Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
As far as most of the world was concerned, it began in May 1963 with the release of his second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” was the final track on side one.
Dylan had recorded the song in December 1962, first sung it in public at Carnegie Hall in September 1962 (prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to which it is popularly supposed to refer) and written it — in fact, typed it — in June of that year without, he said, much of a tune in his head. But it goes back further than that.
For one thing, it goes back to the border ballad “Lord Randall” (or “Randal” or “Rendal”), which, in most versions, begins, “Oh where ha’e ye been, Lord Randall, my son? / And where ha’e ye been, my handsome young man?” Note that Dylan even retained the “Oh” and “And” at the start of the first and second lines. And it isn’t only the first two lines of Dylan’s song that are closely related to the ballad, so are the questions that begin each verse: “Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?”; “Oh, what did you hear…”
What Did You Hear? is the title of a book by Steven Rings that’s that rare thing, an examination of the sound of Dylan’s music rather than an analysis of his words. It is hardly surprising that dozens — probably hundreds — of books deal with the Nobel laureate’s lyrics, but it seems extraordinary that so few ask the question: what did you hear? After all, for Dylan’s detractors as much as his fans, it is surely the sound of the singer’s voice and what he does with it that is the gateway — or possibly hurdle — to his songs.
Rings discusses Dylan’s voice (and guitar and harmonica) in performance and is also good at explaining how the tunes work and, in some cases, where they come from. For example, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which Dylan insisted lacked a tune, in fact picked one up from a source Dylan had already used. “Song to Woody” from Dylan’s eponymous first album had borrowed the tune of “1913 Massacre,” which Woody Guthrie had recorded in 1945 and Dylan had sung in 1961. Now it gave Dylan the beginning of “Hard Rain.”
Traditional ballads were always swapping tunes, not because they shared similar diction or told similar stories; all that was needed was a similar metre. As Armando Iannucci once pointed out, you can sing the opening of Paradise Lost to the signature tune of The Flintstones.
Rings traces the rising melody at the end of each of Dylan’s verses — “And it’s a hard… it’s a hard… it’s a hard… it’s a hard… it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall” — to his hearing Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared” which, while different vocally, stylistically and in nearly every other way, has a similar melodic ascent (Dylan wrote of his admiration for Orbison’s song in Chronicles Vol. 1). Appropriately, Dylan’s melody falls on the word “fall.”
For good measure, Rings reminds us that the repetition of “it’s a hard” can be traced to a 1936 recording by John and Alan Lomax of Lemuel Jones in Richmond State Penitentiary. Jones’s song, “It’s Hard on We Po’ Farmers,” contains the refrain: “It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard on we po’ farmers. It’s hard.”
“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” was written at a time when it was frowned upon to sing original songs in folk clubs (Dylan’s first album had contained mostly traditional material); however, borrowing words and tunes was not only normal but a standard practice in oral traditions, the blues as much as Anglo-Celtic folk songs. Woody Guthrie had always written new words to old tunes (“This Land Is Your Land” borrows its tune from a Baptist hymn, via the Carter Family) and Dylan followed suit.
To take another example from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, “Masters of War” found its tune in the traditional song “Nottamun Town,” the structure and words of which would shortly provide Dylan with a template for another song, “Oxford Town.” It’s also worth noting that “Masters of War” begins with the stock ballad opening, “Come you”: “Come all you young sailors”, “Come all you bold minors”, “Come all you young and tender maids”… And let’s not forget: “Come gather round people wherever you roam.”
In short order, while Dylan’s use of models became less important in his writing, the influences having been absorbed, Rings’s book shows that the sound(s) of Dylan’s voice remained susceptible to influence and was always changing. It’s not simply that from his early twenties, when he first began making records, until now, in his eighties, the voice has altered — whose wouldn’t? — but that throughout he has been able, consciously, to employ a variety of vocal types.
