by Michael Masterson

(Photo Source: Harry Goodwin/Star File in Guitar World, March 1999)

On the Tuesday before Christmas, 1998, NBC's Bob Costas interviewed rock musician and songwriter John Mellencamp for the Today Show, a session meant both to glean insights into Mellencamp's life and, of course, plug his new album. In the course of the interview, after the usual prattle about a young Johnny Cougar becoming a mature John Mellencamp (why does he still have to deal with that after 20 years?), they began a conversation about artistry, craftsmanship, and pretension. Sensing a welcome turn in the discussion, Mellencamp engaged immediately. He described his role in the music world as long-lasting because he and his musicians provide good, solid songs that illustrate small town life in an everchanging American culture. Ordinary people identify with the lyrics and sounds in his musical vignettes of life. Mellencamp made the point that good craftsmanship kept him in the business unlike so many one-hit wonders who don't last in the music world after their one lucky strike.

Costas brought up artistry and the acknowledged influence of Bob Dylan on Mellencamp's music. Mellencamp avoided calling himself an "artist" and began a generic criticism of musicians who think much higher of themselves than their body-of-work might allow. Costas interrupted, asking if Mellencamp meant that many so-called rock artists might be "pretentious." In a burst of intensity, John turned toward Costas and agreed. Then, after dissing all the hair-swinging bands out there, Mellencamp made the point that Bob Dylan was an artist because "he changed the world." Using Mellencamp's just established criteria, Costas asked if Bruce Springsteen was an artist. After a few seconds of silence, clearly an interval of intense reflection, Mellencamp quietly replied, "No." To him Springsteen was exceptional with an earned status in the music world, but Dylan was an artist because he "changed the world." The implication was crystalline: Springsteen, Mellencamp and others musically represent modern American life in appealing ways that have led to much critical and commercial success, but Bob Dylan was on a higher level because his musical depictions changed people's lives, including Mellencamp's and Springsteen's.

Now I was engaged. The TV interview had fanned the flames of intense discussion enough to grab an audience member. I agreed with John Mellencamp's criteria for artistry. And he certainly struck a strong personal chord with me when he asserted that craftsmanship as a cultural value has been undervalued. In this television conversation, Mellencamp clearly articulated strong beliefs that mattered to him, and because musicians by definition symbolize societal values with their art, they matter to our culture at large as well. (1) He was doing with spoken words what his songs have done for years--describing values that point to both how we Americans live and how perhaps we should live. In many ways over the last two decades, musicians like Mellencamp and Springsteen have modeled a way of life for artisans in other fields like writing, carpentry, pottery, cooking, sculpture, painting, and many more. They demonstrate that people can actually make a living in a chosen vocation instead of in mainstream corporate America. Examples abound. Think of all the arts and artisans represented on cable TV or the internet. Very few folks become artists that change the world, but most can develop high levels of competence that create alternative, yet quality ways of living.

But as I listened to the discussion come to an end, musical questions came to mind--questions that the interview certainly was not going to get to in the next minute-and-a-half of wrap up, questions that rarely receive articulate responses though they are often answered beneath the level of language in the realm of an audience's feeling responses to music. What is there about Dylan's music that changed the world? We know it happened. We can hear it in the music. Dylan's folk, rock, pop, blues and country songs from the early and mid-60s changed the Beatles music of the late 60s. It shaped new groups like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. It encouraged the singer/songwriter era of the early 70s. It affected country artists like Johnny Cash. And it led directly to Bruce Springsteen who was signed as the "new Dylan" in 1973. Bob Dylan's music has affected our American culture as a whole. He's quoted by Presidents. He inspired cultural protests. His music is heard on film scores. He brought the power of poetry and socially conscious lyrics to popular music. His songs are covered by musicians from folk to pop to rock to metal to R&B to country, who often attract a larger audience and receive more revenue from sales than did Dylan's original versions. During the 1960s, he helped a mostly adolescent popular culture gain a sense of maturity during a time of cultural struggle by giving voice to more mature representations of life.

Questions return. What is there in Dylan's sound that enabled his influence on dominant music making in American culture? It had to be alternative in nature from the mainstream musical sound, or Dylan would not have been credited by John Mellencamp and others with "changing the world." And it likely retains an alternative nature even in the present, or his own accounts of his songs would attract more audience sales.

