other Strangers: Bob Dylan Examined by Harold Lepidus

Well, how could I stop at just one anthology of essays? Friends and Other Strangers: Bob Dylan Examined is a book by Harold Lepidus (an awesome Dylanologist if you ever get the chance to check out his stuff online) and goes through different influences, ideas and cultural contexts surrounding Bob Dylan from Buddy Holly all the way to Carolyn Hester, D.A Pennebaker, Leonard Cohen, Barry Manilow and even JFK. I highly recommend this one for the fact that it is simply brilliant.

A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo

If you want to separate the man from the myth then perhaps dive into the late Suze Rotolo's book about her ex-boyfriend, Bob Dylan. Suze and Bob were together during Bob's much earlier years and she tells her story of how she may have romanticised the life of the 1960s a bit too far. She comes clean with truths about her relationship with Dylan including the fact that she was kind of uncomfortable with the idea of being a muse. I'd give it a read - it is simply brilliant.

Bob Dylan: The Day I Was There by Neil Cossar

This is another anthology which includes a lot of Dylan-based memories. It' basically a compilation of lots of different people commenting on their time spent with Dylan at any time in particular. These people include: Joan Baez, Robbie Robertson and even John Lennon. It's not an 'academic' Dylan book but I love it all the same. I hope if you're going to pick up your first Dylan book after reading this article that you choose this one.

Wicked Messenger by Mike Marqusee

I read this book when I was on my post-graduate degree basically because I found it in the library and I think DylanTwitter was going through a thing about listening to John Wesley Harding on repeat. The base of the book states that Bob Dylan never really took politics out of his songs, he just adjusted the articulation of them according to the political context of the time. It's quite short but it's a fascinating book.

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Conclusion

Bob Dylan is in fact, my favourite artist if you haven't already realised. I hope that on this day which is his 84th birthday, you can choose to give a listen to some of the songs that have either shaped the political landscape of the masses like A Hard Rain's a-Falling or that have subverted expectations like Subterranean Homesick Blues. I hope you choose to listen thoughtfully to the meditations Dylan makes in Dear Landlord and the way he croons out the entire Nashville Skyline album in a singing voice perhaps many aren't too familiar with. I hope you choose to pay attention to when Bob Dylan starts to feature religious themes more heavily in his songs than he did in With God on Our Side, in albums such as Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. I hope you understand that Bob Dylan is still going with Rough and Rowdy Ways (I went to see him on that tour!). But most of all, I hope you spend the day exploring the phenomenal back catalogue of the greatest songwriter to ever live.

Today we wish Bob Dylan a great 84th birthday. ❤️