Should artists who borrow from others be thought of as thieves or as commoners? In asking that question in several posts on this site last summer here, and here I offered some details about Bob Dylan’s debts to musicians and songwriters who came before him.
I have since found a remarkable book that documents such debts for the first seventy songs that Dylan recorded in the 1960s. Todd Harvey’s The Formative Dylan was published in 2001 by the Scarecrow Press of Lanham, Maryland, and London. Harvey is a composer and musicologist living in Washington, D.c., where he works at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center.
“Almost every song in this period [1961-1963] had a clear predecessor,“ Harvey writes. “Almost a third of the melodies in these 70 songs are original to Dylan,” he tells us. “The remaining two-thirds of the melodies Dylan used in his early songs were borrowed from the Anglo- and African-American traditional song repertory.”
Harvey’s book consists of short essays on the roots of each of the 70 songs from the 1961-1963 period. These have wonderfully full detail and good documentation. Take Dylan’s signature tune from the end of that period, “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” written in October of 1963. Harvey writes that “the song has original lyrics set to a variation of the ‘Paths of Victory’ melody.” The latter was, in turn, a song Dylan wrote in November 1962, based on “Deliverance Will Come,” a 19th-century Protestant hymn written in the 1830s by one John B. Matthias or in the 1870s by a certain W. McDonald, or else simply indigenous to southwest Virginia, origin unknown.
Dylan probably heard the hymn on early recordings by Uncle Dave Macon and by the Carter Family. The original hymn includes the lines:
“Palms of Victory, crowns of Glory / Palms of Victory I shall wear.”
To read those lines is to see how Dylan sometimes works: his “Paths of Victory” simply places new words over the old:
“Trails of troubles, roads of battles, / Paths of victory, we shall walk.”
“Paths of Victory” is indebted – melody, words, and phrasing – to the nineteenth-century hymn, and variants of the melody turn up as well in “When the Ship Comes In,” “One Too Many Mornings,” and of course, “The Times They Are A-Changin.’”
To describe this case is to give only a small sample of the wealth of knowledge that Harvey has assembled in his book. It’s an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to see the degree to which a great artist like Dylan – be he a thief or be he a commoner –must begin by absorbing and inhabiting a tradition he inherits from the past.