I considered these questions, thinking of my recent listening to Dylan's new release, Bob Dylan Live 1966: The 'Royal Albert Hall' Concert, the famous bootleg album finally delivered to the general public thirty-two years after the fact. It's a classic live album, perhaps the best live album ever because Dylan is "on" with "dramatic force," even snarling with anger at the catcalls from the audience for changing his style from the first set of acoustic folk music, to the second riveting rock set with his band "The Hawks," later to become "The Band." This concert, not actually held in Albert Hall as the bootleg suggests, but at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on May 17th, 1966, represents Dylan at his best as he expands his artistic vision beyond the folk/protest reality. The audience, however, gets what they need, not what they want. Expecting folk music, they heckle and rhythmically clap as he tunes his electric guitar, making the concert a war of wills. Dylan responds to the challenge and infuses his music with biting freshness and "ferocious concentration." It's an "epic" performance of Bob Dylan at his "mischievous" best, a perfect concert that demonstrates how he changed the world. (2)

As I listened to Live 1966, after the Mellencamp interview concluded, I began to focus on Dylan's vocal quality and style, aspects of his performance brought to my attention again by Mellencamp's comments. As Dylan riveted the audience with his intense, timeless versions of "Desolation Row," "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "Like a Rolling Stone," among several others, his singing rarely centered on the notes of his melodies but instead slid up to the notes and away, or down to the notes and around. He swooped, soared, and glided but never settled on the core of the notes as do most mainstream singers. He was singing all the pitches of the tune except the centered ones that might be written in a songbook or musical score. Now this is not a revelation. Dylan analysts and listeners know this to be true in so much of his music. You can find similar insights written in many essays and books. (3) All his ragged pitch sliding, in combination with his raspy, raw, nasal, intense vocal quality, remains noisy to many listeners, much of the reason why other more conventional sounding singers with their cover versions, like Peter, Paul, and Mary in the early 60s with "Blowing in the Wind," or Garth Brooks with "To Make You Feel My Love," in 1998, sell more copies of his songs.

Dylan's distinctive voice did not and does not fit mainstream singing models of beauty and artistry. In the engaging historical liner notes enclosed with the Live 1966 CD, musician Tony Glover concurs almost apologetically: "It may be true that Bob never had a great voice, but dammit, it's evocative and delivers his words with just-right emotional intensity--can you imagine doing them (Dylan's songs) with more compassion or authority?" (4)

My answer is: "Of course not." For the majority of Americans, however, Dylan's singing style is so raw, raspy and ragged that they love the songs but avoid the singer. But it's his way of singing, as well as the songs that have helped Dylan change the world. Mainstream popular music, descended from the century-old Tin Pan Alley tradition, primarily celebrates songs sung by a "star" or lead voice creating a personally styled version of the song with a clean vocal timbre, focused pitches in the melody, and lyrics mixed "hot" above the supportive rhythmic and harmonic accompaniment of a rhythm section. Modern singers in this mold crossover many popular styles and include such people as Faith Hill, Vince Gill, Celine Dion, or Brandy. Earlier vocalists might include Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Julie Andrews, and even much of Elvis' repertoire over the years. Emphasis is on the individual singer and a personal, expressive interpretation of the song with the accompanying voices and instruments performing in a "blended" way that supports the lead melody.

Musicians call this kind of musical texture "homophonic" with its "harmonic bed supporting a predominant melody." This texture is heard in perhaps "90 per cent of the music popular and classical, that we in the West make and hear." Homophonic texture represents in sound a societal hierarchy with definite divisions of labor among the leaders and followers in a society. In this musical model of a culture's fabric, the leaders of a society expect other members to blend their individual talents and voices in an embrace of common goals. This texture provides a fine metaphor for the desired organizational structure of modern industrial society. (5)

BIABH sessions, January 1965; Kramer Photo

Bob Dylan uses this homophonic texture often in his music. His lyrics, voice, and harmonica often dominate the guitar chords and rhythms he strums when he performs solo, as in "Visions of Johanna," during the first half of the Live 1966 concert. And when singing with The Hawks during the second half of the program on "Like A Rolling Stone," among other songs, his voice moves in and out of the musical fabric, often riding over the top of the instrumentals in a leader/accompaniment texture. But another texture is heard in the sound and style of Dylan's singing and the band's overall music making. With his ragged, raspy and robust swooping, gliding and soaring over, under, and around the pitches of the melody rather than clearly on the tune itself, Dylan consciously avoids the clear lead role common to mainstream Tin Pan Alley or classic singing styles. In his authoritative interpretations of the songs, he includes, however briefly in his sliding and gliding, the multiple pitches of many other possible interpretations. It's as if a gathering of people were also singing the song, each using their own slightly different set of pitches and rhythms.

