More than six decades into the career of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, the word that pops up most often to describe his canon is “original.” When the longevity of Dylan songs is praised, the resonant staying-power of those early anthems— like “Farewell, Angelina,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”— is generally attributed to the artist’s iconoclastic creative daring. There’s no denying the genius, but the genius had parents. No, we’re not referencing the appliance-store Zimmermans of Hibbing, but rather the anonymous folk canon which nurtured Dylan’s musical imagination.

The artist often describes the 1960s as an intense period of channeling and transcribing.  He doesn’t compare his experience to that of Mozart, but we will. It’s reasonable to conclude that Dylan had been exposed to the Child Ballads and Lomax field-recordings by the time he visited Woody at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in 1961, and in this sense his musical vocabulary was hardly tabula rasa. The next year, he knocked around London and learned Anglo-Celtic melodies from Martin Carthy and Bob Davenport. But Dylan was not content to be an archivist, and used the traditional forms merely as his ticket to ride.

For centuries, sea-chanteys, ballads of farewell, and riddling call-and-response songs served as entertainment in a world lit only by fire. So many of these songs reside in our collective memory. Maybe our grandparents knew one or two and hummed them to us as we slept (or fussed). Today, we may catch a snatch of an oddly affecting refrain in a movie score which inexplicably gives us chills, even if we don’t know the song by name. But there is an explanation: the old songs and stories rest dormant in our synapses, simply waiting to be stirred.  Dylan fearlessly agitated this rich stew of conventions and influences, but was not content to simply pine for the girl from the north country in new, bohemian form. The conventional tropes of wayward lovers and heartbroken homesickness became the framework for the poet’s apocalyptic warnings of Cold War annihilation and even more existential devastation.  In this way, the topical content seemed instantly familiar, and therefore trustworthy.

“When the Ship Comes In” begins with the jaunty vigor of a whaler’s ditty. The brisk time-signature sets the upbeat tone, and the lyrics burst with uncharacteristic optimism in the form of laughing fishes, smiling seagulls, and busted chains buried on the bottom of the ocean. Dylanologists attribute the writing of this 1963 composition as being influenced by “Jenny’s Song” from the Brecht/Weill “Threepenny Opera,” morphed to voice Dylan’s outrage because a hotel clerk refused him a room. Okay, but it’s impossible to not feel that these lyrics have a broader sense of rocking anarchy:

Oh, the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And they’ll know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in

[Chorus]
And they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’, “We’ll meet all your demands”
But we’ll shout from the bow, “Your days are numbered”
And like Pharoah’s tribe
They’ll be drowned in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.

Not only does Dylan include what was to become a lyrical signature—a Biblical reference or two, a habit shared with Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon— but he also reminds us once again in the previous chorus “That the whole wide world is watchin’.” After all, we’re talking about the year which is often called the defining moment of the civil rights movement. On August 28 in the shadow of the Lincoln Monument, MLK assured the March on Washington that…”1963 is not an end, but a beginning” as part of his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Three months later, JFK would be assassinated, derailing one aspect of the dream but igniting the movement’s “fire next time” agenda. No wonder the Pogues later covered this tune in their usual bashing, rollicking style.

Women of Dylan’s era (and others) may never forgive the Minnesota Minstrel for assuming the mantle of a generation’s apologist for men behaving badly, characterized by refusal to commit. The most famous example is found in the lyric of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” where the singer explains that he’ll be gone at the break of dawn because “I gave her my heart, / But she wanted my soul,” released in 1963. Of course, it’s her fault, not his; after all, she’s the reason he’s travellin’ on.

This song is so deeply embedded in the pop psyche that we tend to forget how unusual it was at the time. Gordon Lightfoot would never have had the cojones to write “For Lovin’ Me” (1967) if Dylan had not walked out the door, taken all his blankets from his lover’s floor a few years prior, even though songs of men leaving and women grieving were anything but new. Generations of Anglo-Celtic ballads, including those transposed to the hills and hollers of Kentucky and Tennessee, bemoan non-committal men from a woman’s point of view, but Dylan turns the tables. For instance, “Your Horses Are Hungry” / “The Wagoner’s Lad” is an achingly plain-spoken narrative of a woman who asks simply, “Sit down here by me for as long as you can.” Nothing doing, sweetheart, the dude and his horses are good as gone.

And every acoustic songstress worth her Herbal Essence shampoo back in the day mastered the plaintive “I Never Will Marry,” featuring one folk’s more graphic descriptions of a wham-bam-thank you, Ma’am:

The train pulled out,
The whistle blew,
With a long and a lonesome moan.
He’s gone, he’s gone,
Like the mornin’ dew,
And left me all alone.

