[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Time On My Mind” font_container=”tag:h2|font_size:42|text_align:left” google_fonts=”font_family:Open%20Sans%3A300%2C300italic%2Cregular%2Citalic%2C600%2C600italic%2C700%2C700italic%2C800%2C800italic|font_style:700%20bold%20regular%3A700%3Anormal”][vc_column_text]

— By Matthew Zuckerman

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1654533169268{border-top-width: 1px !important;border-right-width: 1px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;border-left-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 20px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 5px !important;border-left-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-left-style: solid !important;border-right-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-right-style: solid !important;border-top-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-top-style: solid !important;border-bottom-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;border-radius: 1px !important;}”]This article was first published in Isis in 2005, eight years after the release of Time Out of Mind. It was one of a series of articles identifying the various musical and lyrical borrowing by Dylan in his songs. Since then, there has been much more research on this matter, and I have made a few corrections and additions for this repost. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Time Out of Mind is a journey made up of songs, eleven of them, written by Bob Dylan with the help of countless other singers and songwriters. Almost every song starts with the singer walking, always alone except for the many ghosts from his past. A restless hungry feeling haunts every track, and that room where his love and he had laid is too far in the past to be seen. These lines plucked from Time Out of Mind’s eleven songs tell the tale; almost any other selection would tell the same story:

 

     I’m walking through streets that are dead

     Gonna walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed

     The light in this place is so bad making me sick in the head

     I’m drifting in and out of dreamless sleep

     I’ve been wading through the high muddy water

     With the heat rising in my eyes

     Boys in the street beginning to play

     Girls like birds, flying away

     Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day

     It’s too hot to sleep and time is running away

     I’m waist deep, waist deep in the mist

     It’s almost like, almost like, I don’t exist

     I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue

     I’d go crawling down the avenue

     Skies are gray, I’m looking for anything that will bring a happy glow

     Night or day, it doesn’t matter where I go anymore, I just go

     The sun is beginning to shine on me

     But it’s not like the sun that used to be

 

To some listeners, the music is swamped by the trademark Lanois ambience, and to others it notable only for its three or four standout tracks (by general agreement ‘Standing in the Doorway’, ‘Trying to Get to Heaven’, ‘Not Dark Yet’ and ‘Highlands’), but to many, myself included, Time Out of Mind is perhaps the first great rock album to look old age unashamedly in the face.

 

Love Sick

Back in the summer of 1997 when I first played the hissy, pre-release tape of Time Out of Mind on my daughter’s tiny (and tinny) cassette deck – my audio equipment being in storage at the time – and I first heard the opening bars of ‘Love Sick,’ they immediately brought to mind Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put a Spell on You’. (The song could almost be subtitled ‘You Put a Spell on Me.’)

‘Love Sick’ brings to my mind the song cycle Winterreise by Schubert (music) and Wilhelm Müller (words). This series of twenty-four songs (written between 1822 and 1827 and set to music in 1827) tells the tale of a man broken by love walking through a winter landscape, observing the world from a distance and “talking to himself in a monologue.” In the first song, ‘Good Night,’ the singer asks:

 

  Why should I stay any longer until I am driven away?

  Leave stray dogs to howl in front of their master’s house.

  Love loves to rove —

  God made it so —

  From one to another;

  Dear love, good night.

‘Good Night’

 

Every line in Winterreise could have come from ‘Love Sick’ – or any song in TOOM, for that matter – and every verse of every song in TOOM would sit comfortably in Winterreise.

 

  Frozen tears are falling from my cheeks.

  Did I not notice that I was weeping?

                                    ‘Frozen Tears’

 

  The chill wind blew straight in my face;

  My hat flew off my head.

  I did not turn back.

                                    ‘The Lime Tree’

 

  It is burning hot under my two feet, although I am walking on ice and snow.

  I do not want to breath again…

                                    ‘Retrospect’

 

On and on through every song, the singer tramps through a silent and desolate world, seeing futility, broken love and Godlessness on every branch and signpost.

 

  I see one signpost standing there,

  Steadfast before my gaze.

  There is one road that I must take

  Which no one has ever travelled back.

                                    ‘The Signpost’

 

Finally, he espies an organ grinder, a figure not unlike that tambourine-wielding man from Dylan’s past.

 

  There beyond the village stands an organ grinder,

  And with numb fingers he grinds as best he can.

 

  Strange old fellow, shall I go with you?

  To my singing, will you grind your organ?

