“The Low Hum in Syllables and Meters”: Blues Poetics in Bob Dylan’s Verbal Art

It may seem to be stating the obvious when pointing to the fact that Bob Dylan’s songs carry the voices of master blues singers. Vocal texture and color, singing behind the beat, and the use of twelve-bar rhythms might very well prove sufficient indicators for qualifying Dylan as a blues musician. Unfortunately, however, the elaborate and fascinating details of blues verbal artistry continue to remain a mystery to many scholars, as well as many musicians themselves. In this paper, we will take a closer look at the poetics of traditional blues lyrics within the particular context of their strong influence on Dylan’s songwriting. In doing so, we will focus on language use. Our goal is a deeper understanding of tradition, transmission, and personal creativity. By poetics, I mean that function of language that serves to enhance, embellish, and in any way focus the attention of listeners (or readers) on what could be called the “message for the sake of the message. ” This definition is a direct borrowing from Roman Jakobson’s description (1987:62-94) of the interworkings of poetics in all speech genres, from everyday forms to the most complex and calculated of written poetries. Ethnopoetics,1 which has been used most widely to treat Native American oral traditions, have contributed to the knowledge that poetic structures, motifs, and devices are culture-specific. Versification, narrative technique, sound patterns, metaphors, symbolic matrices, imagery, characterization, grammar use and all other such techniques derive from cultural uses of the 1 The leading figures of ethnopoetic approaches to verse structures and stylisti