The Singer-Songwriters: Part One Artwork

American Song

American Song is a podcast that traces the origins and development of American - and ultimately world-wide - forms of modern musical entertainment. Over time, we will trace every major genre from its origins through the current day.American Song looks at the development of our music through the lens of social, political, and economic changes that were occurring in each case, and we'll feature the most important musicians in each genre.Every episode is chock-full of the music we love and where possible, we include archival interviews so you can hear about, in the actual words and voices of these great musicians and singers, the motives and passions that drove their creativity.

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American Song

The Singer-Songwriters: Part One

February 23, 2025 • Joe Hines • Season 5 • Episode 1

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By the late 1960’s, folk was beginning to feel “scarred and battered”, so what came next in this tradition was less political, and much more personal. The world was changing politically, socially, and culturally. Some of the new generation of singers and songwriters felt that staying relevant meant they had to move away from folk, towards more personal themes. The ‘70s was the “Me” decade. Instead of drawing from what was happening in the outside world, one group of song-writers turned inward. Another group turned toward broader political issues, instead of the Hattie Carroll, situation-specific inspirations that had inspired writers in the early. ‘60s.

There’s no better artist to start with than Bob Dylan, the single artist without whom, this whole series may not have even been possible, his impact is so huge. And yet, even Dylan owes his position as the Mount Everest of rock music to the people who came before him. One very important inspiration was the great Woody Guthrie. And even Guthrie you have to put in context, amidst all of the other great artists we’ve been talking about since day one of the American Song podcast. It’s like Pete Seeger, the great folk musician and a closer friend and collaborator of Guthrie’s, said,

"All songwriters are links in a chain."

In This Episode

Bruce Springsteen: Atlantic City
Pete Seeger - This Land is Your Land
Bob Dylan - The Times They are a Changing
Jim Croce - Operator
Bob Dylan - Song to Woody
Bob Dylan - Big Yellow Taxi
Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Not Fade Away
Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Maybe Baby
Bob Dylan - Mr. Tambourine Man
Bob Dylan - Jokerman
Bob Dylan - Foot of Pride
Bob Dylan - House of the Rising Sun
Bob Dylan - Rollin' and Tumblin'
Bob Dylan - Arthur McBride
Bob Dylan - Hurricane
Bob Dylan/ Tom Petty - I've Forgot More than You'll Ever Know
Bob Dylan - Blind Willie McTell
Bob Dylan - Cantina Theme
Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall
Bob Dylan - Sad Eyes Lady of the Lowlands
Bob Dylan - Masters of War
Bob Dylan - Every Grain of Sand
Bob Dylan - I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
Bob Dylan - High Water (for Charlie Patton)
Bob Dylan - Meet Me in the Morning
Bob Dylan - Sweetheart Like You
Bob Dylan - Not Dark Yet
Bob Dylan - False Prophet
Bob Dylan - Murder Most Foul

Interviews

Pete Seeger (on Woody Guthrie)
Bob Dylan (on 'the muse' and Hoagy Carmichael)
Louie Kemp (Bob Dylan's childhood friend)
Bob Dylan/ Ed Bradley (60 Minutes Interview)
Bob Dylan (on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature)
Alan Ginsberg (on first hearing Bob Dylan)
Penn Jillette (Bob Dylan is America's Shakespeare)

Links to earlier American Song Episodes

Allman Bros. - Southern Rock: Coming to Terms with a Complicated Past

Folk Revival in England - The Second Folk Revival: A Passing of the Torch

For as long as people have been telling stories, we’ve been fixed on our heroes. In myths, our heroes have always helped us make sense of the world around us; those terrifying forces of nature, like shifting stars, changing seasons, wild animals and the sea. In our modern world today, the rise of technology like artificial intelligence could be the counterpart to shifting stars. For changing seasons, we could easily substitute climate economic cycles, or a change in political administrations. Anyone who’s ever worked in business can tell you about wild animals and corporate politics, and even in today’s age of advanced technology, we are still subject to the power of nature.

The recent and horrific fires we’ve just experienced here at home in Los Angeles - especially in and around Alta Dena or Pacific Pallisades, are all you need for convincing.

For the ancient Greeks, society and literature were part of the same thing. Poetry played an incredibly important role in their daily lives. It was how history and social lessons were handed down and remembered.

Take for example, a fragment of a poem that’s survived to our day, by the Greek poet, Solon. He wrote,

“The man whose riches satisfy his greed

Is not more rich for all those heaps and hoards

Than some poor man who has enough to feed

And clothe his corpse with such as the Gods afford.