                                    ‘The Organ Grinder’

 

Is the similarity of theme and treatment between Winterreise and TOOM a coincidence? There seem to be no specific musical or lyrical connections and I have never come across anything about Dylan expressing an interest in Schubert or lieder. When a BBC interviewer brought up Schubert in a talk with Dylan in 1986 during the shooting of Hearts of Fire, he showed no particular spark of interest at the mention of the name.

All the same, it would not surprise me in the slightest to find that he is familiar with this work, or even that he wrote TOOM under the influence of it. If Tangled Up in Blue can be seen as a descendant of Petrach (the Italian poet from — almost — the 13th century), then TOOM can certainly be viewed as a successor to Schubert and Müller. (And the above lines from ‘The Organ Grinder’ do suggest that Dylan might have been familiar with this song cycle as far back as 1964 when he wrote ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.)

It is interesting to note that Müller is not generally regarded as a first-rate poet. The words to Winterreise do not amount to great poetry, but as part of the song cycle – a medium in which the effect of the music and words become inseparable – they become a powerful, and a great, work of art. It’s worth keeping this in mind when discussing the lyrics to TOOM. The few dissenting voices among the choruses of praise for the album have focused on the seeming lack of originality and sophistication in some of the language. These criticisms are valid, but what looks hackneyed on paper can come alive in the music.

As Dylan said back in 1968: “It’s the difference between the words on the paper and the song. The song disappears in the air, the paper stays. They have little in common. A great poet, like Wallace Stevens, doesn’t necessarily make a great singer. But a great singer always – like Billie Holiday – makes a great poet.”

There are many fine versions of Winterreise in the catalogue, my favourites being by German baritone/bass Hans Hotter in 1954, tenor Peter Pears in 1963, and a number of wonderful renditions by Dietrich Fischer-Diskau and pianist Gerald Moore.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1672290623457{margin-top: 50px !important;border-top-width: 1px !important;border-right-width: 1px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;border-left-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 20px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 5px !important;border-left-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-left-style: solid !important;border-right-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-right-style: solid !important;border-top-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-top-style: solid !important;border-bottom-color: #e2e2e2 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;border-radius: 1px !important;}”]Dirt Road Blues

This is a song that at first listen would seem the most likely candidate to be a patchwork of old songs, but none of the words actually strike any such bells in my mind. (As Michael Gray noted in Song & Dance Man III, most of Dylan’s quotes of blues lyrics occur in songs that don’t adopt the blues form.) The title, however, is a clear evocation of Charley Patton and countless other country blues singers. Patton recorded ‘Down the Dirt Road Blues’ in 1929 and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup recorded an unrelated song entitled ‘Dirt Road Blues’ in 1945, and there are countless versions of many other similarly titled songs: ‘Dusty Road,’ ‘Big Road Blues,’ and so on. Even more songs include the phrase “down the dirt road” — Bobby Grant’s ‘Lonesome Atlanta Blues,’ for example: “I’m gonna walk down that dirt road till someone lets me ride.”

When Dylan sings of “rolling through the rain and hail, looking for the sunny side of love”, it suggests not a blues, but the old country song ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’, written by Blenkhorn & Entwisle and recorded by The Carter Family:

  The storm in its fury broke today

  Crashing hopes we’d cherished so dear

  Clouds and storm will in time pass away

  And the sun again will shine bright and clear.

 

  Keep on the sunny side

  Always on the sunny side

  Keep on the sunny side of life

  It will help us everyday

  It will brighten all our way

  If we keep on the sunny side of life.

‘Keep on the Sunny Side’

Musically, the song sounds like a meeting between Carl Perkins and the deep Mississippi blues, as if Charley Patton had lived long enough to make it to Sam Philips’ Sun Studios in Memphis in the early 1950s.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Standing in the Doorway

Though it bears no lyrical or musical connection (except for the title), there is a blues song called ‘Standing in the Doorway Cryin’ by Jessie Mae Hemphill, available on She-Wolf (Hightone HMG6508). There is also a wonderful song by William Harris recorded in 1928 called ‘Bullfrog Blues’ which contains the line: “I left you standin’ here in your back door cryin’.”

 

“Don’t know if I saw you, if I’d kiss you or kill you…”

The dichotomy between love and hate is well documented in song, and this line brings ‘Pretty Polly’ by Dock Boggs to mind:

  ‘She threw her arms around him and trembled with fear

  How can you kill the poor girl that loves you so dear?’

                                             ‘Pretty Polly’

 

“I’m strummin’ on my gay guitar, smokin’ a cheap cigar…”

Another Dock Boggs song, ‘Danville Girl,’ shows its influence in a number of songs, including Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘Waiting for a Train’ and Dylan’s ‘New Danville Girl’/’Brownville Girl.’ The second verse of the song could be the origin of that cheap cigar Dylan is smoking:

   I was standing on the platform

  Smoking a cheap cigar

  Listening for that next freight train

  To carry an empty car.

‘Danville Girl’

As for the “gay guitar,” one version of ‘The Gypsie Laddie’ (originally collected by Francis James Child, Child ballad #200) runs:

   Of a rich young lady I’m going to tell,

  Who lov’d a gipsy young laddy well;

  While she was playing on her gay guitar,

  The young gipsy laddy, the young gipsy laddy did her tender heart ensnare.

‘The Gypsie Laddie’

However, it may be a “Gay” and not a “gay” guitar that Dylan is playing. According to guitarist Ed Gerhardt, Gay guitars were rather flashy instruments favoured by certain country singers in the 1950s. The guitars were made by Francois Gay, a luthier, guitarist and watchmaker from Marcelin in Canada. As Gerhardt recalled, they were not particularly pricey — or good, for that matter — though they certainly looked the piece slung over a Nudie suit in a honky tonk. Another informant said that they never really caught on because they had an unfortunate tendency to fall apart. So by the sound of it, a Gay guitar would go very well with a cheap cigar.

 

‘I eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry and live my life on the square’

Back in 1963, Dylan recorded ‘Moonshiner’ during the Times They Are A-Changin’ sessions. The last verse contains a close relative of the above line, and the song is strongly reminiscent in mood to ‘Standing in the Doorway’ (and indeed the whole of TOOM).

  Let me eat when I’m hungry

  Let me drink when I’m dry

  Dollars when I’m hard-up

  Religion when I die

  The whole world’s a bottle

  And life’s but a dram

  When the bottle gets empty

  It sure ain’t worth a damn’

‘Moonshiner’

 

“When the last rays of daylight go down, Buddy, you’ll roll no more…”

This is another line that has many echoes in traditional song, one example being:

  ‘Hey Buddy, won’t you roll down the line…”

                                             ‘Roll Down the Line’

(It may just be a coincidence, but in his Grammy acceptance speech Dylan mentioned that he felt the spirit of Buddy Holly looking down on the sessions.)

 

“You left me standing in the doorway crying, blues wrapped around my head.”

This is yet another line that can be found in similar form in many a blues song, though I don’t recall “wrapped” being used in such a context before. Here’s one example, by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee:

  Woke up this mornin’, woke up this mornin’,

  Blues all around my head, Lord lordy…

                                                      ‘East Coast Blues’

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Million Miles

This is a smoky blues with a loping beat, strongly suggestive of many others (particularly Robert Johnson’s ‘Stop Breaking Down Blues’, though with a decided Tom Waits feel to it), without throwing up any specific models. There are hints of many different songs though, some probably intended, some not.

At two points in the song, Dylan sings “That’s all right, mama,” which is a song by Arthur Cruddup that Dylan himself recorded during the Freewheelin’ sessions. The most famous version, of course, was by Elvis Presley in 1954, released along with ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ as his first single. Another song title that crops up in the song is ‘Rock Me, Baby’ by B.B. King.

And that’s not forgetting:

   I’m just one too many mornings an’ a thousand miles behind.

                                                      ‘One Too Many Mornings’

 

   I’m trying to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you.

                                                      ‘Million Miles’

 

Trying to Get to Heaven

Alan Lomax’s 1960 collection Folk Songs of North America includes a song called ‘The Old Ark’s A-Moverin’’ which contains the lines:

 

   Look at that sister comin’ ’long slow

  She’s tryin’ to get to heaven fo’ they close the do’

 

‘Trying to Get to Heaven’ is a song which is almost a mosaic of traditional lines. Mike Daley wrote in a newsgroup that he was reading the above-mentioned Lomax collection and found that song on page 248. He started thumbing through the book and unearthed a number of other lines that appear in the song:

 

   Seal up your book, John, and don’t write any more

 ‘John the Revelator’ (page 252)

 

   This train don’t pull no gamblers, no midnight ramblers, this train!

