Bob Dylan

Provides an introduction to the music of Bob Dylan including an examination of the impact of his work over time and key critical responses. This book locates Dylan's work within a broader context of the history of the American popular song and its various antecedents, examining how his music draws on a heritage of folk, blues and pop tunes.

Bob Dylan is one of the most important songwriters of our time. His lyrics provided inspiration to countless performers and pointed the popular song in a new direction. With some justification he has been celebrated as a poet, philosopher or seer: his wordplay the subject of repeated study and analysis. Yet, his lyrics are sung. His songs are music.
In this concise profile Keith Negus presents Bob Dylan primarily as musician, focusing on the qualities of Dylan songs that have received little attention, such as melody, rhythm, instrumental texture, and Dylan''s performing voice. He also explores the way Dylan''s musical sensibility has been shaped by blues and folk ballad traditions and highlights how he has frequently created unique musical identities by intensely personalising borrowed phrases, tunes or riffs.
In tracing the various phases of a career that has lasted almost half a century, Negus stresses the centrality of performance to Dylan''s lite as a musician and songwriter, as well as detailing the way Dylan has treated his songs as continually open to change and re-arrangement in concert. Through listening to his words as sounds, rhythms and tunes in the air rather than reading them as prose on a page, we can gain an insight into one of the most enigmatic, enthralling yet unpredictable popular musicians.