I have no use for men who steal and cheat;

The fruit of evil poisons those who eat.

Some wicked men are rich, some good men poor,

But I would rather trust in what's secure;

Our virtue sticks with us and makes us strong,

But money changes owners all day long.”

Ever since the printing press and literacy rose dramatically, poetry has played an ever diminishing role. Of course, the rise of mass media, starting in the last century, only made poetry less important than it had already become.

And yet, poetry is part of the human soul. You can’t extinguish it. It flows like warm blood. Close off one pathway, and it will find another. Two really important forces have kept it alive; the rise of the folk music movement in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s, and the rise of the Beat poets in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it’s also found its way into American Song. Take, for example this verse and chorus from Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City”.

Well, I got a job and tried to put my money away

But I got debts that no honest man can pay

So I drew what I had from the Central Trust

And I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus

Well, now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty

And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

Despite the thousands of years that separate “the Boss” from Solon, the messages are the same. I would rather trust in what's secure;

Our virtue sticks with us and makes us strong,

But money changes owners all day long.”

Starting in the ‘30s and 40’s, singer-songwriters like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were performing politically charged music at song swaps in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Woody’s songs, like the hymn for the common American, This Land Is Your Land, got his messages across. Here’s Guthrie’s former collaborator and friend, Pete Seeger, talking about This Land is Your Land.

Right-wing nuts like Joseph McCarthy found these songs threatening and one newspaper columnist, doing McCarthy’s bidding, labeled Guthrie and Seeger’ music a “communist scheme to "hypnotize" America's youth.

An aside here: Have you ever heard the name Roy Cohn? Cohn was, in some ways, brilliant. When he was still just barely into his 20s, he had a job as an assistant prosecutor. In 1951, he helped engineer the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies. He admitted to using illicit, back-channel conversations with the judge to get the death penalty. Soon after, he became notorious as chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy's committee on Un-American Activities, rooting out Communists and supposed Communists from the government. Cohn was also a closeted gay man who persecuted other gays out of their government jobs during what became known as the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. In the 1970’s, he mentored a young man whose father was a New York City Real Estate guy - Donald Trump. It was Trump most of the under-handed maneuvers we’ve come to expect from Teflon Don. In New York during the 1970s and 80s, he partied at the drug-fuelled nightclub Studio 54, and wielded influence as a friend of the famous and powerful, including Barbara Walters, Andy Warhol and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. As a lawyer, he represented clients from Mafia bosses to Trump. Weeks before he died, Cohn was disbarred for, among several offences, defrauding his clients. The student learned his teacher’s lessons very well! Anyway, Cohn was a special guy. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming….

The American Song series has already focused a few times on folk music as a wellspring of our musical heritage, in episode eleven of season one, and in episodes one, two and three of season two. Check those out for a deep dive into this fascinating topic!

A new audience of young adults had grown up in the 1960’s. They were ready for something new, and they wanted to hear it in their own way, not like the generation before them. The same stuff happens now! If songs are good, they feel like part of “now”. They should reflect the times – Love songs or protest songs could take on larger themes. These were still cold-war days and there was a lot that the young Boomers, in their 20’s, were concerned about. No one was even sure if they’d live to see their next birthdays.

In an interview with Jackson Browne, he explained one of the chief unifiers between himself and other artists in his circle was the way they viewed the persisting problems in American society. He said,

“The thing that we all shared was this widespread distrust of the American

establishment. That was just the ground…a basic fact…So the one thing that we

all had in common was the recognition that things were changing. And we had a

deep sense of being on the right side. Being on the side of change. On the side of

upheaval and disruption against an unjust status quo…That was in my music

before I could address any specific political questions. But it was always there.”

The singer-songwriters we’re talking about, starting with today’s episode, came out of the 60’s folk revival movement. For instance, Jim Croce, whose career was cut tragically short in a plane accident, and which lasted only 18 months, died just as his career was in its ascendency. Croce was first drawn to music when he heard the music of Woody Guthrie, and the early country music star, Jimmie Rodgers. His early influences were English and Irish ballads, and he’d use a lot of his diverse folk background to write gems like “Time in a Bottle” and “Operator”.

Jackson Browne is another of the singer-songwriters whose early music owed a debt to the folk scene. In an interview, he talked about the impact that Bob Dylan’s song, “Ramona” had on him. He said, “I think the songs have always been very personal to me. At the same time, that’s what was happening in the music I listened to, I think. It seemed to me that that’s what people were always [doing]. If you listen to Bob Dylan’s “Ramona,” this is an incredibly beautiful song to somebody that is so specific, you know – and then he quotes Dylan - Your cracked country lips to kiss,’ and the whole discussion of her attitudes of what she was finding in the city.

And I always pictured someone from the civil rights movement because it was

right in that era, and I thought this was a discussion about idealism, but one that

was specific to a particular person. And I thought that was really valuable.”

As a unique sound, the singer-songwriter genre started where folk had left off, but it made efforts to create something new and fresh. Here in LA there’s a night club that still operates today called the Troubadour. In the late ‘60’s and early ‘ 70s, it was the epicenter of LA’s singer-songwriter scene and which later showcased bands like Motley Crue, The Bangles, Guns 'n Roses, Sound Garden and Oasis while still continuing to be a place where the newer singer-songwriters as well as established musicians came to play. In another interview, Dickie Davis, who ran the lights at the club described the sound like this, “It was in contrast to the over-produced folk music that was coming out at the time…I remember listening to the radio and thinking, ‘What is this? It’s was so over-produced. So predictable. So tedious and bland. And then when James Taylor, when Carly Simon, when Joni Mitchell…I mean, those are the albums that I had. That was what I was listening to then because they were so personal!”

"All songwriters are links in a chain."

The importance that Guthrie had as an inspiration can’t be over-emphasized. Here; let’s hear it directly from Dylan, himself.

Dylan’s first song ever written.

Still, you can probably count on one hand the number of musicians whose influence is as profound as Dylan’s. It's hard to imagine the art of songwriting as we know it without him. For six decades now, Dylan has turned the Romantic idea of original songwriting on its head. With his own completely unmistakable method of composing, he’s written and performed over 600 songs, many of which are the most significant and most significantly original songs of his time. Bob has spoken about artistry and creativity many times, including on his Sirius radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. Using the great Hoagie Carmichael as his example, Bob said this;

Joni Mitchell, whom some people think of as Dylan’s female counterpart, once said about Bob that, “No one has come close to being as good a writer as Dylan. He had these grand themes, these cast-of-thousands kind of songs, people running around with cats on their shoulders, street scenes.”

Dylan, himself, has, for almost the entire time he’s been on the world stage, tried to shrug off the weight and responsibility for greatness that the world pinned on him. This great sphynx of a self-effacing man has said, “somebody else would have done it.”

Bob was the first domino that pushed the whole row forward. He knew that rock music could rise far above its simple structure and teenage inheritance and – maybe because it was so simple – it could rise to the stature of the greatest poetry and speak to our souls. And as much as people talk about Bob’s start in folk music, his real jumping off point was 50’s rock and roll. Let’ let his childhood friend, Louie Kemp, tell us about Bob back in those days.

So early on, Bob was turned on by guys like Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis.

But there was so much more to him than that. Dylan fused the beauty of the English language we find in Shakespeare, Byron, and Dylan Thomas, he named himself after Dylan Thomas you know, with the expansiveness and beat experimentation of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, bonding the ‘everyman’ wisdom and poetry of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams with the electricity of rock and roll.

His early songs, like Mr. Tambourine Man, mesmerized listeners with their breathtaking poetry and lyricism. Who else could write a verse like,

"Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky

with one hand waving free,

silhouetted by the sea,

circled by the circus sands,

With all memory and fate

driven deep beneath the waves,

Let me forget about today until tomorrow."

Much later in his career, in the 1980’s, on his album, Infidels, he gave us a song called Jokerman. Here, his poetry gives majesty to a song that still points a finger at injustice. Just listen,

“It's a shadowy world

skies are slippery gray

A woman just gave birth to a prince today

and dressed him in scarlet

He'll put the priest in his pocket,

put the blade to the heat

Take the motherless children off the street

And place them at the feet of a harlot"

Dylan inspired his generation and because he did, also the generations that followed. Because John Lennon heard Dylan, he learned that pop songs could actually carry sincerity and depth and so he wrote “Help!” which was the first crack in an iceberg that eventually became the Plastic Ono Band album in which he finally revealed his real pain, with songs like God and Mother. Lennon was channeling Dylan when he wrote Hide Your Love Away, and he was still looking over his shoulder at him on Working Class Hero.

It’s ironic that Dylan doesn't think of himself as a poet. He has said, "Poets drown in lakes." And in 1985, Dylan gave his first ever network interview on ABC’s 20/20 and he said this about his lyrics,

Maybe so. Dylan’s 83 now – and the Nobel Prize Commission has decided the matter for all of us. I think he’s written some of the most beautiful poetry we’ve known; poetry about love and outrage, abstraction and clarity, timelessness and relativity. And even this far along in life and his career, he has also said he doesn't consider himself to be a professional songwriter. "For me it's always been more confessional than professional. My songs aren't written on a schedule.”

Dylan's fans first saw him as "a kind of shaman, priest, guru, teacher, and

poet". After all, this is the man who wrote Blowing in the Wind in ten minutes.

Dylan continues to speak directly for and especially to individual listeners. His whining, grating, snarling voice is capable of filling us with righteous anger or comforting our pain. He can both strip words of their meaning, and make us experience their deepest intent. This is his greatness; it’s WHY he is a celebrated winner of the Nobel prize in literature.

He began his career as a folk protest singer in the days of Civil Rights and at the beginning of the war in Vietnam. His targets have shifted over the decades, and his themes have broadened, but he has always kept that role.

In a song like this one, Foot of Pride, but also on others like “Serve Somebody or “Ring Them Bells”, he’s an Old Testament prophet, doing battle with the worst in our society.

Although he long ago threw off the shackles that his folk audience would have trapped him in, he has never lost his love for, or completely abandoned the music that first captured his heart

including folk

House of the Rising Sun

Electric Blues

Such as Rollin’ and Tumblin’ from Modern Times

Irish and Scottish ballads

This recording, Arthur McBride, is from his album Good As I’ve Been to You.

And of course rock and roll

Such as this song, Hurricane, about the falsely accused boxer, Hurricane Carter.

Bob Dylan is a living well of American music with more than 650 songs in his memorized repertoire and he can still peel them off and drop them into a concert without notice.

In his book, Chronicles, Dylan says, “ Folk songs are the way I explored the universe. They were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could connect the pieces....Most of the other performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song, but...with me, it was putting the song across.”

While on tour in 1986, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dylan introduced a song called “I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know” to the crowd by saying, “Tom and I are gonna do a song for you right now. We used to hear these songs all the time when we were growing up. You can't hear them anymore. Very seldom you hear real songs anymore. Well, we were lucky to grow up, when you could hear them all the time. All you had to do was switch on the radio and you could hear them.” Here’s the performance:

Real songs, for Bob, are songs that carry truth. They’re about real places, real things that matter, real conflicts and people and emotions and causes…. About the things that give life meaning. He uses his brilliant talent for language and melody to paint mental pictures for us and put us in the center of these real things.

In his song Blind Willie McTell, he tells the story of the early Georgia blues man, who wrote a song called “Statesboro Blues”. The Allman Brothers covered it in the early ‘70s. There’s a link in the show notes. Check it out.

In “Blind Willie McTell,” Dylan, the master writer gives us every bit the immersive experience that readers get from reading the greatest of novels. We go aboard creaky slave ships so real you can almost hear the waves lap against the wooden hull, and smell the sweet fragrance of magnolias, hear the sharp cracking of the slave drivers’ whips. You can almost pull back the canvas of the revival tents, feel the burn of bootlegged whiskey as it pours in rivulets down your throat; hear the coarse voices of country squires, the faint hooting of barn owls, and laughter of charcoal-skinned gypsy maidens when Dylan sings his opening lines,

“Seen the arrow on the doorpost / Saying, "This land is condemned

All the way from New Orleans / To Jerusalem."

I traveled through East Texas / Where many martyrs fell

And I know no one can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell”

And how does he do it? He clued us in in with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech when he said,

Bob could never have written the songs he wrote, could never think in the profound way he thinks, without everything he learned in “his back pages’.

One way to recognize greatness is the impact the student has on the teacher. You could make the argument that Alan Ginsberg, the great Beat poet from the generation that came just before Bob’s arrival on the world stage, was the teacher by example. Ginsberg had been away from New York City, traveling extensively in India, when Bob first made his mark on Greenwich Village. But on coming home, a friend played this song, A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall, for him. This is Ginsberg, in Scorcese’s Dylan film, No Direction Home, explaining the impact it had on him.

This, song, Sad Eyed Ladies of the Lowlands, is one of the most gorgeous and heartfelt love songs among all of Bob’s 600. It’s a love letter to Sara Lowndes, Bob’s wife at the time. The seams of the song are stretched to bursting with love for her, and it brims with clever imagery and wordplay. Few artists could write such a song, fewer would have the courage to bare themselves open like this. Musically, it’s spellbinding and transcendent.