 ‘This Train’ (page 255)

 

   Ridin’ in the buggy, Miss Mary Jane… Sally got a house in Baltimo’

 ‘Miss Mary Jane’ (page 259)

 

   I wanted sugah very much, I went to Sugah town

  I climbed up in that sugah tree an’ I shook that sugah down

 ‘Buck-eye Rabbit’ (page 266)

 

It is worth noting that these five quotes almost appear in the same order in the song as in the book, so it’s not unreasonable to imagine that Dylan might have spent a night or two thumbing through this volume himself. (The “train don’t pull no gamblers” line also appears in Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready,’ a song Dylan has recorded three times over the years.)

 

Another clear correlation comes from ‘I Will Turn Your Money Green,’ recorded by Furry Lewis on August 28, 1928:

 

   When I was in Missouri, would not let me be

  When I was in Missouri, would not let me be

  Wouldn’t rest contented ‘til I came to Tennessee

                                                      ‘I Will Turn Your Money Green’

 

Other possible connections with this song are less obvious, but there are many songs containing references to “going down to New Orleans,” such as this one, collected from Rufus Crisp in Kentucky in 1953:

 

  Take my knapsack on my back

  Rifle on my shoulder.

  Goin’ down to New Orleans

  Goin’ to be a soldier

                                                       ‘Rocky Mountain’

 

Till I Fell in Love With You

This is another blues that, like ‘Million Miles,’ is strongly reminiscent of many songs without throwing up any specific models. Interestingly, the song that this most reminds me of is not a blues at all but ‘Crying,’ a beautiful number by the late Roy Orbison.

 

   I was all right for a while, I could smile for a while

  Then I saw you last night, you held my hand so tight

  When you stopped to say hello

  You were wishing me well, you couldn’t tell

  That I’d been crying over you

  Crying over you

  And you said “So long”

  And left me standing all alone

  Alone and crying…

                                                      ‘Crying’

 

Not Dark Yet

Christopher Ricks wrote on this song at length in Visions of Sin, in particular its connection with John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. “I’d not mind the likeness between Not Dark yet and Ode to a Nightingale called a coincidence,” he writes, “provided that it wasn’t called a mere coincidence.”

I recommend that chapter in Ricks’ book unreservedly, and little needs to be added, except the following observation:

She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind…

A letter from a loved one features in countless folk and blues songs – far more often than they appear in pop or rock songs. Maybe the presence of the telephone has made the arrival of the letter less of an event. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s ‘East Coast Blues’ not only refers to “blues all around my head” (see ‘Standing in the Doorway’ above), it also has this to say about the receiving of a letter:

  Woke up this mornin’, woke up this mornin’

  Blues all around my head, Lord lordy,

  Woke up this mornin’, blues all around my head.

  Well I dreamed last night, the girl I loved was dead.

 

  You can read my letter, you can read my letter

  You sure can’t read my mind, Lord lordy,

  You can read my letter, you sure can’t read my mind.

  Well when you see me laughin’, I’m laughin’ just to keep from cryin’

                                             ‘East Coast Blues’

 

However, the source of this quote was surely Slim Critchlow’s ‘Girl From the Red River Shore’, collected in American Ballads & Folk Songs by John A. Lomax & Alan Lomax. The fourth verse goes:

 

   She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind,

  And in this letter, these words you could find:

  “Come back to me, darling. You’re the one I adore,

  You’re the one I would marry on Red River shore.”

                                             ‘Girl From the Red River Shore’

 

A song of the same name has been said to have been recorded as an outtake from TOOM, but it has generally been referred to as an original composition. While that is possible, this is most probably the song that was recorded.

[Except that ‘Red River Shore’ was indeed an original song, as we discovered in 2008 with the release of Tell Tale Signs. See the following article for more on this.]

“I can’t even hear the murmur of a prayer” is a phrase that must feature in many places, but ‘Somebody’s Darling’ by Marie Ravenal de la Coste and John Hill Hewitt has a turn of phrase that somehow sounds very familiar:

 

  Give him a kiss, but for Somebody’s sake,

  Murmur a prayer for him, soft and low

                                                      ‘Somebody’s Darling’

 

Cold Irons Bound

The most striking thing about this song is certainly the title, a phrase that conjures up a number of images and meanings without being pinned down by one – is he bound by or for cold irons? (Since writing this, I have heard Dylan performing the song in concert, and he sometimes sings “in cold irons bound”, suggesting that the former is what was intended.)

 

Again, there is an echo of many songs, if no specific model, one such being ‘The Fields Have Turned Brown’ (quoted in the second line of the song) by the Stanley Brothers and another being the traditional Irish ballad, ‘The Constant Farmer’s Son.’

