Dylan As The Greatest Thief Of All?

While Bob Dylan has been known as the premier English-language songwriter of the last half century, most people aren’t as quick to acknowledge the overbearing importance his influences have had on his work. Dylan’s little-discussed first album is, after all, mostly folk and blues covers that Dylan learned in Greenwich Village. But when critics discuss Dylan’s music, they prefer to discuss the groundbreaking single “Like A Rolling Stone” and the barebones confessional album Blood on the Tracks. The tendency has been to see his covers album as a stepping-stone to his more mature work, rather than as a foundational base for everything Dylan has done since.

Dylan depends on a lot of this music—grabbing melody lines and lyrics and incorporating them into his own work. There’s something a little uncomfortable, I think, about admitting Dylan as…well…not a plagiarist…but an artist who “appropriates.” Not that his appropriations are ever a problem. Most of Dylan’s sources entered the public domain a long time ago. Some of his sources, in fact, have never been identified at all. When it comes to songs like “Girl from the North Country,” some might argue that the stand-alone Dylan credit should actually acknowledge input from a “Traditional” source as well. Parts of the melody and even the story of the lyrics are borrowed from the classic English folk song “Scarborough Fair.” (Simon and Garfunkel have recorded the most memorable version.)

But that example of borrowing only skims the surface. One of Dylan’s most famous compositions—“The Times Are a-Changin’”—is more or less a direct melodic borrowing from the Carter Family song “The Way-worn Traveller.” Dylan obviously wrote new lyrics and changed the tune from common time into 3/4. The trick that most people don’t see, however, is that this Carter Family song “The Way-worn Traveller” is itself a borrowing from an old gospel song “Palms of Victory.” That song can tentatively be traced back to Rev. John B. Matthias. But that’s tentative, so actually…oh well, you get the point.

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These musical genealogies are everywhere once you start looking for them. Dylan directly addresses this issue in the title of his album “Love and Theft”. It seems appropriate that in order to make a point about theft in popular culture Dylan himself is a thief; Dylan took the title from the scholar Eric Lott’s book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class about minstrel shows in the antebellum era.

This careful borrowing inevitably leads, argues Robert Christgau, to the realization that “all pop music is love and theft.” No musician out there can outrun his influences; Dylan poses that idea as an absurd notion. Dylan takes everything in and makes it uniquely his own. (For some examples of Dylan’s thefts, see this page here on Dylan’s album Modern Times.)

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In an interview with Robert Hillburn of the Los Angeles Times, Dylan stated:

“Well, you have to understand that I'm not a melodist… My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form. What happens is, I'll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That's the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it's a proven fact that it'll help them relax. I don't meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song. I'll be playing Bob Nolan's ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly—while I'm driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I'm talking back, but I'm not. I'm listening to a song in my head. At a certain point, some words will change and I'll start writing a song.”

Giving his two cents to the argument, Pete Seeger told how Woody Guthrie once admitted, “That guy stole that from me, but I steal from everybody.”

See more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palms_of_Victory#cite_note-0