To begin with, he learnt as much from old blues singers as from Appalachian singers like Uncle Dave Macon and Dock Boggs. But Rings points to Dylan’s Elvis voice on his recording of “Blue Moon” and his debt, long before those twenty-first-century forays into the repertoire of Tin Pan Alley, to singers like Sinatra. Tony Bennett said of Dylan that while “he may not be able to sing… he sure can phrase,” and that ability to put a song across chimed with other performers.
“From now on it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is,” Sam Cooke told Bobby Womack, a propos Dylan. “It’s going to be about believing the voice is telling the truth.” The key word there is “believing,” because one must always remember, although it’s sometimes hard, that Dylan came from a middle-class Jewish family in Minnesota.
Rings progresses from the sound of Dylan’s voice to his melodic structures: how he turns speech into song (and song into speech); how a melodic line might consist of just two notes: a “reciting tone” on the tonic, say, with emphasis provided by the minor third above it. Take “Ballad of a Thin Man”:
You walk into a room,
With your pencil in your hand,
You see somebody naked and you
Say, “Who is that man?”
Rings is always careful to link the theory to the sound of the music and to Dylan’s ever-changing vocal personality, not to mention the way the songs themselves change — sometimes to the point of unrecognisability. What is Dylan doing when he recasts a song? Is he mining its potential? Trying to improve it? Trying to throw us, his listeners, off the trail? Or simply trying to keep himself interested? Rings suggests it may be all these things.
With songs such as “Blind Willie McTell,” dating from the 1983 sessions for Infidels but not included on the album, or “Mississippi,” intended for Time Out of Mind and recorded in multiple versions, though again left off, Rings proposes that sometimes Dylan is simply dissatisfied with the results. This is in spite of the fact that the version of “Blind Willie McTell” recorded with himself on piano and co-producer Mark Knopfler on twelve-string guitar, finally released on the first of the never-ending Bootleg Series, is thought by many to be among the songwriter’s masterpieces (Rings remarks on its “spare and eerie” quality); while the recording of “Mississippi” with just Daniel Lanois’s slide guitar (Bootleg Series Vol. 17: Fragments) is a gently jaunty heartbreaker of a performance.
That a song might go through different guises in search of its final version is perfectly understandable (the first Bootleg Series release included an early account of “Like a Rolling Stone” in the form of a slow waltz), but that they should continue to evolve over decades is reminiscent of the oral tradition from which Dylan sprang.
Rings discusses several examples but goes into most detail about “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” There’s the version Dylan sang in 1971 at the Concert for Bangladesh, which, post Nashville Skyline, has a subtle dash of Hank Williams; there’s a more driven acoustic version from three years later in St Louis; a year later, on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour and with Dylan in white face, the song has become a Chicago blues number, a la Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy”; a year after that it’s a country waltz; during his born-again phase, there is sometimes a Gospel call-and-response with backing singers.
On it goes until, in Nara, Japan, in 1994, Dylan performs the song with the Tokyo New Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen, who had also made the arrangement. This, to date, is the only time Dylan has sung with an orchestra. Rings points out that the arrangement is evidently based on Dylan’s original recording and that now, in front of ninety musicians who, unlike Dylan’s own bands, can’t adjust in the moment to any rhythmic vagaries, the singer is obliged to sing it as written — rhythmically at least. But the performance finds him exploring new melodic tropes and decorations, the song expanding into a performance of lyrical beauty that would affect the way Dylan sang it for a decade after, before bringing is back into his set in 2024, now seated at a piano.
Was it a voyage of discovery, then? Has Dylan, even as his voice is reduced to a croak, finally learnt how to sing his own song? Only a fool would attempt to answer that question, and Steven Rings is no fool. His book, packed with music examples and copious QR coded links to dozens of excerpts from recordings, is a revelation and, like all good writing about music, makes you want to listen to it all over again. •
Andrew Ford interviewed Steven Rings recently on The Music Show.