I'll state this in another way: In his vocal performance style, Dylan sings a variety of versions of the song simultaneously. A result of his raspy, sliding vocal timbre is that he creates a musical texture that includes the potential voices of many others in society. He performs solo but expresses a multiplicity of voices. Avoiding the one melodic voice of leadership hierarchy, Dylan vocalizes communality and equality. Of course it's noisy, ragged, and raspy, but also robust, compassionate, and authoritative. In Live 1966, Dylan sounds a unifying voice of America in all its cultural diversity and individual equality. In Dylan's representation of life Americans are singing the same tune but maintaining differences as they move over, around, and through the notes and rhythms. This kind of texture, often defined as "heterophonic" is not well understood in Western societies, nor does it usually apply to solo singing. It's an ancient texture in so many ways to mainstream homophonic sounds, but it's a texture still heard today, as the following explanations and examples demonstrate.

Heterophony has been likened to a group of pedestrians crossing the street at a busy intersection in a large city. A signal is given, and everyone crosses in the same direction but they walk, saunter, jog, or march in their own unique way. Listen to any group of friends, parents, or siblings sing "Happy Birthday" at a party, and you hear heterophonic texture. But it's not just "sloppy," "bad," or not having "a great voice" singing. You can hear it in Irish bands or Bluegrass music as the performers play the primary melody with slight variations in the different instrumental voices. It occurs with less precision but perhaps more enthusiasm in congregational hymn singing at many churches. And heterophony is often shouted out in Blues, Rock, R & B, and Gospel musics. (6) Early jazz bands at the turn of the century must have sounded a cacophony of heterophonic melodies, rasps and swoops if the funeral band descriptions are accurate at all. (7)

It's certainly a "noisy" texture compared to the music making standards of Western Civilization founded on the unisons of Gregorian Chant. A unison desires its citizenry literally to sing as one. Everyone must match pitch, timbre, consonants, vowels, and rhythms perfectly. Unisons provide an incredible sound and cultural function when performed accurately. Imagine large congregations of people in churches, orchestras, or other celebrations performing as one. What a model for a society trying to unify, work, and think together. Plato preferred unisons and disliked heterophony because heterophonic textures encouraged too much individuality. (8) However, try as we might to emulate these European-based sounds in our many American musics--and we do in beautiful ways, just think of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man"--Americans still create and enjoy noisy sounds of independence and community.

America's great iconoclastic composer at the turn of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Charles Ives, experimented with quarter tone tuning for pianos instead of the normal semitone or half-step tuning common to Western Civilization's music to recreate the wilder, noisier, heterophonic sounds he heard at his father's town band rehearsals and performances in nineteenth century New England. Ives' experiments provided a dissonant sound of music that transcended the middle class' sentimental, nostalgic music making of the day derived mostly from European and American parlor songs, forerunners to Tin Pan Alley sounds. He preferred the noisy authority of ordinary Americans making powerful music with intense emotions and transcendent feelings no matter their inability to satisfy the artistic standards of European-style aristocratic music-making. Bob Dylan and Charles Ives seem cut from the same cloth. But it's a fabric with earlier threads in America. For centuries American Indian music in most tribes and manifestations has been and continues to be sung in heterophonic ways. When contemporary powwow participants strike their drums and raise their voices in song they sing mostly in a Plains Indian style that requires a raspy, nasal, aggressive, forceful timbre. As they sing together the melody of the song, there are no harmony or supporting parts other than the rhythm of the drum; the singers create their own individual versions of the musical line using variants of pitch and rhythm. The overall sound effect can intrigue the unfamiliar listener with its power, strength, and uniqueness, but can also confuse with the "noisiness" of its multi-pitched melody. In this music, as Dylan does symbolically on Live 1966, the American Indians literally sing in a communal style with the participants vocalizing together in multiple, individual ways. They sound as one large fibrous strand, but the one thick cable contains a variety of filaments and threads winding in and around each other in ways that can be both rough and gliding.

