Music

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What did you hear? Really. Blonde on Blonde’s nasally whine or Nashville Skyline’s country croon? Which one is Bob Dylan’s real voice? Despite, or perhaps because of, Dylan’s vocal masks, his voice rings true. Or, according to Steven Rings, author of What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan, you believe it does. Yes, Dylan is an impersonator, weaving lies to tell truths, bolstered through imperfections, changing from nothing to one—a prestidigitator. You’re believing his every word.

Steven Rings, an Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, has written a highly engaging and accessible book in What Did You Hear?, without compromising depth and theory. Its main proposal is that Dylan’s sonic imperfections are key to understanding his songs and their impact, offering a refreshing and new framework through which to view Dylan’s music.

Also, it is a framework that is seemingly close to Bob Dylan’s modus operandi, in which the emotional weight of a song—for example, “No More Auction Block”, where Dylan’s pathos-laden moans and cyclical guitar strumming contain the cruel fate that awaited thousands of American slaves—matters more than technical perfection. Additionally, in 1979, Dylan saw humanity’s imperfection revealed through God’s light. “Talk about perfection, I ain’t never seen none,” Dylan fulminates in “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One”.

The Carver-esque book title playfully asks, “What Did You Hear?” It seems simple. Obvious. Intrusive. Once you read What Did You Hear?, though, you realize that it is a question with a purpose: to investigate what we are hearing. With an adept ear and an in-depth understanding of music theory, Rings helps readers understand Dylan the performer, rather than the lyricist or songwriter. In other words, it isn’t about Dylan’s compositions but rather a breakdown of how he performs them, live or in the studio.

Bob Dylan’s Perfect Imperfection

Have you ever wondered about Dylan’s upsinging in the wee small hours? How does the music inform the pronunciation of a lyric? No? I understand—you have a life. However, for those of us who don’t, music theorist Rings provides these answers. Furthermore, Rings showcases Dylan’s multifaceted techniques on various instruments, including voice, guitar, harmonica, and piano, all of which are explained without being overly saturated with music theory, and thus potentially denuding Dylan’s music of its poetic appeal.

Helpfully, especially for a book concerned with sound, Rings has a website, which includes all of the book’s audio and video examples. For certain, this is useful, though the book works just as well without referring to the audio examples.

What Did You Hear? is a welcome and indispensable addition to Dylan scholarship—not an easy task, due to the abundance of books written on the elusive subject. What makes this different, though, is that it puts Dylan as a performer first and foremost, with a particular emphasis on his live performances.

In the introduction, Rings postulates that there has been little written about Bob Dylan’s music; instead, the focus has either been on Dylan’s lyrics or him as a cultural/political figure. However, when Rings creates an inventory of books, with its focus primarily on Dylan’s music, it does not cite Todd Harvey’s 2001 book, The Formative Dylan: Transmission and Stylistic Influences, 1961-1963, which seems worthy of inclusion (Harvey is cited on p. 267 and in the references).

Further in the introduction, Rings posits that, in the early 1960s, Bob Dylan blended African American influences with white folk musicians, such as Woody Guthrie, which is, of course, correct. However, what is incorrect, as Rings implies, is that the two sources of Dylan’s influences were separate. Although influenced by white musicians, such as the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, Guthrie was also influenced by African American musicians: Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker; the latter inspired Guthrie’s vocal phrasing.

Apart from the above-mentioned oversights, What Did You Hear? is scrupulously detailed and exhaustively researched. One of the central premises of What Did You Hear? is that, despite many vocal and musical changes, as well as various personae, Dylan always sounds like himself. To a certain extent, this is a novel idea, as Dylan is often portrayed as a shapeshifting figure with each iteration a stranger to the last.

Yet, it makes sense that there would be distinguishable characteristics of Bob Dylan in each of his transformations; this is not unlike what Dylan writes about Dion DiMucci in his 2022 book The Philosophy of Modern Song (a text filled with self-referential remarks), “Dion DiMucci evolved throughout his career, changing outwardly but maintaining recognizable characteristics across every iteration.”

As Rings writes, “…the critical commonplace that Dylan’s voice is merely a series of ‘masks,’ with no persisting core voice. But any fan also knows that one can always perceive Dylan within or behind the mask.” Also, Rings establishes that the quiddity of Bob Dylan is best personified when the singer-songwriter imitates other singers. Put differently, Dylan, paradoxically, becomes more identifiable himself when adopting different personae and masks. This is just one of the numerous astute observations Rings makes in What Did You Hear?

