Word: songfulness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young Dylan's original repertoire was particularly strong on civil rights. He could have filled a LP side with songs decrying the injustices done to black Americans: "Oxford Town" (about the shooting of Medgar Evers), "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", "Who Killed Davey Moore?" and "The Death of Emmett Till" ("This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man / That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan...
...Most impressively, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." That song, which Dylan wrote within a few weeks of the event it describes, tells of the killing of a Baltimore maid by a rich, politically connected society toff named William Zantzinger. Don't cry yet, Dylan warns in each of the first three choruses, as he relates the awful particulars of the case: "Now ain't the time for your tears." At the end, he spits out the judge's obscenely lenient decision: "And handed out strongly for penalty and repentance, / William Zanzinger with a six months' sentence." Dylan's message...
...Babe," Dylan uses the title of Niles' song, but ups the antagonistic ante: "Go away from my window, / Leave at your own chosen speed. / I'm not the one you want, babe, / I'm not the one you need. / ... You say you're lookin' for someone / Who will promise never to part, / Someone to close his eyes for you, / Someone to close his heart, / Someone who will die for you an' more, / But it ain't me, babe, / No, no, no, it ain't me, babe, / It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe...
...times his scorn was directed at agents of destruction, like the munitions manufacturers in "Masters of War." The song begins with a catalog of their sings ("You put a gun in my hand / And you hide from my eyes / And you turn and run farther / When the fast bullets fly") before imagining a suitable comeuppance ("And I hope that you die /And your death'll come soon. ... / And I'll stand o'er your grave / 'Til I'm sure that you're dead"). But more often the songwriter's derision was directed at someone who had committed no atrocity greater...
...Before Dylan, pop music wallowed and exulted in the love song; the body of get-lost songs was small. If pop approached the topic, it was usually an invitation to mutual hermitting. ("Let's get lost," Frank Loesser wrote and Mary Martin sang, "lost in each other's arms.") It's true that songs of emotional defiance had been a sub-genre of blues. In folk music, John Jacob Niles, the Kentucky balladeer with the dramatic delivery and the pure falsetto, had written "Go Away from My Window," covered by Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez - and adapted by Dylan...