Now, at the end of the twentieth century, mainstream America listens to American Indian music with more understanding and cultural awareness than their forebears. Over a century ago, after the American Indians had been conquered by the American cavalry and settlers, Buffalo Bill Cody created a traveling Wild West show celebrating the "Winning of the West." For over 30 years, from 1883 to 1916, the American Indians in the show presented aspects of their indigenous American culture to mass audiences across America and Europe, educating and entertaining them with authentic song and dance. Newspaper accounts include many references to American Indian music and its "unearthly," "queer," "weird," "howling," "whooping," and "buzz saw" heterophonic noisiness. These Victorian Era audiences responded with both fascination and resistance to this "exotic" music because it represented in sound cultural values quite different from those of the middle and upper classes of nineteenth century America and Europe. European ideas of centered unities of sound and society were challenged by the raspy timbral assertiveness of personal difference heard in the wide, varied, decentered pitches and rhythms of the music of the first Americans. (9) To European and mainstream American Wild West show audiences, American Indian music represented an often frightening social alternative to the desired cohesion of modern industrial societies, especially to Americans who clearly remembered the violent disunity of the Civil War. (10) Raspy timbres and heterophonic textures define American Indian music, but, as described earlier, they also define Bob Dylan's music.

Does Dylan's music sound like American Indian music or that of Charles Ives? No. But does it have analogous sound characteristics representing similar values of cultural and personal assertiveness. Yes, and there are more historic forerunners to this sound.

America's earliest European settlers in New England and the Southwest brought hymn and other singing traditions with them, but few instruments or songbooks. The churches encouraged the people to sing a variety of sacred lyrics to a few familiar hymn tunes to avoid learning new melodies for every text. And the melodies were to be sung the "regular" way, as learned in Europe. But it wasn't long before the new citizens slowed the melodies down, encouraging fresh harmonizing and embellishing of melodic ideas which subverted the old hymns with new variations. An American heterophony based on European sources was born. Shaped-note Sacred Harp singing with its equal-voiced group harmonic shouting developed from this early hymn singing during the Jacksonian Era of the nineteenth century. Sacred Harp music, with all the heterophonic voices on the same flat plane of the texture, was an early musical representation of social equality for all despite the social class a person was born to. (11)

African Americans also participated in the Sacred Harp movement both before and after slavery. However, sliding, gliding, slurring, buzzing, ragging, and embellishing melodies was part of the African heritage of music making. Through field hollers, work songs, gospel hymn singing, spirituals, and later the blues, African Americans brought their own heritage of heterophonic singing to the twentieth century. (12) Bob Dylan's music is clearly rooted in the aforementioned common, working-class American musical and cultural traditions (just listen to the recordings of the music cited above). In his grainy, noisy, gliding, and buzzing singing style, Bob Dylan has internalized these diverse traditions (and their modern manifestations of Folk, Country, R&B, Rock and Roll, Gospel, Jazz and more), understood their implications, and created an American music sounding contemporary overtones of equality, communality, and personal identity and power. English musicologist Wilfrid Mellers recognized this combining aspect of Dylan's music by calling him a "Jewish Amerindian and White Negro" in his book about Dylan and American culture whose title portrays a similar notion, A Darker Shade of Pale: A BackdropTo Bob Dylan. Mellers points out quite accurately that American culture, as represented in its music, has roots in more colorful places than Europe.

Dylan's singing style mediates American cultural difference by connecting diverse ethnic musical streams into a powerful flood of sound that often overflows the riverbanks containing popular mainstream music. In so doing Dylan provides modern America a new aesthetic for artistic decision making, an alternative to the "regular," contained choices. The result: a changing of the world.

It's a familiar aesthetic, however. In this century we have heard it in the instrumental styles of Scott Joplin's piano, Louis Armstrong's and Bix Beiderbecke's trumpet, Charlie Parker's saxophone, or B.B. King's and Jimi Hendix's guitar, and in the singing styles of Bessie Smith, Armstrong again, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Elvis, and more. Rooted in traditional American musical sounds, this alternative aesthetic reveals a richer "body" of American music. These more substantial musics transcend the day-to-day average styles of music that express commonly held understandings of emotional content; styles that fulfill but rarely challenge, that require subjective statements of like or dislike but never mysterious ones of awe or wonder, or that expect adjective descriptions like thoughtful, relaxing, or exciting but never call forth discussions of the life forces at work in the music. Mainstream music has many purposes, fulfills the majority of American's aesthetic needs, and requires a high level of music-making abilities (think of John Mellencamp's career as a musical craftsman, for example), but is often linked to current styles, trends, personalities, and fashions rather than to representations of fundamental life patterns.

Dylan's songs and vocals, however, present music connected to the depths of American culture. Philosopher Roland Barthes attributes the profound power of a vocal sound to "the grain of the voice." To Barthes, a voice with a grain goes "beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form . . . and even the style of execution. . . . The voice is not personal (as in personalities) . . . and at the same time it is individual: it has us hear a body which has no civil identity (we hear culture rather than celebrity).... Above all, this voice bears along directly the symbolic, over the ...expressive. . . . The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the (individual and cultural) body speaking its mother tongue." (13)

Dylan's vocal power becomes more evident with Barthes' insights. Dylan avoids singing the expressive style familiar to audiences who expect music coded to please them. He allows the Byrds, Garth Brooks, and many others to do that, to popularize his music. Instead, Dylan sings sounds that represent deeply-rooted American archetypes, the cultural identity that goes beyond the moment and into symbolic timelessness. In his lyrics and way of singing, he models an inclusive reality combining the strands of diverse American cultural voices. His vocal grain may not be the "great" voice of the moment, but it provides Americans with ageless musical insights into multiple realities that lead to responses involving deeper emotions and more thoughtful engagement. In Dylan's music, the "I" of the listener's personal reality becomes disturbed by the "we" of the "different" inherent truths of other life possibilities. (14) As John Mellencamp reminds us: Bob Dylan changed the world. And he does it with American songs that perfectly, often mischievously, integrate text, voice, and culture in ways that challenge us to live more intensely and profoundly . . . a true alternative.

Notes

1. John Shepherd, Phil Virden, Graham Vulliamy, Trevor Wishart, Whose Music: A Sociology of Musical Languages (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1977), p.1. Also Robert Walser, Running With The Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), pp. 26-56.

2. David Fricke, Review of Bob Dylan: Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert-The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4. RollingStone.com.

3. Here are just a few of the 144 book entries listed in an Amazon.com search for "Bob Dylan." Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, 1997. Carl Benson, ed., The Bob Dylan Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, 1997. Paul Williams, Bob Dylan Performing Artist 1960-1973: The Early Years. Bob Dylan Performing Artist 1974-1986: The Middle Years, 1994. Tim Riley, Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary, 1999.

4. Tony Glover, Liner essay in Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert: The Bootleg Series Vol.4, (New York: Columbia Records/Legacy #C2K 6579, 1998), p. 15.

5. David Reck, Music of the Whole Earth, (New York: Charles Scribnerís Sons, 1977), pp. 288-302.

6. Reck, pp. 312-325.

7. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music, (New York: Oxford University Press, original ed., 1964, this ed. 1987) p. 283. Also Amiri Baraka aka LeRoi Jones, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It, (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963), 7 pp. 145-150.

8. Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1973), p. 383.

9. Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1968), p. 205.

10. Michael L. Masterson, "Sounds of the Frontier: Music in Buffalo Billís Wild West," Diss. The University of New Mexico, 1990, (Ann Arbor: UMI, #9033340), pp. 253-283.

11. White Spirituals from the Sacred Harp, New World Records, #80205-2, 1976.

12. The Roots of the Blues, New World Records, #80252-2. Also Wiregrass Singers: Negro Sacred Harp Singing, New World Records, #80433-2. There is much white and black heterophony heard in the three volumes recorded by Harry Smith in his Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, (Washington D.C., 1977, from original Folkways recordings, 1952).

13. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 179-189.

14. David Citino, The World Without, poem, (Columbus, OH: Logan Elm Press, 1977).