Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan – Vol. 1 Language & Tradition (50th Anniversary), Michael Gray: A review

Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan – Vol. 1 Language & Tradition (50th Anniversary), Michael Gray, The FM Press, 2023, ISBN: 979-8988288701, $24.99

Towards the end of this book, the first in a projected three-part reissue of his monumental work on Dylan to mark the 50^th anniversary of the first edition, Michael Gray quotes this from Pete Welding:

“the creative bluesman is the one who imaginatively handles traditional elements and who, by his realignment of commonplace elements, shocks us with the familiar. He makes the old newly meaningful to us…”

It’s a quote that might serve as a kind of summary of Gray’s intentions in this first volume, but with a wider remit than just the blues. The book consists of a series of chapters on various traditions that Dylan’s work draws on, folk music, literature, rock ‘n’ roll, mysticism, the blues, along with a couple of chapters on Dylan’s language, charting a move towards and then away from complexity, and one on books about the man and his work. These are wrapped by an introductory introduction to his albums (studio, live and Bootleg Series) issued between 1962 and 1988 and a closing roundup of sorts.

Straight away I found myself in disagreement with Gray’s judgements, his dismissal of Self Portrait as ‘a mistake’ and praise of Under The Red Sky as ‘an achievement that has gone entirely unrecognised’ should, in my view, be reversed. But this is a good thing, I don’t want to read a book on Dylan that confirms my biases and Gray certainly doesn’t do that. In fact, throughout the book his contrarian opinions, such as the complete dismissal of Dylan’s protest songs as ‘rarely of outstanding quality’, draw the reader in to an engagement with the book’s more central preoccupations. And to be fair to Gray, he’s quick enough to self-correct. One outstanding example of this is an almost incomprehensibly wrong-headed reading of ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ which misses  almost everything about that great song, but which ends with a footnote that begins ‘When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it.’ If only more critics possessed that degree of honest self-awareness.

And what of the central preoccupations I mentioned? The main one is an extended and comprehensively persuasive investigation of how Dylan’s work interacts with the various musical and literary traditions noted above as an integral part of his creativity, his art. Gray recognises that Dylan’s true originality lies in his powers of reinvention, both of himself and of the folk, rock and blues music he grew up on and apparently never tired of. His stature lies both in the greatness of the best of his songs and in the way he makes us see music anew. I am reminded again of the following quote from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ by TS Eliot, one of the poets Gray discusses as a literary influence, but without reference to this essay:

“The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.”

This aspect of Dylan’s work is most extensively teased out in the chapter on the blues, the longest in the book. Gray demonstrates with numerous vivid examples his central idea, that Dylan transmutes traditional blues couplets in his own blues songs while quoting them more or less straight in his non-blues ones. This has the effect of making his blues songs an integrated extension of the tradition while drawing his non-blues songs into its ambit.

One thing that Gray doesn’t cover, partly because of timing, I suspect, is the way we can now see that folk, rock ‘n’ roll and blues were a well to which Dylan returns time and again. This is evident in ‘Self Portrait’, which, despite his dismissal, he draws on for many examples in the folk chapter, and even more so in Another Self Portrait, The Basement Tapes Complete, 1970 and Travelin’ Thru, all of which were releases after his cut-off point of 1998, as well as Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, both of which he praises. These recordings, along with tracks from Biograph and The Bootleg Series I-III serve to underscore Gray’s argument, showing, as they do, Dylan’s conscious and engaged turning to the tradition as a means of musical self-reinvention.

In the chapters on language, Gray argues that in the early to mid 1960s, Dylan moves from linguistic simplicity towards ever greater complexity as a way of addressing the chaos of the world he found himself in. One of the more interesting aspects of this movement is that Dylan’s complexity is syntactical more than lexical. Take, for example, a famously obscure line ‘The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face’; there are no words here that anyone with reasonably fluent English would have to look up in the dictionary, and it is in effect a simple declarative sentence, subject phrase, verb, indirect object phrase. The complexity comes from the unexpected relationships within and between these elements. This complexity doesn’t describe the condition of ‘sane men surrounded by the madness and chaos of other people and other things’, it enacts that chaos, pushing the capabilities of song to their limits.

Almost inevitably, the songs that followed Blonde on Blonde moved away from this chaos towards simplicity; there’s only so many times a person can peer over the brink and survive. In those great songs of the 60s, Dylan asks us to acknowledge the chaos, but doesn’t offer easy answers. In the albums that follow, especially Nashville Skyline and New Morning, he gropes towards an answer for himself, marriage, and domestic bliss and then memory of simpler times in Planet Waves. The language of these records shows a clear shift towards a kind of simplicity that irritates Gray, who dismisses it as ‘a lack of anything much to say’. And yet these records pave the way for the triumph that is Blood on the Tracks, where for the first time Dylan stares into the abyss and reports back in a language that is clear, lucid and moving.

Gray’s chapter on writings about Dylan is the one part of the book that has not dated well, both because there are so many more now and because his dalliance with post-structuralism seems almost quaint, such are the vagaries of critical fashion. However, it is followed by the longest and most substantial chapter, the one on Dylan and the blues. As already stated, Gray teases this out with numerous examples comparing the blues canon, mainly pre-WWII country blues, with Dylan lyrics. It’s a meticulously constructed thesis, but its value lies equally in the comprehensive footnotes, which serve as a framework for what would be the most excellent blues playlist imaginable. Even if you disagreed entirely with Gray, which I don’t, these footnotes are worth the price of admission.

Now may be time to confess that I’m not a big reader of books about Dylan; I value his own work too highly to risk being distracted. However, Song and Dane Man is proving to be the exception to my self-imposed rule. I really can’t wait for volumes II and III.