When I first received
this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my
songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where
the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And
most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say
will be worthwhile and purposeful.
If I was to go back to
the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly.
Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the
moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an
older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music
that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’
roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he
intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote
songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses.
And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the
archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but
once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a
hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.
He was powerful and
electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away.
He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped
his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way
he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about
him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed
permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue,
the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in
the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know
what. And it gave me the chills.
I think it was a day or
two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody
I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the
song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right
then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was
like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and
all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody
laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.
It was on a label I’d
never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other
artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost
City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any
of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly,
they had to be good, so I needed to hear them. I wanted to know all
about it and play that kind of music. I still had a feeling for the
music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I forgot about it.
Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long gone.
I hadn’t left home yet,
but I couldn’t wait to. I wanted to learn this music and meet the
people who played it. Eventually, I did leave, and I did learn to
play those songs. They were different than the radio songs that I’d
been listening to all along. They were more vibrant and truthful to
life. With radio songs, a performer might get a hit with a roll of
the dice or a fall of the cards, but that didn’t matter in the folk
world. Everything was a hit. All you had to do was be well versed and
be able to play the melody. Some of these songs were easy, some not.
I had a natural feeling for the ancient ballads and country blues,
but everything else I had to learn from scratch. I was playing for
small crowds, sometimes no more than four or five people in a room or
on a street corner. You had to have a wide repertoire, and you had to
know what to play and when. Some songs were intimate, some you had to
shout to be heard.
By listening to all the
early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the
vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues,
work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy
songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.
You know what it’s all
about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket.
Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know
that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You
know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the
deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink
in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the
wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that
played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in
his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white
linen.
I had all the vernacular
all down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the
devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew
all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all
connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing
my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and
I used it.
But I had something else
as well. I had principals and sensibilities and an informed view of
the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar
school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels,
Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading
that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human
nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me
when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books
worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or
unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever
heard, and these themes were fundamental.
Specific books that have
stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I
want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the
Western Front and The Odyssey.
____________________
Moby Dick is a
fascinating book, a book that’s filled with scenes of high drama
and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is
straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab – captain of a ship
called the Pequod – an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his
nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he
pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa
and into the Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of
the earth. It’s an abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. He
calls Moby the emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab’s
got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about now
and again. You can anticipate what will happen.
The ship’s crew is made
up of men of different races, and any one of them who sights the
whale will be given the reward of a gold coin. A lot of Zodiac
symbols, religious allegory, stereotypes. Ahab encounters other
whaling vessels, presses the captains for details about Moby. Have
they seen him? There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the
vessels, and he predicts Ahab’s doom. Says Moby is the incarnate of
a Shaker god, and that any dealings with him will lead to disaster.
He says that to Captain Ahab. Another ship’s captain – Captain
Boomer – he lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s
happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for
vengeance.
This book tells how
different men react in different ways to the same experience. A lot
of Old Testament, biblical allegory: Gabriel, Rachel, Jeroboam,
Bildah, Elijah. Pagan names as well: Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fleece,
Starbuck, Stubb, Martha’s Vineyard. The Pagans are idol
worshippers. Some worship little wax figures, some wooden figures.
Some worship fire. The Pequod is the name of an Indian tribe.
Moby Dick is a seafaring
tale. One of the men, the narrator, says, “Call me Ishmael.”
Somebody asks him where he’s from, and he says, “It’s not down
on any map. True places never are.” Stubb gives no significance to
anything, says everything is predestined. Ishmael’s been on a
sailing ship his entire life. Calls the sailing ships his Harvard and
Yale. He keeps his distance from people.
A typhoon hits the
Pequod. Captain Ahab thinks it’s a good omen. Starbuck thinks it’s
a bad omen, considers killing Ahab. As soon as the storm ends, a
crewmember falls from the ship’s mast and drowns, foreshadowing
what’s to come. A Quaker pacifist priest, who is actually a
bloodthirsty businessman, tells Flask, “Some men who receive
injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.”
Everything is mixed in.
All the myths: the Judeo Christian bible, Hindu myths, British
legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they’re all whalers.
Greek mythology, the gory business of cutting up a whale. Lots of
facts in this book, geographical knowledge, whale oil – good for
coronation of royalty – noble families in the whaling industry.
Whale oil is used to anoint the kings. History of the whale,
phrenology, classical philosophy, pseudo-scientific theories,
justification for discrimination – everything thrown in and none of
it hardly rational. Highbrow, lowbrow, chasing illusion, chasing
death, the great white whale, white as polar bear, white as a white
man, the emperor, the nemesis, the embodiment of evil. The demented
captain who actually lost his leg years ago trying to attack Moby
with a knife.
We see only the surface
of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit.
Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and
vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a
book. Here’s a face. I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you
can.