 

  The brothers they were taken, and sent away to jail,

  Bound down for by strong irons, their sins for to prevail,

  The jury found them guilty, and the Judge to them did say,

  For the murdering of young Willie, your lives in forfeit pay.

                                             ‘The Constant Farmer’s Son’

 

Then there is a song by Dave Swarbrick and Richard Thompson that appeared as the b-side of a Fairport Convention single back in 1970 that went:

 

   When the fire is grown too fierce to breathe

  In burning irons I’ll be bound

  Fiercest fire weary to the sound upon the wheel

                                             ‘Now Be Thankful’

 

“I went to church on Sunday and she passed by…”

Dylan might not have heard that one (though he performed with Richard Thompson in 1992, and sang his ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’ in 2013), but he would surely be familiar with the traditional song ‘Loving Hannah’ which goes:

 

   I went to church last Sunday

  My true love passed me by

  I could see her mind was a changing

  By the roving of her eye

                                             ‘Loving Hannah’

 

To Make You Feel My Love

Somehow, it doesn’t seem a fruitful enterprise to hunt for songs that contain sentiments such as “I could hold you for a million years” or “I could make you happy, make your dreams come true.” Perhaps the most striking achievement of this song is its avoiding the “moon” and “June” rhyme (though the one time Dylan did employ this hoary cliché, it was in the striking “They’re not showing any lights tonight and there’s no moon / There’s just a hot-blooded singer singing ‘Memphis in June’.”) The phrase “winds of change” will always – in the UK, at least – be associated with Harold MacMillan’s famous speech in Cape Town in 1960 (“The wind of change is blowing through this continent…”), but it is hard to conceive of this being on Dylan’s mind when he wrote the piece.

Most people find it hard to understand why such a bland song made the cut, elbowing out the excellent ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Red River Shore,’ but, as a friend of mine observed, this one works much better if you view it through David Lynch glasses. Seen in this way, “I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue, I’d go crawling down the avenue” does not sound quite so insipid. And while Adele and most of the other singers who have covered it perform it as a straight love song, Dylan often sings it as if it is one of the stages of dealing with grief, bargaining.

 

 Can’t Wait

This is the only song on the album that has been drastically rearranged in live performance, the sprightly rhythm of the stage version changing the mood from despair to sardonic anger. The studio version has a hypnotic groove that is strongly reminiscent of Howlin’ Wolf’s early recordings… ‘Smokestack Lightnin’’ or ‘Evil’. There are expressions that jab at the memory – “trying to walk the line,” “I’m your man,” “the sweet love we knew,” “night or day,” “rolling through stormy weather,” “graveyard of my mind” – that suggest other songs (such as – “No, no, ma’ma, I can’t wait…” from the Mississippi Sheiks’ ‘Blood in My Eyes’), but few specific models.

One thought that came to me after listening to TOOM was that Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind make a striking triptych – the same deeply romantic sensibility in youth, middle- and old-age, toiling through a surreal landscape that always tends toward the apocalyptic. When Dylan sings, “I’m breathing hard, standing at the gate,” it immediately suggests another gate, the one he was standing outside in ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ three decades before – back when he was only half- and not utterly sick.

 

Highlands

In 1939 William Saroyan wrote a play entitled My Heart’s in the Highlands, and Jack Kerouac mentioned it in his book Vanity of Dulouz. While Dylan could well be conversant with these works, the clear model for the song is ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’ by Robert Burns:

 

  My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

  My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer,

  Chasing the wild deer, and following the row –

  My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.

 

  Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,

  The birth-place of valour, the country of worth!

  Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,

  The hills of the Highlands forever I love.

 

  Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow,

  Farewell to the straths and green valleys below,

  Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods,

  Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!

 

  My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

  My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer,

  Chasing the wild deer, and following the row –

  My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.

 

                                             Robert Burns (1756-1796)

 

This Scottish connection can explain the “Aberdeen waters,” though there is an Aberdeen in Mississippi which was sung about by Bukka White.

The most striking scene in the song is the conversation with the waitress, in particular the exchange in which she guesses that he doesn’t read women writers and he counters that he’s read Erica Jong. He evidently has, too. In Any Woman’s Blues, published in 1990, Jong wrote:

“I am looking now at one of the paintings I painted to his design (he had scribbled a rough sketch on a napkin; I, of course, had painted it), and there’s no denying that it’s an abortion. Not my style at all.”

                                             Any Woman’s Blues

And Jong is certainly aware of Dylan, too. In her Inventing Memory, published in 1997, the same year as TOOM, she talks at one point about the funeral of a rock star named Sally Sky, mentioning:

 

 “…a very rambling Dylan, who allowed as how much he had loved Sally, how he wished he could have saved her, how she was always her muse.”

