Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature is a blessed relief, a gift of something else to think about, or argue about, that isn’t dire and ugly like the otherOctober surprises the month has thrown at us.
The news offers something else, too, specifically for New Yorkers, for whom Mr. Dylan is close to a native-son, homegrown laureate. Mr. Dylan invented himself here, plugged into its creative artistic grid here, and here came face to face with his greatest early influence.
Dylan becoming Dylan wasn’t going to happen in small-town Minnesota. It was on the narrow streets of Greenwich Village that he got his early gigs and press attention (a 1961 review by a Times music critic, Robert Shelton, was an important career boost). And it was farther out, on a long subway ride into Queens, that Mr. Dylan made a fateful pilgrimage to the home of a transplanted Oklahoman named Woody Guthrie, whose style and methods the young Mr. Dylan lifted for his own. Like his hero, Mr. Dylan found New York’s lefty, folky, hootenanny world highly conducive to his art.
The hallmark of genius, of course, the kind the Nobel committee likes to reward, is creative immensity, the ability to absorb and contain multitudes. Mr. Shelton, impressed by a “bright new face” at Gerde’s Folk City on West Fourth Street, wrote: “Mr. Dylan’s highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge.” He added, “Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.”
This was, in fact, the trajectory. Up and then out, and very far. Folk music did not contain him. The river Mr. Dylan tapped was deep and wide, encompassing folk, blues, gospel, “hillbilly” music and the stew of rock ’n’ roll, to which he added his own strange, inexplicable Dylan thing.
“There’s nothing secret about it,” Mr. Dylan said in an eloquently revealing speech last year, about how deep, deep immersion in folk songs and the blues made his songwriting possible, even inevitable.
“You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all you know. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense. ‘When you go down to Deep Ellum keep your money in your socks / Women on Deep Ellum put you on the rocks.’ Sing that song for a while and you just might come up with, ‘When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too / And your gravity’s down and negativity don’t pull you through / Don’t put on any airs / When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue / They got some hungry women there / And they really make a mess outta you.’”
Well, maybe he might come up with that. A half-century later Mr. Dylan has built a body of work, written and sung, that achieves greatness in its breadth and beauty. He also has a Christmas record — take that, Czeslaw Milosz.
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