Tashtego says that he
died and was reborn. His extra days are a gift. He wasn’t saved by
Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man and a
non-Christian at that. He parodies the resurrection.
When Starbuck tells Ahab
that he should let bygones be bygones, the angry captain snaps back,
“Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I’d strike the sun if it
insulted me.” Ahab, too, is a poet of eloquence. He says, “The
path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is
grooved to run.” Or these lines, “All visible objects are but
pasteboard masks.” Quotable poetic phrases that can’t be beat.
Finally, Ahab spots Moby,
and the harpoons come out. Boats are lowered. Ahab’s harpoon has
been baptized in blood. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat and destroys it.
Next day, he sights Moby again. Boats are lowered again. Moby attacks
Ahab’s boat again. On the third day, another boat goes in. More
religious allegory. He has risen. Moby attacks one more time, ramming
the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines
and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.
Ishmael survives. He’s
in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the
whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way
into more than a few of my songs.
____________________
All Quiet on the Western
Front was another book that did. All Quiet on the Western Front is a
horror story. This is a book where you lose your childhood, your
faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re
stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death
and pain. You’re defending yourself from elimination. You’re
being wiped off the face of the map. Once upon a time you were an
innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once
you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces.
Day after day, the
hornets bite you and worms lap your blood. You’re a cornered
animal. You don’t fit anywhere. The falling rain is monotonous.
There’s endless assaults, poison gas, nerve gas, morphine, burning
streams of gasoline, scavenging and scabbing for food, influenza,
typhus, dysentery. Life is breaking down all around you, and the
shells are whistling. This is the lower region of hell. Mud, barbed
wire, rat-filled trenches, rats eating the intestines of dead men,
trenches filled with filth and excrement. Someone shouts, “Hey, you
there. Stand and fight.”
Who knows how long this
mess will go on? Warfare has no limits. You’re being annihilated,
and that leg of yours is bleeding too much. You killed a man
yesterday, and you spoke to his corpse. You told him after this is
over, you’ll spend the rest of your life looking after his family.
Who’s profiting here? The leaders and the generals gain fame, and
many others profit financially. But you’re doing the dirty work.
One of your comrades says, “Wait a minute, where are you going?”
And you say, “Leave me alone, I’ll be back in a minute.” Then
you walk out into the woods of death hunting for a piece of sausage.
You can’t see how anybody in civilian life has any kind of purpose
at all. All their worries, all their desires – you can’t
comprehend it.
More machine guns rattle,
more parts of bodies hanging from wires, more pieces of arms and legs
and skulls where butterflies perch on teeth, more hideous wounds, pus
coming out of every pore, lung wounds, wounds too big for the body,
gas-blowing cadavers, and dead bodies making retching noises. Death
is everywhere. Nothing else is possible. Someone will kill you and
use your dead body for target practice. Boots, too. They’re your
prized possession. But soon they’ll be on somebody else’s feet.
There’s Froggies coming
through the trees. Merciless bastards. Your shells are running out.
“It’s not fair to come at us again so soon,” you say. One of
your companions is laying in the dirt, and you want to take him to
the field hospital. Someone else says, “You might save yourself a
trip.” “What do you mean?” “Turn him over, you’ll see what
I mean.”
You wait to hear the
news. You don’t understand why the war isn’t over. The army is so
strapped for replacement troops that they’re drafting young boys
who are of little military use, but they’re draftin’ ‘em anyway
because they’re running out of men. Sickness and humiliation have
broken your heart. You were betrayed by your parents, your
schoolmasters, your ministers, and even your own government.
The general with the
slowly smoked cigar betrayed you too – turned you into a thug and a
murderer. If you could, you’d put a bullet in his face. The
commander as well. You fantasize that if you had the money, you’d
put up a reward for any man who would take his life by any means
necessary. And if he should lose his life by doing that, then let the
money go to his heirs. The colonel, too, with his caviar and his
coffee – he’s another one. Spends all his time in the officers’
brothel. You’d like to see him stoned dead too. More Tommies and
Johnnies with their whack fo’ me daddy-o and their whiskey in the
jars. You kill twenty of ‘em and twenty more will spring up in
their place. It just stinks in your nostrils.
You’ve come to despise
that older generation that sent you out into this madness, into this
torture chamber. All around you, your comrades are dying. Dying from
abdominal wounds, double amputations, shattered hipbones, and you
think, “I’m only twenty years old, but I’m capable of killing
anybody. Even my father if he came at me.”
Yesterday, you tried to
save a wounded messenger dog, and somebody shouted, “Don’t be a
fool.” One Froggy is laying gurgling at your feet. You stuck him
with a dagger in his stomach, but the man still lives. You know you
should finish the job, but you can’t. You’re on the real iron
cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your
lips.
