Bob Dylan: The Freewheelin¹ Bob Dylan :: Essays Papers

Bob Dylan: The Freewheelin ¹ Bob Dylan When I was growing up, Bob Dylan was more of a name on paper to me than a person. I knew Peter, Paul & Mary's covers of his songs better than I knew his. My parents listen to a lot of folk music--Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Woody and Arlo Guthrie--but somehow Bob Dylan never entered the mix. Even after it somehow filtered into my consciousness that he'd written these songs I'd known all my life, that he was a performer, he remained mysterious. Photographs always seem to show him looking down, away from the camera, an expression of brooding concentration fixed on his face. When I heard the original versions of the songs I knew, like "Blowin' In the Wind," I liked the covers better. I liked the melody and harmony. Dylan's vocal style was a little too slipshod. It wasn't quite talking but it wasn't quite singing, he slurred his words and ended lines before it felt like they were done, and his timing was off. But it's that ambiguity--clear as spli t pea soup, as they say--that keeps drawing me back. Like the lines that end early, leaving you with the sense that the important part was left unsaid, more is implied by Dylan than said straight out. I keep going back, wanting to hear more, hoping that maybe this time he'll finish that thought. Maybe this time I'll get it. But I never quite do. He's never appealed to me as a singer, but his style and character are unmistakable, his charisma magnetic and powerful. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was Dylan's first album of almost-all original songs, the album that announced his potential and talent to the world, announced the arrival of folk music's "poet-prophet." (Friedlander 139) It's pre-electric Dylan, rootsy sounding, just the man, a guitar, and a harmonica. That a man could write new songs that sound so traditional--songs like "Down the Highway" and "Talkin' World War III Blues" aren't a far cry from Leadbelly or John Lee Hooker--is part of the genius, the intrigue, of Bob Dylan. He's simultaneously traditional and revolutionary. Some songs have achieved this mythic antiquity--sounding like they were written much more than forty years ago--over time. "Oxford Town" alternates (often mid-line) between Dylan's characteristic hoarse, thin growl and a lower, clearer, more resonant tone reminiscent of Pete Seeger.