In yesterday’s posting I described the great catalog of cultural debts that Bob Dylan offers in his recent memoir, and his sense of how largely any I, any self, is made of the others that have informed it. Thus are great artists not private individual selves, but common selves, and willingly so.
Today I wonder if the blogosphere can help fill out the catalog of Dylan’s debts. Can we collectively make a list of what he has borrowed from traditional sources?
I’ll begin with three items he himself mentions, though even here I’d love to have some help with the details.
1) Of the homage to Woody Guthrie that is on Dylan’s first record he writes: I wrote that song with him in mind, and I used the melody from one of his old songs…. What Guthrie melody was that?
2) He says that his early song, Let Me Die in My Footsteps, is based…on an old Roy Acuff ballad.? What ballad?
3) Dylan’s friend Len Chandler wrote a song about a schoolbus accident in Colorado. It had an original melody and because I liked the melody so much, I wrote my own set of lyrics to it. Len didn’t seem to mind.
A slim start on a catalog of borrowings.
Come Oh Blogosphere! Let us aggregate this scattered knowledge! Sing muses! Tell us what old songs were in the pool from which this bard drank!
Lewis Hyde is an essayist and cultural critic, currently writing a book in defense of the cultural commons.