Bob, himself, is subject to the transcendence.

Once, in an interview, he said,

“It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from the inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down… The best songs to me — my best songs — are songs which were written very quickly. Yeah, very, very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.”

Dylan’s poetic evolution has occurred out in the open – there for all to see. In the beginning, he was a social justice balladeer, carved out of the same American wood as his musical heros, That was the poetry in this song, Masters of War.

Every Grain of Sand: At one point, he was the Old Testament-inspired chronicler of spiritual experience,

From Shot of Love, the second of his three ‘Christian’ albums, this song, Every Grain of Sand, could be one of his finest statements. A meditation on faith, redemption, and the presence of God in everyday life. In language, vivid with imagery and metaphors, he opens with the lines "In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need" and we’re slowed down, brought into his prayer. He slowly builds the music to a silvery crescendo that sails through his simple harmonica solo. It’s been called a "mature update" of an earlier song, Chimes of Freedom. It's a testament to Dylan's ability to craft lyrics that are both deeply personal and universally resonant, exploring complex themes with honesty, vulnerability, and poetic grace.

And then, Bob has a honky-tonk / juke-joint beer chugging country crooner side, too.

This song, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight comes from his ‘60s album, John Wesley Harding. This album was a transition album away from the electric albums he’d made for several years, and edging back towards a more acoustic sound again. It was the follow up after Blonde on Blonde and on this song, you get the more gentle and romantic side of Bob, less complex, less challenging more comforting. He’s expressing a desire to comfort and be close to someone.

There’s also the ‘story-teller’ side of Dylan, as hear in this song, High Water (For Charlie Patton)

OK. It’s not a straightforward beginning, middle, and end kind of a story. What you get actually is more like a series of vivid snapshots, connected by themes of societal breakdown, natural disaster, and the enduring power of music.

Here's why it stands out:

It’s VERY Atmospheric. It’s kinda about the Mississippi flood of 1927 where 200,000 African Americans lost their homes, and then it isn’t about that, too. More than this, it’s about the need to recapture our morality. Different characters represent different points of view. You’ve got themes like birth, death, infidelity, corruption in the courts, wealth and poverty…. Only a songwriter of Dylan’s depth and caliber could write a song like this. Nothing in this song is what it appears to be, everything is a representation of something else. Just like in the deepest poetry. Because it’s Dylan. For instance, the Mississippi in flood is also a metaphor for the Biblical flood. Bertha Mason, a character from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a character in this song, and so is Charles Darwin, and so is the black bluesman, Big Joe Turner, and so is Charlie Patton.

In the end, Bob leaves it up to us to piece the fragments together and interpret the song’s meaning.

And Dylan can be a Chicago bluesman. - Meet Me in the Morning

By the time Dylan was recording his album Blood on the Tracks, his marriage to his sad eyed lady of the lowlands, Sara Lowndes, was falling apart, and the album is an emotional trip through Bob’s pain-wracked heart and while "Meet Me in the Morning" might seem like a simple blues number, nothing is simple with Bob.

Like all his lyrics, this song is carefully constructed, with subtle meanings and nuances. From the outside, it sounds like his narrator is presenting a path that leads to healing things up. But if you’re paying close attention, you see that its she who is trying to reconcile and he who is pessimistic and punishing.

A few symbols flow from Bob’s narrator’s perspective. A rooster and the darkness, an intersection (56th and Wabasha) stands for a meeting of minds. A trip to Kansas symbolizes a journey towards recovering their relationship. But Bob’s heart is in chaos, and to conjure that we get images of stormy weather. He uses light to stand for hope and reconciliation.

Bob is self-revealing in a mysterious way – as he’s always been. He’s admitting that his positive qualities are overshadowed by his negative traits, and we see him resigned to failure. He wants things to work out, but his negativity stands in the way, and he’s over-thinking things. In contrast, he also shows us Sara’s love, represented by a kiss. While the narrator is talking and talking, it’s the woman’s simple act of love in the kiss that holds the potential for healing.

It's now more than 63 years since Dylan made his first album. And still, he continues on his ‘Endless Tour”, playing more than 100 live dates a year. And lest you think that his greatest days are behind him, he continues to astound. Many say that his period in the 1980’s was his weakest, but even then, there were some amazing moments. His album, Infidels, has always been one of my favorites in his catalog. We heard a little from the song, Jokerman, on that album a little bit ago. And his album, Oh Mercy, produced by Daniel Lanois, was also a very fine album, I think. My favorite cuts from that are Everything is Broken and Ring Them Bells.

