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. |
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Page 146
... sweet lady , like those of the sad - eyed lady of the lowlands , show mostly parts of her face , beginning here with her mouth . The midrefrain couplet contains two powerful visual images of " blowing , " set apart by the " Idiot wind ...
... sweet lady , like those of the sad - eyed lady of the lowlands , show mostly parts of her face , beginning here with her mouth . The midrefrain couplet contains two powerful visual images of " blowing , " set apart by the " Idiot wind ...
Page 149
... sweet lady , predicting her death with a vicious curse . " Cover up the truth with lies " directly evokes Watergate . The ditch in this scene reinforces road imagery elsewhere , for throughout the song ( as in Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl ...
... sweet lady , predicting her death with a vicious curse . " Cover up the truth with lies " directly evokes Watergate . The ditch in this scene reinforces road imagery elsewhere , for throughout the song ( as in Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl ...
Page 161
... sweet lady and Nixon and the corpse in the ditch , simultaneously ; this outtake line's blinding of the narrator as well is less effectively integrated into previ- ous imagery patterns . The last half of the fourth outtake verse focuses ...
... sweet lady and Nixon and the corpse in the ditch , simultaneously ; this outtake line's blinding of the narrator as well is less effectively integrated into previ- ous imagery patterns . The last half of the fourth outtake verse focuses ...
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Common terms and phrases
ABCB aesthetic ain't Al Kooper album artistic audience aural Babe Baby Ballad bass Beatles Blonde on Blonde Bob Dylan chord change couplet culture drums Dylan's songs Dylan's voice effect electric guitar emotional feel female Ferry's Folklore four fourth stanza Freewheelin Hard Rain hard rain's a-gonna harmonica Highway 61 Revisited Idiot Wind Idiot wind Blowing imagery imitate instrumental break Isis John Wesley Harding listener listener's melody meter Miss Lonely musical beat musicians narrator narrator's oral organ chords outtake Oxford Town performance phrase piano pitch plays poetic rain's a-gonna fall recorded refrain released Retrospective rhyme word riff rock rock music 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 textual third stanza throughout the song tion verse woman Woody Guthrie words and music York