The most interesting section of What Did You Hear? is Part 1: Voicing, especially chapter four. There Rings delineates a spectrum between speech and song, in which he lists five different nodal points: metered speech (e.g., “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”); syllable-emphatic style (e.g., “Memphis Blues Again”); chant (e.g., “Subterranean Homesick Blues”); contour-inventive style (e.g., “Jokerman”); conventional melody (e.g., “Make You Feel My Love”). In his syllable-emphatic (Rings’ coinage) delivery, Dylan seizes on syllables that we would typically accent, but exaggerates the contrast to the point of mannerism. As Rings writes, “we hear the contours of everyday speech, but in a funhouse mirror.”

Rings addresses another misconception that Dylan’s “true” voice is raspy. As stated by Rings and others, Dylan’s “Nashville Country voice” can be heard in the bootleg recorded at the apartment of Karen Wallace in St. Paul, Minnesota, in May 1960, which, obviously, precedes his rough-hewn folk voice. Thus, what is Dylan’s true voice?

As it is known, Bob Dylan was a rock ‘n’ roller before he became a folk artist, but the two are not mutually exclusive, as Rings points out. The influence of rock ‘n’ roll can be found in his folk period, and vice versa.

As Rings suggests, Dylan’s pedal-to-the-metal acoustic guitar strumming during his folk period was like Buddy Holly, while he was strumming like a folkie when he played the electric guitar in live performances in 1966, which Robbie Robertson disliked. At the Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan went electric, he barely played the electric guitar; it was a symbolic move. Instead, it was Mike Bloomfield, the primary guitarist of Howlin’ Wolf, who made his guitar bleed and scream like Willie Johnson. 

One of the main ideas in What Did You Hear is “flaw imperfection” and “change imperfection”. Essentially, the former refers to an imperfection as a flaw, although it can be purposefully incorporated in old-time music and bluegrass. In contrast, the latter is the difference that arises from repetition, such as when Dylan performs live. Or, as Rings put simply, “he repeats and he differs”.

What Did You Hear? is the musical and vocally equivalent of Christopher Ricks’ book Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004). Whereas Ricks gave a close reading of Dylan’s lyrics and contextualized them in a literary tradition, mostly in Elizabethan and Romanticism literature, and modernism (cue, T. S. Eliot), Rings exemplifies how Dylan’s music and vocals work in the context of predecessors within different genres: folk, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll.

There has been a paradigm shift in Dylan scholarship aimed at bridging the gap between academia and popular writing, as seen in historian Timothy Hampton’s Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (2019), one of the best books ever written on Dylan. Indeed, What Did You Hear? showcases that Rings has a sharp mind, abetted by his generosity of spirit. He never overexplains or treats the reader like a fool; he makes his points with a deftness.

There are moments in What Did You Hear? when Rings lets go of formality and becomes a writer with a gut-punch swagger. For example: “There is still some wobble in the voice, but the overall tone is one of fuck-you confidence, of definitely claiming an identity in the face of bourgeois reproach. Instead of balled fists, a middle finger.”

These sections are surprising as they are refreshing; they punctuate the text with a humanity, and display a writer who takes his ideas—not himself—seriously. (For What Did You Hear?, Rings hasn’t thankfully adopted academic writing, which is often as lifeless as a mortuary, leaving you feel as dead as the body of the text, and wishing that you were dead, as at least then you wouldn’t have to read desiccated prose.)

There is a scintillating idea on p.186, where Rings links Dylan’s harmonica playing to the accordion, after reading a quote by Dylan, in which he said he plays the harmonica like an accordion. Rings traces it to Robert Zimmerman’s childhood in Hibbing, when, in the 1950s, polka bands performed in taverns on Saturday nights. However, I wished Rings had expanded on the point (I like the idea; I’m already half-convinced), and listed examples of polka artists/bands Zimmerman would have heard—Six Fat Dutchmen, Whoopee John Wilfahrt, and Harold Loeffelmacher—and linked them to his harmonica playing, if, of course, the theory holds up.

In the postscript, Rings interestingly states that Bob Dylan’s sounds approach a second-order perfection in their fidelity to imperfect life, an emotional truth which is perhaps a kind of perfection. Indeed, What Did You Hear? carries a lot of emotional truth. Is What Did You Hear a perfect book? I‘ve never read one, and, like listening to Bob Dylan’s imperfect voice, I don’t expect that I ever will.