Full Description
Discover a new side of the songs of Bob Dylan by exploring the virtues of rough sounds, peculiar intonation, and a raspy voice.
Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he's written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan's music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar.
Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan's songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings. Rings begins—where else?—with Dylan's voice, exploring its changeability, its unmistakable features, and its ability to inhabit characters, including the female narrator of "House of the Rising Sun." Rings then turns to Dylan as an instrumentalist, examining his infamous adoption of the electric guitar in 1965, as well as his stylistically varied acoustic playing, which borrows sounds and techniques from Black blues musicians, among other influences. Rings charts the histories audible in Dylan's harmonica as well as piano, which has been central to his music making since his earliest days of imitating Little Richard in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Finally, Rings guides readers through one of Dylan's most famous songs, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," analyzing its musical sources as well as variations in live performances. A companion website of audio and video examples helps readers notice the nuances and idiosyncrasies inherent in Dylan's work and, even more importantly, their effects.
A close look at an underdiscussed but essential aspect of Dylan's oeuvre, What Did You Hear? offers a fresh understanding of a singular performer, his musical choices, and the meanings that we can hear in his imperfect sounds.
Contents
How to (Not Just) Read This Book
Introduction
Part I: Voicing
Chapter 1. The Fashioned Voice
Chapter 2. Identity and Plurality
Chapter 3. The Empathic Voice
Chapter 4. Words-Music (1): Speechward
Chapter 5. Words-Music (2): Songward
Part II: Playing
Chapter 6. Guitar: Sound and Symbol
Chapter 7. Harmonica: Breathing Room
Chapter 8. Piano: Seeking and Finding
Part III: Sounding "Hard Rain"
Chapter 9. What Did You Hear, My Blue-Eyed Son? The Musical Sources
Chapter 10. Six Crooked Highways: Time and Harmony in the Guitar Part
Chapter 11. I'll Know My Song Well: "Hard Rain" in Performance, 1962-1978
Chapter 12. I'll Tell It and Think It and Speak It and Breathe It: "Hard Rain" in Performance, 1980-2017
Afterword: On Perfection
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Notes
References
Index
