Life, and Life Only: “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
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“Those early songs were almost magically written”
Screencap of CBS News 60 Minutes Interview with Bob Dylan (2004)
Dylan looks back on “It’s Alright, Ma” as a work of magic that he can’t replicate. He discussed it in an interview with CBS’s Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes. After uncharacteristically reciting his own lyrics, the first verse of “It’s Alright, Ma,” he says:
“Try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time.”
Dylan was only 23 when he wrote the song, yet mortality looms over it. “Bleeding” is the only word in the title that doesn’t appear in the lyrics. Dylan has titles that don’t appear in his lyrics in some songs, and song titles that do in others. This one is a hybrid, and “Bleeding,” with it’s ironic, parenthetical emphasis, catalyzes the mortality themes within the song. We understand the stakes throughout the song’s stanzas, and the theme comes home in the fifth set of stanzas:
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely
In Bob Dylan: All the Songs, authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon maintain that “It’s Alright Ma” marks Dylan’s return “to the protest songs of his early career.” They find the song pessimistic, and one in which “severely criticizes the hypocrisy and commercialism of a society led by a ‘junk elite.’” Professor David R. Shumway characterizes this protest theme in a specific way, in conversation with other Dylan scholars:
“According to Nick Bromell, Dylan’s earlier protest songs were ‘liberal’ because they were sung on behalf of others, but with Bringing It All Back Home there is a radicalism rooted in ‘the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed’ (…quoting Greg Calvert). The singer now understands himself to be denied the freedom he once portrayed as denied only to society’s Others, and the song’s social critique combines surrealism, with more explicit charges: ‘Advertising signs that con you/Into thinking you’re the one/That you can do what’s never been done/That can win what’s never been won.’”
Part of what undercuts the case for “It’s Alright Ma” as a protest song is that protest songs focus on matters people can change, at least in principle. That doesn’t pertain here. Furthermore, protest songs aim to animate others to action. That’s also absent, and Dylan explicitly denies that “call to action” reading of his songs in his interview with Bradley. “They weren’t sermons,” he says. While I wouldn’t go so far as to characterize the song as “pessimistic,” I don’t hear Dylan implying that the corrosive forces around him might be other than they are, or that he can change them. Everything is fallen, but “It’s alright, Ma, I can make it.” The artist suffers, Job-like, holding fast to the good.
Bob Dylan at Newport Folk Festival, 1965 (credit: unknown)
Despite not being a sermon, what also makes this life or death song less of a protest song is the transcendent framework that Dylan interjects. All these slings and arrows of artistic fortune become relevantized by what really matters. Although he sings “not much is really sacred,” an undercurrent of some kind of faith flows within this song.
For instance, Dylan describes an episode that leaves more than just vague traces in the rhymes of “It’s Alright, Ma.” It provides one tangible anecdote for understanding his grievance, but in doing so, the lyrics raise an important, if implicit, question about that undercurrent of faith and where it flows. Brief glimpses of the transcendent throughout the song inform the answer to that question. These hints become augmented now by the sense of mystery that Dylan himself at times attaches to his creative process.
Here is the episode, described by Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One (cited by Shumway):
“Ronnie Gilbert, one of the Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, ‘And here he is…take him, you know him, he’s yours.’ I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis never had been introduced like that. ‘Take him, he’s yours!’ What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now.”
Dylan sings:
You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to
The concluding lines of these stanzas invite the question of to whom the artist does belong. Dylan laments the toxic pageant that he describes in the main stanzas, but doesn’t propose he can change it so much as defy it. The faith that secures him in that defiance presents the implicit question. Knowing something about Dylan’s subsequent religious odyssey and his impression of these songs as “magically written,” we might offer a different answer now than listeners might have hazarded then. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” remains one of Dylan’s most frequently performed songs over his career. He has performed it well over 700 times. I suspect the answer to that question continues to evolve.
The song’s final line reinforces the notion that life and death yield precedence to a higher value.
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
You may take that last line as ironic. In doing so, you will likely meet Dylan somewhere between where you are and where he is. It offers a defiant, final rejection of the inauthentic. It declares that life alone, stripped of “death’s honesty,” is not the paramount value – or at least his. “Death is not the end.” Life isn’t either.