Turn Me On, Dead Man

Just as with Led Zeppelin, charges of plagiarism have dogged Bob Dylan throughout his career. Recently Joni Mitchell said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times, “Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.” The interview went off in a different direction and the interviewer did not follow up on this statement. On the blog Big Hollywood, however, Jonny Whiteside took up the topic and ran with it, calling Dylan a "Grade-A phony." According to Whiteside, "Let's face it: as a lyricist, Dylan is crap." While I have little patience for this sort of polemical writing, the allegations of plagiarism are worth thinking about.

Information about Dylan borrowing heavily from his influences abounds on the internet, such as The Roots of Bob Dylan and Matthew Zuckerman's analysis of Dylan’s influences in 33 songs. Dylan's album Modern Times has come under particular scrutiny for lifting other artists' work. In fact, most of the tracks on Modern Times have been shown to have identifiable uncredited sources. In "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," Jonathan Lethem offers this insight:

Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.

In an article called "Who's This Guy Dylan Who's Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod?" the New York Times presented side-by-side comparisons of lines from Timrod's poetry with Dylan's lyrics. They demonstrated how Dylan had incorporated Timrod's words into "When the Deal Goes Down," "Spirit on the Water" and "Workingman's Blues #2" from the album Modern Times.  Suzanne Vega defends Dylan--sort of, anyway--in this opinion piece, also from the New York Times. She acknowledges that he is a "thieving little swine" but she's passionate about him anyway and she wouldn't expect Dylan to provide footnotes and asterisks in his releases. On the website Poetry Foundation, Robert Polito found at least ten instances in which Bob Dylan lifted phrases from Timrod's poetry. Even so, Polito argues that to turn this into a "story of possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper."

On Modern Times, as in all of his work, Dylan draws from all sorts of sources to produce his art. And this isn't the sort of situation where one artist has denied someone else the fruits of their labor, as was the case in the story Newsweek ran in 1963 that Bob Dylan had stolen "Blowin' in the Wind" from a new Jersey high school student. The story was later proven to be completely false. On Modern Times, Dylan drew on a rich folk tradition and produced a work that ranks among his best. Dylan was operating in the folk tradition, whether borrowing from a Civil War poet or Scottish sources.

Still, I have to admit that I'd like a few footnotes and asterisks from the artists I enjoy. I've discovered a lot of great work by investigating charges of plagiarism. I can't help but think that a mention of Timrod in some liner notes might have been worth Dylan's while. It just seems like it would be the right thing to do. But he's Bob Dylan so he can do whatever he likes.