Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob DylanBob Dylan is not a poet. He is a singer-songwriter, a performing artist. The unit of his art, as collected and documented by his intended audience, is the live performance. Right now, no existing technological tool can give researchers ready access to his entire corpus of work. Revised from the author's Ph.D. dissertation (UC Berkeley, 1978) and again from its first edition (Indiana UP, 1982), Performed Literature develops a methodology for close analysis of verbal art that is heard, not seen, using as comparative examples 24 performances of 11 songs by Bob Dylan. The second edition adds a preface, two major appendices and one minor one, and a detailed index. |
From inside the book
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Page 15
Bryan Ferry's performance, I will show, accentuates the emotional variety of these
shifting scenes and images, allows no thinking time at all between lines, and
does a listener's responding for her. Dylan's 1963 performance, instead, equates
...
Bryan Ferry's performance, I will show, accentuates the emotional variety of these
shifting scenes and images, allows no thinking time at all between lines, and
does a listener's responding for her. Dylan's 1963 performance, instead, equates
...
Page 105
Now folklorist Tristram R Coffin was being pretty radical, in the 1950s, when he
proposed that traditional ballads be regarded aesthetically as songs, not poems,
and that a ballad's "emotional core" is what matters to singers and audiences: ...
Now folklorist Tristram R Coffin was being pretty radical, in the 1950s, when he
proposed that traditional ballads be regarded aesthetically as songs, not poems,
and that a ballad's "emotional core" is what matters to singers and audiences: ...
Page 153
In particular, the triplets that end "struck me kinda funny" and "You won't get it for
money" seem succinct, emotion- packed images for a relationship going bad. By
changing this verse to a more gentle and direct statement, one of regret, Dylan ...
In particular, the triplets that end "struck me kinda funny" and "You won't get it for
money" seem succinct, emotion- packed images for a relationship going bad. By
changing this verse to a more gentle and direct statement, one of regret, Dylan ...
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Common terms and phrases
ABCB aesthetic ain't album artistic audience aural Babe Baby Ballad bass Beatles becomes Blonde on Blonde Bob Dylan chord change concert version couplet culture drums Dylan's songs Dylan's voice effect electric guitar emotional feel female Ferry's four fourth stanza Freewheelin Hard Rain harmonica Highway 61 Highway 61 Revisited Idiot Wind Idiot wind Blowing imagery imitate instrumental break Isis Joan Baez John Wesley Harding listener listener's melody meter Miss Lonely musical beat musicians narrative narrator narrator's Newport 65 organ chords outtake Oxford Town patterns performance phrase piano pitch plays poetic rain's a-gonna fall recorded refrain released rhyme word riff rock Rolling Stone Sad-Eyed Lady scene second stanza Shelter shift singers sings someone song's sound stanza studio version Subterranean Homesick Blues suggests sung lines sweet lady syllables tambourine tape third stanza throughout the song unresolved verse vowel woman Woody Guthrie words and music
Bibliographic information
| Title | Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series |
| Authors | Betsy Bowden, Bob Dylan |
| Edition | 2, illustrated |
| Publisher | University Press of America, 2001 |
| Original from | the University of Michigan |
| Digitized | 11 May 2010 |
| ISBN | 0761819479, 9780761819479 |
| Length | 263 pages |
| Subjects | › › Literary Criticism / General Music / Instruction & Study / Songwriting |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |