Happy 83rd birthday, Bob Dylan! The poet, songwriter and rocker is forever young and always influential — The South Dakota Standard

Editor’s notice: “I’ve been ten thousand miles within the mouth of a graveyard … I noticed a black department with blood that stored drippin’.” These traces, from “A Laborious Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, are from one of many few Bob Dylan songs that I heard after I was a Marine preventing in Vietnam. They made fairly an impression on me after I was 19. These impressions have endured. Thanks for sharing this, Randy. John Tsitrian

An vital birthday is developing. Bob Dylan will flip 83 on Might 24. 

About 60 years in the past, I had my first inclination to be a Dylanologist. Once I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on the radio, I used to be hooked.

Most of my relations and associates thought I used to be nuts and dismissed my attraction to Dylan (his signature is proven above in a public area picture posted on wikimedia commons) by remarking, “The man can’t even sing. He simply wheezes.” I attempted to elucidate that the wheezing remark wasn’t solely correct. It took just a few years, however later, on “Nashville Skyline,” Dylan reworked for a time right into a easy, dyed-in-the-wool nation crooner. 

Within the Nineteen Seventies after I was a highschool English trainer, I might boost the poetry items with modern materials. After making ready lyric sheets of Dylan songs, I might convey my albums to class and play the songs whereas the scholars would pay attention and concurrently learn the lyrics. I opined that a lot of Dylan’s songs had been, certainly, poetry.

Among the college students appreciated my opinion and a few didn’t — primarily as a result of they couldn’t get previous the voice on the report. My college students may now understand that I used to be on to one thing as Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.

Along with Dylan, college students in my lessons additionally studied the songs/poetry of Joni Mitchell (“All the way down to You”), Paul Simon (“One Man’s Ceiling is One other Man’s Flooring”), Elton John/Bernie Taupin (“Indian Sundown”) and others. The scholars would convey their very own materials to class for evaluation and dialogue, together with songs from Kansas (“Mud within the Wind”) and the Moody Blues (“Query”).

One classroom exercise that I didn’t take into consideration on the time was to have my college students examine the outline of Devil in Milton’s “Paradise Misplaced” or the Previous Testomony Ebook of Job with that of the Rolling Stones’s “Sympathy for the Satan.”  The exercise would have been thought-provoking.

The lyrical content material of a few of Dylan’s poems/songs have been the topic of most likely means an excessive amount of evaluation. Granted, a few of Dylan’s songs might be advanced and are topic to diverse interpretations; and, I’ve at all times loved taking part in such examine.

A couple of of my private favorites for deep examination embody “Desolation Row,” “Dignity,” “With God on Our Facet,” and “Jokerman.” In fact, as you might be choosing Dylan songs to research, the listing goes on and on.

One key to the importance of Dylan’s songs is their timelessness. Dylan’s “Blowin’ within the Wind,” for instance, written over 60 years in the past, asks 9 easy questions relating to inequality, injustice, human struggling, and struggle and peace. The tune addresses points that existed within the Nineteen Sixties as they’ve existed all through historical past and stay so immediately.

“The Occasions, They Are a’Changin’,” written about the identical time as “Blowin’ within the Wind,” gives an outline of the results of presidency dysfunction.

“Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the decision

Do not stand within the doorway

Do not block up the corridor

For he that will get damage

Shall be he who has stalled

The battle exterior ragin’

Will quickly shake your home windows

And rattle your partitions

For the occasions they’re a-changin’”

A cynical and plain-as-day political actuality is described in a Dylan tune entitled “Sweetheart Like You.”  Borrowing from Samuel Johnson, the tune was included on a 1983 album, “Infidels.” As soon as once more, timeless.

“They are saying that, ‘Patriotism is the final refuge

To which a scoundrel clings’

Steal slightly and so they throw you in jail

Steal quite a bit and so they make you king”

Not the whole lot Dylan addressed in his writing was about injustice, private trauma, love and loss, political corruption, historic intrigue, the character of evil on the earth, and different psychological, sociological, and religious themes. Not the whole lot he wrote was loaded with symbolism and allusions to different artists and their works.

No, there have been issues that Dylan described that had been straight-forward snippets of the human situation, seasoned with a wry humorousness. No interpretation wanted.

Peggy Day stole my poor coronary heart away

By golly, what extra can I say

Like to spend the evening with Peggy Day

Randy Zitterkopf served as a public college trainer and administrator in Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota. Now retired, Randy and his spouse Linda reside in Sioux Falls.