In our own time, Bob Dylan is renowned as one of the most prolific songwriters. In an interview with Pete Seeger that is included on Great White Wonder, Dylan says casually: “I might go for two weeks without writing these songs. I write a lot of stuff. In fact, I wrote five songs last night.” I don't know whether the first sentence or the last sentence in that quote is the most unbelievable!
I never could come up with a proper count of the total number of songs that Bob Dylan has written; and I certainly wasn’t going to try to count up the huge lists that I encountered, from Wikipedia on down. The Wikipedia category “Bob Dylan songs” has 312 at present, though it is incomplete: For instance, “I Shall be Free No. 10” from Another Side of Bob Dylan is not on the list, since an article on this song has not yet been written.
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But solo songwriting is a lonely profession, and success is far from guaranteed. Bob Dylan’s first album, Bob Dylan did not particularly showcase Dylan’s songwriting talent; there were only two original songs on the album. and the tunes to both had similarities with his mentor Woody Guthrie’s songs. In fact, says Wikipedia: “Mitch Miller, Columbia [Records]’s chief of A&R at the time, said U.S. sales totaled about 2,500 copies. Bob Dylan remains Dylan’s only release not to chart at all in the US, though it eventually reached #13 in the UK charts in 1965. Despite the album’s poor performance, financially it was not disastrous because the album was very cheap to record.” Bob Dylan was one of the first Dylan albums that I purchased, and I am astounded that this album never made the charts.
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On the other hand, Bob Dylan’s next album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was a big hit, and largely because Peter, Paul and Mary had a #2 hit with “Blowin’ in the Wind” that was released just three weeks after Freewheelin’ – Albert Grossman, who was managing both Dylan and PP&M in that time period, brought them the song, and they immediately recorded and released it.
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This started a whole parade of 1960’s artists who recorded Bob Dylan songs. The Byrds alone released five different Bob Dylan songs as singles, starting with “Mr. Tambourine Man” (their first hit song and only their second single). The 2002 reissue of The Byrds Play Dylan (originally released in 1979) has 20 Dylan songs on it, all recorded during the 1960’s.
Several other major artists have launched their careers with Bob Dylan songs, Olivia Newton-John (“If Not for You”), the Turtles (“It Ain’t Me Babe”), and Cher (“All I Really Want to Do”) among them. Cher’s hit version of “All I Really Want to Do” had to compete on the charts with the Byrds’ version of the same song, “All I Really Want to Do”. Additionally, Manfred Mann and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band have salted their albums with mostly obscure Bob Dylan songs since their third release, As Is (1966).
Masquerading as the Wonder Who? – at the same time that the Who and the Guess Who were current – the Four Seasons released a version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” with Frankie Valli singing an exaggerated falsetto. And there is the excellent cover by the Jimi Hendrix Experience of “All Along the Watchtower”, which seems to be on everyone’s short list of the greatest Bob Dylan covers of all time.
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A bit of serendipity occurred when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez appeared together at the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival singing a duet of a newly written song, “With God on Our Side” (which would appear on Dylan’s next album, The Times They Are A-Changin’). The Festival was in the same month as the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Wikipedia states: “Baez was at the pinnacle of her fame, having appeared on the cover of Time magazine the previous November. The performance not only gave Dylan and his songs a new prominence, it also marked the beginning of a romantic relationship between Baez and Dylan, the start of what Dylan biographer [Howard] Sounes termed ‘one of the most celebrated love affairs of the decade’.”
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Bob Dylan was one of many folksingers in the early 1960’s who were following in Woody Guthrie’s shoes. From Wikipedia: “Dylan wrote of Guthrie’s repertoire: ‘The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them.’ After learning of Guthrie’s whereabouts, Dylan regularly visited him.” Later on, a number of other performers were heralded as the “new Dylan” – so many that the phrase started to sound like an epithet.
Wikipedia states: “Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Hunter, Harry Chapin, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Andy Irvine, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Jerry Garcia, Jay Farrar, Bob Weir, Jeff Tweedy, Bob Childers, and Tom Paxton have acknowledged [Woody] Guthrie as a major influence.”
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I have written previously of another song on Dust Bowl Ballads, “I Ain’t Got No Home”. Although Bob Dylan idolized him, it is one of the very few Woody Guthrie songs that Dylan recorded.
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Woody Guthrie became an active mentor for folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott; because of his deteriorating health from the ravages of Huntington’s Disease, Bob Dylan and his own son Arlo Guthrie said that they actually learned about Guthrie’s music mostly through Elliott. Wikipedia says of this: “When asked about Arlo’s claim, Elliott said, ‘I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn’t teach me. He just said, “If you want to learn something, just steal it — that’s the way I learned from Lead Belly.”’”
(March 2015)
