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 33
... melody with a harmonica reproduction of " My warehouse eyes , my Arabian drums . " This melody can easily be identified , even though the five renderings of the " warehouse " line differ . In the first three stanzas , Dylan sings each ...
... melody with a harmonica reproduction of " My warehouse eyes , my Arabian drums . " This melody can easily be identified , even though the five renderings of the " warehouse " line differ . In the first three stanzas , Dylan sings each ...
Page 106
... melody as published for the ABCB and DEFE segments . ( And far be it from me to do what musicologists have never done , to attach discursive meaning to melodic variations . ) For the last verse line and refrain , however , all six do ...
... melody as published for the ABCB and DEFE segments . ( And far be it from me to do what musicologists have never done , to attach discursive meaning to melodic variations . ) For the last verse line and refrain , however , all six do ...
Page 119
... melodic profile " It ain't me that you're looking for . " And the melody of these refrains , again , is one of very few elements in common with the five earlier performances . This version may strike one first as a parody of the studio ...
... melodic profile " It ain't me that you're looking for . " And the melody of these refrains , again , is one of very few elements in common with the five earlier performances . This version may strike one first as a parody of the studio ...
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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 oral organ chords outtake Oxford Town patterns performance phrase piano pitch plays poetic recorded refrain released rhyme word riff rock Rolling Stone Sad-Eyed Lady scene second stanza sexual 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 Univ unresolved verse vowel woman Woody Woody Guthrie words and music York