Bob Dylan, 1978

“You can do anything with your voice if you put your mind to it. I mean, you can become a ventriloquist or you can become an imitator of other people’s voices. I’m usually just stuck with my own voice. I can do a few other people’s voices.” –Bob Dylan, 1978

“Here’s your throat back, thanks for the loan”

In light of some of my recent attempts to identify the elements that make for an effective or convincing performance of a murder ballad, I found this video particularly interesting. The talk, recorded last October at the University of Chicago, presents some early findings of Professor Steven Rings’s study of the characteristics of Bob Dylan’s voice over the course of 50 years or so of live performances. I just came across the talk on Monday, and I thought a short “Interlude” post would be good to tide us over until next week.

Here’s the talk in its entirety.



Some of you may recall in our discussion of covers of Norman Blake’s “Billy Gray” that I used an analogy to Aristotle’s Rhetoric to try to explain how a singer projects authenticity in the song–effectively evoking the right ethos, or character, to make the song believable. This issue came up again last week in our discussion of covers of “Sing Me Back Home,” where we discussed how some performances can cut against the tone of the lyrics because they are perhaps just a little too pretty.

I won’t go into reprising all the details of Rings’s very interesting and entertaining talk. You can watch it through the link above. The first half, roughly, sets the stage with clear examples, and the latter half gets to the meat of our discussion here. Rings supports his argument with some helpful spectrographic analyses of the vocal overtones in Dylan’s highly imitative and affected singing style. I appreciated how this gave some objective data to look at in pursuing this issue of vocal authenticity or credibility. I also appreciated that he offers a more precise conceptual way of analyzing it than I had come up with in my rough analogy to classical rhetoric. In this case it is phoné (voice) working against or with logos (word) to convey meaning. Something is happening here, and Rings knows what it is.

Rings’s phoné/logos discussion takes its bearings in part from the work of Slovene philosopher and literary critic Mladen Dolar, and his book, A Voice and Nothing More. He also cites the work of Adriana Cavarero, and her book, For More than One Voice, as helpful for exploring this interplay between sound an meaning.

The key quote, though, for me is the one Rings provides from Sam Cooke, reflecting on the way Dylan’s sound began to revolutionize music in the early 60’s. Hearing Dylan’s music, Cooke commented to one of his back-up singers:

Sam Cooke

“From now on it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It’s going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.”
  — Sam Cooke

As Rings mentions, Cooke’s encounter with Dylan’s early work inspired his own “A Change is Gonna Come.” (on Spotify)

The ironic thing, Rings explains, is that Dylan becomes more ‘believable,” sounding more like himself (or at least our understanding of the authentic Dylan voice), the more he imitates others–be they Woody Guthrie, Delta bluesmen, or Egyptian singers. Dylan’s choice of voice makes a huge difference in a song’s effectiveness, and almost always because he’s using a voice different from his more natural, unaffected singing style.  I think that we’d still be helped by considering the artistic ethos Dylan projects to the mix of what serves this purpose, as his vocal affectations were corroborated (mostly) by the various and constantly shifting personae he’s inhabited as an artist over the years–not the least of these, certainly, being his choice to leave “Robert Zimmerman” behind. Rings and Cooke are on target, though, with the aesthetic switch that Dylan effects through his voice.

“I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.”

None of this, I suppose, has to do specifically with murder ballads per se. We’ve heard, however, through any number of the songs we’ve explored that various characteristics like empathy and compassion can be crucial to the song’s credibility or its artistic effectiveness. Voice, I think is crucial for this. Consider, for instance, Lyle Lovett’s approach to “Mack the Knife.”  More recently, we’ve suggested that Joan Baez’s take on “Sing Me Back Home,” threatens to convert the listener’s empathy for the condemned prisoner to pity for him, thereby taking the song in a decidedly different direction.

With murder ballads, the voice singer inhabits might be victim, perpetrator, or witness, or combinations of any or all of these. As we’ve seen time after time, the stories these narrators tell may not be entirely accurate, and are never complete. We’ve talked about these credibility gaps in the narrative in all kinds of ways, from unreliable narrators in “Pancho and Lefty” to an inherent instability of meaning in “Edward,” among other places. With these kind of challenges in the stories we’re hearing and telling through the ballads, voice alone may sometimes be the primary vehicle for the song’s credibility. Regardless of whether the story the ballad tells is true, as listeners to others or as singers ourselves the capacity of the singer’s voice to find it’s own match to the heart of the song may provide the only truly persuasive reason to believe it.  

“It’s alright, Ma”

Perhaps I’ve introduced more loose ends than sewn up arguments, but I do find some promising threads for our on-going conversation. And, just so we don’t leave this post lacking for music, I’ll add a short Spotify playlist for this post that will help flesh out some of the contrasts Rings explores above, plus a few YouTube videos for those not able to access Spotify. I can’t line the Dylan performances up precisely with the examples Rings cites, but they should give some sense of the variety.