Months pass by. You go
home on leave. You can’t communicate with your father. He said,
“You’d be a coward if you don’t enlist.” Your mother, too, on
your way back out the door, she says, “You be careful of those
French girls now.” More madness. You fight for a week or a month,
and you gain ten yards. And then the next month it gets taken back.
All that culture from a
thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom – Plato,
Aristotle, Socrates – what happened to it? It should have prevented
this. Your thoughts turn homeward. And once again you’re a
schoolboy walking through the tall poplar trees. It’s a pleasant
memory. More bombs dropping on you from blimps. You got to get it
together now. You can’t even look at anybody for fear of some
miscalculable thing that might happen. The common grave. There are no
other possibilities.
Then you notice the
cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this.
Poplar trees, the red butterflies, the fragile beauty of flowers, the
sun – you see how nature is indifferent to it all. All the violence
and suffering of all mankind. Nature doesn’t even notice it.
You’re so alone. Then a
piece of shrapnel hits the side of your head and you’re dead.
You’ve been ruled out, crossed out. You’ve been exterminated. I
put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another
war novel again, and I never did.
Charlie Poole from North
Carolina had a song that connected to all this. It’s called “You
Ain’t Talkin’ to Me,” and the lyrics go like this:
I saw a sign in a window
walking up town one day.
Join the army, see the
world is what it had to say.
You’ll see exciting
places with a jolly crew,
You’ll meet interesting
people, and learn to kill them too.
Oh you ain’t talkin’
to me, you ain’t talking to me.
I may be crazy and all
that, but I got good sense you see.
You ain’t talkin’ to
me, you ain’t talkin’ to me.
Killin’ with a gun
don’t sound like fun.
You ain’t talkin’ to
me.
____________________
The Odyssey is a great
book whose themes have worked its way into the ballads of a lot of
songwriters: “Homeward Bound, “Green, Green Grass of Home,”
“Home on the Range,” and my songs as well.
The Odyssey is a strange,
adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in
a war. He’s on that long journey home, and it’s filled with traps
and pitfalls. He’s cursed to wander. He’s always getting carried
out to sea, always having close calls. Huge chunks of boulders rock
his boat. He angers people he shouldn’t. There’s troublemakers in
his crew. Treachery. His men are turned into pigs and then are turned
back into younger, more handsome men. He’s always trying to rescue
somebody. He’s a travelin’ man, but he’s making a lot of stops.
He’s stranded on a
desert island. He finds deserted caves, and he hides in them. He
meets giants that say, “I’ll eat you last.” And he escapes from
giants. He’s trying to get back home, but he’s tossed and turned
by the winds. Restless winds, chilly winds, unfriendly winds. He
travels far, and then he gets blown back.
He’s always being
warned of things to come. Touching things he’s told not to. There’s
two roads to take, and they’re both bad. Both hazardous. On one you
could drown and on the other you could starve. He goes into the
narrow straits with foaming whirlpools that swallow him. Meets
six-headed monsters with sharp fangs. Thunderbolts strike at him.
Overhanging branches that he makes a leap to reach for to save
himself from a raging river. Goddesses and gods protect him, but some
others want to kill him. He changes identities. He’s exhausted. He
falls asleep, and he’s woken up by the sound of laughter. He tells
his story to strangers. He’s been gone twenty years. He was carried
off somewhere and left there. Drugs have been dropped into his wine.
It’s been a hard road to travel.
In a lot of ways, some of
these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs
dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong
woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices
with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far
blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered
people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all
around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you
no good. And that’s still not all of it.
When he gets back home,
things aren’t any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking
advantage of his wife’s hospitality. And there’s too many of ‘em.
And though he’s greater than them all and the best at everything –
best carpenter, best hunter, best expert on animals, best seaman –
his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will.
All these stragglers will
have to pay for desecrating his palace. He’ll disguise himself as a
filthy beggar, and a lowly servant kicks him down the steps with
arrogance and stupidity. The servant’s arrogance revolts him, but
he controls his anger. He’s one against a hundred, but they’ll
all fall, even the strongest. He was nobody. And when it’s all said
and done, when he’s home at last, he sits with his wife, and he
tells her the stories.
____________________
So what does it all mean?
Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by these
very same themes. And they can mean a lot of different things. If a
song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to
know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my
songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.
When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references,
scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of
the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don’t think
he would have worried about it either – what it all means.
John Donne as well, the
poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words,
“The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two
loves, the nests.” I don’t know what it means, either. But it
sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.
When Odysseus in The
Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld –
Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a
short one full of honor and glory – tells Odysseus it was all a
mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No
immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be
a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is –
a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of
life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.
That’s what songs are
too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are
unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in
Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as
lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope
some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they
were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people
are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who
says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”
© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION
2017. The Nobel Foundation has not obtained the right to assign any
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rights may thus not be granted. All rights to the Nobel Lecture by
Bob Dylan are reserved and the Nobel Lecture may not be published or
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