In the ‘90’s, Dylan released Time Out of Mind. The critics heaped praise on it, saying it was

A Return to Form and A Masterpiece. And even while his voice was beginning to show the raspiness that has come to really characterize his late career now, writers were lauding it, saying what a powerful instrument it was, and how it perfectly communicated the emotional weight of the songs,

This song, “Not Dark Yet” was one of the best on the album. Poignance drips from every line but it never sounds maudlin. Dylan reunited with Lanois on this record and gave this album a lush quality that previously had not fit so well with Dylan’s output. Not that he hadn’t tried for that kind of sound. It just never seemed right.

Dylan had done a more standard version of the song before Lanois got his hands on it. But Lanois was able to rework the songs on Time out of Mind to create a cinematic effect and cast foreboding sense of unease. The song was recorded at a slower tempo, adding an ephemeral organ and two different drums and it sounds like a march.

This is an older, sadder, wearier Dylan. The song is about oncoming death. “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear – It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

We have the physical sensation of time running out. The song is filled with imagery of shadows falling, time slipping away, and a sense of weariness. This is Bob, looking back on his life, acknowledging his flaws and mistakes. He tell us, "I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal". But as always, he’s honest. In Not Dark Yet, Dylan is facing the inevitable and doing it with a degree of strength.

Bob released his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, mid-pandemic, in 2020. I guess he felt the moment fit the mood of the album. It’s a record filled with righteous anger. This is Bob Dylan the grizzled man of ages who’s seen it all and is disgusted by most of it. This song, “False Prophet” is the second track and it points the way to the utter destruction of the final track on the album, “Murder Most Foul”. On this track he confides in us, “I know how it happened – I saw it all begin – I opened my heart to the world and the world came in” As with so many of Dylan’s most ambitious songs, the lyrics teem with references to everything from antiquity to modern pop culture.

But the music – the music is pure blues. Guitarist Charlie Sexton, who has been playing with Dylan for the past 25 years, carries the song, right through the final 30-second outro. And Dylan’s voice, full of wisdom and gravel, becomes a blues instrument itself. And when he tells you “I ain’t no false prophet – I just said what I said – I’m just here to bring vengeance down on somebody’s head,” you should probably believe him. Sixty-plus years of writing these songs, and he can still bring it.

The album closes with Murder Most Foul – as deep and wondrous a song as Dylan – at any age – in any guise you choose to see him in – has ever written. This is a dirge. A funeral march played out across a single chord, rolling cascades of piano riffs played masterfully by Fiona Apple.

For close to seventeen minutes Dylan, with piano, cello and light percussion accompaniment, hypnotically meditates upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He takes us through the events of those late November days in 1963 when “the soul of a nation has been torn away” and “the age of the anti-Christ has just only begun.” The subdued meditative mood of the song perfectly reflecting the gray and mourning period of those long ago days when America lost its innocence.

As the master story-teller that he is, Dylan puts us into Kennedy’s suit, seated behind Governor Connolly, next to his beautiful wife, Jackie. He lets us think Kennedy’s likely thoughts, that he was being, “led into some kind of a trap” and “gunned down like a dog in broad daylight” while “ridin’ in the back seat next to my wife / heading straight on into the afterlife.” Dylan sharpens the focus on Zapruder’s lens, makes it high definition for us, captured forever on that famous film.

He makes us feel the horror of that rifle-crack, pink cloud moment, of a murder most foul – Shakespeare’s words from Hamlet, not his for once – we get to remember what it was like when “they killed him once and they killed him twice / killed him like a human sacrifice.”

A powerful song, and perhaps a convincing rebuttal to what Bob himself said to Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes a number of years ago, when reflecting on the young man who wrote those powerful, early songs and the elder statesman he’s become, and whether he can still do today what he seemed to do so effortlessly in the early 1960s.

So many people have been touched by Dylan’s work. To close off this portion of this episode, let’s hear from Penn Jillette, on why he says ‘Dylan is the Shakespeare of our time.’

This wraps up our journey into the mind, art and music of Bob Dylan. As I mentioned in the beginning, for the next several episodes, we’ll be deep diving into the singer songwriters from the 60’s and 70’s and future episodes will focus on some of the greats; Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Cockburn, Warren Zevon, Joni Mitchell, Carol King, and others. You won’t want to miss any of what’s to come!

This has been Joe Hines, I write and produce the American Song podcast. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Thanks for listening!