'Bob Dylan' and 'The Philosophy of Modern Song'

Bob Dylan’s self-titled debut album was released in 1962. It included thirteen songs; two original compositions, with the rest being covers of folk, blues, country and gospel. The album only sold 5,000 copies in its first year of issue and has tended to be overlooked in comparison to the wonders of those albums that quickly followed in its wake. However, it contains, in essence, the seeds of nearly all that Dylan would go on to explore over the course of his lengthy career.

Folk rocker, Frank Turner, says that “You can hear the beginnings of what he was trying to do gathering on this record” because it is “the blueprint” which shows “where he was coming from and, with the benefit of hindsight, what he was heading towards.” Similarly, Campbell Baum has noted that, “What’s great about [Bob Dylan] is it gives you context for the rest of what he did.”

Each genre of song that Dylan included on Bob Dylan has its own significant period in his later career from the early folk albums to his country period, then the gospel albums of the late 70’s and early 80’s to the pre-dominantly blues influenced albums from Time Out of Mind onwards. The only period not really reflected by the song choices on Bob Dylan - although his choice of a song by Jesse Fuller may tip his hat in that direction, given the range of Fuller’s own work - is that of the Great American Songbook as featured on Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels and Triplicate. The amazing original compositions which featured first on two tracks within Bob Dylan are what gained him his reputation and led to the award of a Nobel Prize and yet covers and covers albums have regularly punctuated his career and renewed his inspiration from the mass of covers among the Basement Tapes through the originally derided Self Portrait to his two acoustic albums from the early 90’s and on to the Christmas album and the three albums mining the Great American Songbook. All these are essentially prefigured by Bob Dylan.

These aspects of Dylan’s debut are worth recalling in relation to The Philosophy of Modern Song, in which Dylan reflects on 66 songs deriving from 1924 through to 2004, and the related interview for the Wall Street Journal following its publication. In that interview, Jeff Slate asked Dylan about his current favourite genre of music and received the following response: “It’s a combination of genres; an abundance of them. Slow ballads, fast ballads, anything that moves. Western Swing, Hillbilly, Jump Blues, Country Blues, everything. Doo-wop, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Lowland ballads, Bill Monroe, Bluegrass, Boogie-Woogie. Music historians would say when you mix it all up it’s called Rock and Roll. I guess that would be my favorite genre.” The Philosophy of Modern Song bears out the truth of that response being based, as is Bob Dylan, on a diversity of genres. It is that same diversity of genres that leads Dylan away from the purity of the folk movement to Rock and Roll where he can play with genres in a way that he thought not possible when labelled, at that time, as a ‘folk’ singer.

This has, at least, two implications. First, as Robert McCrum has written, “you can find the secret of his greatness, his ability to play at will in the fields of an Anglo-American oral culture that fuses hillbilly blues with the plangent melancholy of the Celt twilight.” His ability to combine genres constitutes a core element of his genius, particularly when combined with his poetic gift. As Dylan tells Slate, a great song “crosses genres” and “is the sum of all things”.

Second, as he told Newsweek’s David Gates in 1997: “Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ — that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.” So, when he tells Slate his “first love,” musically speaking, is “sacred music, church music, ensemble singing” and states, “I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it”, it is “the religiosity and philosophy in the music” of which he is speaking.

The Philosophy of Modern Song doesn’t offer a philosophy for creating modern songs, instead it describes “the religiosity and philosophy” that Dylan has found in modern songs.

Andrew Tolkmith has written of this in terms of The Philosophy of Modern Song being “deeply rooted in Christian culture.” He begins his argument by suggesting that it is “at least noteworthy, even if it is only pure coincidence, that there are sixty-six chapters, the same as the number of books in a Protestant Bible, and the book is replete with references to Catholicism and Scripture, some more serious and some more flippant.”

He notes, too, that it has “long been argued that Dylan’s music cannot be understood without a deep knowledge of the Bible, and the same is true for the music that Dylan reveres” giving examples from Dylan’s notes on ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Blue Bayou’ and ‘If You Don’t Know By Now’:

“Many songs Dylan explores clearly signify elements of Christianity, and for good reason: most of these songs were created in a world that was Christian socially, morally, and cultically. Up through the revolutions of the 1960s, elements of Christendom permeated the wider Western culture and held strong influence in the arts. This holds true in most music genres of the time, the same genres that hold Dylan’s attention in this book: blues, country, folk, bluegrass, jazz, and early rock and roll. Dylan puts it this way in the same chapter on “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”:

One of the reasons people turn away from God is because religion is no longer in the fabric of their lives. It is presented as a thing that must be journeyed to as a chore—it’s Sunday, we have to go to church. Or, it is used as a weapon of threat by political nutjobs on either side of every argument. But religion used to be in the water we drank, the air we breathed. Songs of praise were as spine-tingling as, and in truth the basis of, songs of carnality. Miracles illuminated behavior and weren’t just spectacle.”

Tolkmith concludes: “We have forgotten the musical traditions that form the bedrock of our music, and we need to return to them. If we heed his words, we will find that those traditions matured in a Christian culture.”

As Dylan put it in 1997, in a quote that could form the blurb for The Philosophy of Modern Song: "Those old songs are my lexicon and prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from `Let Me Rest on that Peaceful Mountain' to `Keep on the Sunny Side.' You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing `I Saw the Light.' I've seen the light, too."

And all this was prefigured and there in essence on Bob Dylan.

Read my posts on Dylan and apocalypse here, Springtime in New York here, Trouble No More here, Dylan as Pilgrim here, and all my posts featuring Dylan here. For more on The Philosophy of Modern Song see here. More reflections on Dylan can be found in my co-authored book The Secret Chord.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bob Dylan - Gospel Plow.