                                             Inventing Memory

 

One last possible connection with this song, suggested to me by Pete Oppel, is the song ‘The Beautiful Waitress’ by Terry Allen in 1978. The last (spoken) part of the song goes:

 

  ‘A waitress asked me what I did.

  I told her I tried to make art.

  She asked me if I made any money.

  I said no… I have to teach to do that.

  She asked me what I taught and where.

  I told her.

  She told me she liked art, but that she

  couldn’t draw a straight line.

  I told her if she could reach for something

  and pick it up, she could draw a line that

  was straight enough.

  She said she wasn’t interested in that kind

  of drawing… but had always liked horses.

I said I did too, but they are hard to draw.

  She said yes that was very true… said she

  could do the body okay, but never get the

head, tail or legs.

I told her she was drawing sausages… not horses.

She said no… they were horses.

 

As for the musical influences on this song, Dylan has said that the riff is taken from a Charley Patton song. It certainly sounds like one, but after having worked my way through every song that Patton recorded, I haven’t found an exact match. Many of the songs come close though, and ‘Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues’ or ‘Down the Dirt Road Blues’ could well have been on his mind when he came up with the riff.

 

Mississippi

This was an outtake from the TOOM sessions, left off, Dylan later related in an interview, because of a disagreement with Daniel Lanois on how it should be recorded.

Back in 1947, Alan Lomax (whose name crops up frequently in the discussion of TOOM… is it just a coincidence that Rounder launched an enormous reissue programme of many of Lomax’s recordings in 1997? Probably, since the songs on TOOM would have been written before that, but Dylan is undoubtedly familiar with much of Lomax’s work, and he may have been aware of the CDs before their release) visited Parchman Farm and recorded many of the inmates. On Prison Songs, Vol. 2: Don’tcha Hear Poor Mother Calling, there is a recording of a chain gang swinging their axes and singing ‘O Rosie’. The chorus of this song is the exact same line as the chorus to ‘Mississippi’:

 

   Just one thing that I did wrong

  I stayed in Mississippi a day too long

 

There is also an old freedom song, ‘Keep your Eyes on the Prize’ which contains the lines:

   The only thing that we did wrong

  Is stayed in the wilderness a day too long’

 

‘Mississippi’ was re-recorded four years later and included on ‘Love and Theft’, Dylan’s next album.

It has been said by some that tracing the possible origins of phrases that appear in Dylan’s songs is a futile exercise. They may well be right, but others who point to these ‘liftings’ as proof that Dylan is a plagiarist who compensates for his own failing muse by pilfering the works of others are, to my mind, wide of the mark.

A few years after ‘Love and Theft’ appeared, it was discovered that a dozen or so lines had been lifted from Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, the memoir of a Japanese gangster translated into English by John Bester. The media had a field day, declaring that Dylan had been caught with his hands in the till, though no lawsuit ensued from Saga, who said he was flattered by the borrowings.

What the accusers failed to notice was that in almost every case, Dylan had lifted a mundane phrase with little or no poetic content.

On pages 57 and 58, the yakuza (Japanese gangster) states:

 

“My mother… was the daughter of a wealthy farmer… (she) died when I was eleven… my father was a traveling salesman… I never met him. (my uncle) was a nice man, I won’t forget him… After my mother died, I decided it’d be best to go and try my luck there.”

 

This is plain reminiscence as bald as it gets, with no turn of phrase that would be seem to be worth stealing. In Dylan’s ‘Po’ Boy’, it becomes:

 

  My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer,

  My father was a travelin’ salesman… I never met him.

  When my mother died, my uncle took me in – he ran a funeral parlor,

  He did a lot of nice things for me and I won’t forget him.

 

This is still not great poetry. In fact, if you were to read it without having heard the song, you may well not notice that it is intended to rhyme or scan. When sung by Dylan, however, it becomes a magical creation, full of warmth for the people mentioned, and a multi-syllabic tour de force of singing.

Indeed, the title of the album, ‘Love & Theft’, is itself borrowed from a book of the same name by Eric Lott, an exploration into blackface minstrelsy and how the white American working class’s borrowing of the black art form was in itself an artistic act of creation.

 

As William Blake once stated:

The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is: the Bad Artist Seems to Copy a Great deal. The Good one Really Does Copy a Great deal.

 

All the translations of “Winterreise” are by William Mann, copyright 1986.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]