Even while immortalized as the ruffian-swain of the stately Joan Baez – “The madonna was yours, for free,” she sang bitterly in her autobiographical “Diamonds and Rust” (1975) – Dylan refused to be guilt-tripped by an unending parade of sad-eyed ladies of the lowlands. Another song, “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” released in 1964, again defends male withdrawal and retreat. Referencing an opening line from several anonymous ballads typically voiced by female singers, the speaker admonishes “Go ‘way from my window, / Leave at your own chosen speed.” Dylan makes no excuses for his request, and anyway, he’s not alone. We’re hard-pressed to identify another song prior to say, the Rolling Stones’ smirking bad-boy catalog, where the masculine brush-off is quite so coolly dismissive.

But the most remarkable instance of early Dylan re-purposing traditional forms is when he takes us into his full-blown, hallucinatory end-days revisioning in “Farewell, Angelina” (1965) and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1962). “Farewell, Angelina” assumes the appearance of yet another man slip-slidin’ away when the emotional going gets tough. Many music historians trace its origins to the Scottish sailing/whaling song “Fareweel Tae Tarwathie,” a haunting piece written by George Scroggie in the 1850s and best sung acapella by Judy Collins. But here, he’s not leaving because she’s making domestic demands. Something far bigger is brewing. The sky is trembling, then on fire, then erupting and just a table standing empty by the edge of the sea means that he must go where it’s quiet.

Songs of leaving and separation compose at least 50 per cent of the folk, blues and rock songbook. Many Dylan songs are written in this context; “Boots of Spanish Leather” begins “Oh, I’m sailin’ away, my own true love, / I’m sailin’ away in the morning.” Or consider the opening of his song simply titled “Farewell”: “Oh, it’s fare thee well, my darlin’ true, / I’m leavin’ in the first hour of the morn’.”   Isn’t he always?  (So go already!)

But “Farewell, Angelina” is Dylan’s Dear Joan letter on vintage Owsley Acid, seemingly penned to the frantic rasp and death-rattle of radio news. As the phantasmagoric imagery piles up—”King Kong, little elves, on the rooftops they dance / Valentino-type tangoes, while the makeup-man’s hands / Shut the eyes of the dead, not to embarrass anyone… Machine guns are warring and the puppets heave rocks, / And fiends nail time-bombs to the hands of the clocks…” –we as listeners feel that creeping dread in the belly that comes with the realization that this is not just another break-up song. Dylan’s recounting the demise of far more than just another soured romance, and by the fire-and-brimstone finale, he can only say what he always says:  “I must go where it’s quiet.”

“Farewell Angelina” revisits Dylan’s earlier travelogue through a political and purgatorial underworld, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” a song which, lo these many years later, remains one of Dylan’s most biting. The Q-and-A format is lifted directly from a discrete body of Anglo-Scottish ballads known loosely as the Lord Randall tradition. Attempting to accurately date this form is a bit like trying to pin an exact date on “Barbara Allen” or “Greensleeves.” Suffice it to say that all three song-ways have been drifting in and out of the pubs, parlors and front porches of the English-speaking world for at least three centuries, probably more, and variants are known in many European languages including Magyar and Wendish. Other versions appear under the names “Henry, My Son,” “Lord Rendal,” “Lord Donald,” and “Amhrán na hEascainne (Song of the Eel)” in Ireland, since the protagonist dies as the result of eating poisoned eels. Yes, the poisoned eels, also fed to the young lord’s hunting hounds, are the work of a woman scorned, according to the song’s layered history.

The story of Lord Randall seems to have been made for the cèilidh, a traditional Scottish and Irish social gathering. It is still often sung in rounds around fireplaces, the seemingly endless and often comic verses interspersed with stories, local gossip, and drink. Dylan’s version begins sweetly enough, with a mother tenderly asking, “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son, / Oh where have you been, my darling young one?” But the speaker’s answers have nothing to do with a spurned sweetheart. The narrator describes “…guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children…where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters…where the executioner’s face is always well-hidden.” He replies that he’s been “ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,” and, most incredibly, he’s going back out there, “…’fore the rain starts a-falling.”

In the original, the young lord returns to his mother’s house to “lay me down and die.”  But Dylan’s blue-eyed son breaks from the narrative in his refusal to surrender or be silent. A year after the song was written, Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, set himself on fire and burned alive at a busy Saigon intersection, and other monks followed his example soon after. Perhaps fewer and fewer Americans now remember that Quảng Đức’s shocking act of self-immolation was not a statement about the Vietnam war, but rather was a final act of protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic church.

At the risk of sounding callous, it hardly matters. The image is, forgive the pun, burned indelibly into the world-consciousness, in spite of our collective wish to forget and drift off to sleep. Human remembering is essential to our love of song. Many of us associate specific sensations, even aromas and textures, with a specific song, as a sort of mnemonic synesthesia. And many of the songs we love best echo from a time and place we don’t consciously recollect. So it is with these Dylan evergreens, rooted in the deep-buried lyrical past but illuminated by the poet who sets himself ablaze, not as an act of self-martyrdom, but to serve as a torch in the darkness. #