Bob Dylan, plagiarist

Dixie
Originally uploaded by vegacura.

I am grateful for Mr. Warmuth and his Google sleuthing to discover the connection, but this debate -- with every album he releases -- over whether or not Dylan is a plagiarist is really ridiculous.

“No doubt about it, there has been some borrowing going on,” said Walter Brian Cisco, who wrote a 2004 biography of Timrod, when shown Mr. Dylan’s lyrics. Mr. Cisco said he could find at least six other phrases from Timrod’s poetry that appeared in Mr. Dylan’s songs. But Mr. Cisco didn’t seem particularly bothered by that. “I’m glad Timrod is getting some recognition,” he said.

Henry Timrod was born in 1828 and was a private tutor on plantations before the Civil War started. He tried to sign up for the Confederate Army but was unable to serve in the field because he suffered from tuberculosis. He worked as an editor for a daily paper in Columbia, S.C., and began writing poems about the war and how it affected the residents of the South. He also wrote love poems and ruminations on nature. During his lifetime he published only one volume of poetry. Among his most famous poems were “Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina 1866,” and “Ethnogenesis.” Mr. Cisco said he could not find any phrases from these poems in Mr. Dylan’s lyrics.

Mr. Dylan does not acknowledge any debt to Timrod on “Modern Times.” The liner notes simply say “All songs written by Bob Dylan” (although some fans have noted online that the title of the album contains the letters of Timrod’s last name).

Nor does he credit the traditional blues songs from which he took the titles, tunes and some lyrics for “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” and “Nettie Moore.”

This isn’t the first time fans have found striking similarities between Mr. Dylan’s lyrics and the words of other writers. On his last album, “Love and Theft,” a fan spotted about a dozen passages similar to lines from “Confessions of a Yakuza,” a gangster novel written by Junichi Saga, an obscure Japanese writer. Other fans have pointed out the numerous references to lines of dialogue from movies and dramas that appear throughout Mr. Dylan’s oeuvre. Example: “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” echoes a line from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

This time around Scott Warmuth, a disc jockey in Albuquerque and a former music director for WUSB, a public radio station in Stony Brook, on Long Island, discovered the concordances between Mr. Dylan’s lyrics and Timrod’s poetry by doing some judicious Google searches. Mr. Warmuth said he wasn’t surprised to find that Mr. Dylan had leaned on a strong influence in writing his lyrics.

“I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs,” he said. “It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.”

Mr. Warmuth noted that Mr. Dylan may also have used a line from Timrod in “ ’Cross the Green Mountain,” a song he wrote for the soundtrack to the movie “Gods and Generals,” which came out three years ago. Mr. Warmuth said there also appeared to be passages from Timrod in “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,” a song on “Love and Theft.”

Mr. Dylan has long been interested in the Civil War: in “Chronicles: Vol. 1,” Mr. Dylan’s autobiography, published by Simon & Schuster in 2004, he writes about spending time in the New York Public Library combing through microfilm copies of newspapers published from 1855 to 1865. “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone,” Mr. Dylan wrote.

To Mr. Warmuth, who found 10 phrases echoing Timrod’s poetry on “Modern Times,” Mr. Dylan’s work is still original. “You could give the collected works of Henry Timrod to a bunch of people, but none of them are going to come up with Bob Dylan songs,” he said.

Mr. Dylan could not be reached through his publicist for comment. A spokeswoman for Columbia Records, Mr. Dylan’s record label and a division of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, did not return calls for comment.

Because Timrod is long dead and his work has fallen out of copyright — you can find his collected poems on the Internet — there is no legal claim that could be made against Mr. Dylan.

But some fans are bothered by the ethics of Mr. Dylan’s borrowing ways. “Bob really is a thieving little swine,” wrote one poster on Dylan Pool (pool.dylantree.com/phorum5/read.php?1,642969), a chat room where Mr. Warmuth posted his findings. “If it was anyone else we’d be stringing them up by their neck, but no, it’s Bobby Dee, and ‘the folk process.’ ”

Authors who have been caught copying from other writers have been accused outright of plagiarism. Earlier this year Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore who had written a first novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” was attacked when readers discovered that many passages in the book nearly exactly replicated portions of “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings,” novels by Megan McCafferty. Ms. Viswanathan’s publisher, Little, Brown, pulled the book from shelves, and the author was disgraced in the press.

In Mr. Dylan’s case, critics and fans have long described the songwriter’s magpie tendencies, looking upon that as a manifestation of his genius, not unlike other great writers and poets like T. S. Eliot or James Joyce who have referenced past works.

That's insulting. Comparing Dylan's ability to synthesize and reshape the words of others to tell an intriguing story is nothing remotely like the sloppy plagiarism of the novelists that Motoko Rich cites. Writes Michael Gray in Song & Dance Man III,

Dylan himself has described acutely what he believes his own contribution has been. Interviewed in 1985 for the retrospective box-set "Biograph", summarised below, Dylan said that before he came along, rock'n'roll had never been enough:

great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms and you could get high on the energy but they weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music...[Those] songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings...I needed that. Life is full of complexities and rock'n'roll didn't reflect that. It was just put on a happy face and ride, sally, ride, there was nothing even resembling "Sixteen Snow White Horses" or "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"...If I did anything, I brought one to the other. There was nothing serious happening in music when I started.

Dylan has not only used, within one of the most powerfully attractive forms of modern technology, the strengths of ancient balladry and of the earliest blues. He has also fused with the power of music the force of other kinds of poetry, creating work that is enriched by and builds upon the work of William Blake, Robert Browning, the French Symbolists, T.S. Eliot, the Beat Poets of the 1950s, and more.

But what really irks me about these debates is the ignorance about what makes Dylan what he is: the music. Yeah, he's the finest poet of the latter half of the twentieth (and start of the twentyfirst) century, but it is the music that informs his genius. His music swings. He brought swing to a folk scene that took itself too seriously (listen to "Maggie's Farm"), and he took swing to rock'n'roll with a combination of inventive arrangement and lyrics that swung (listen to "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again", "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum", and, most recently "Thunder on the Mountain").

I was thinking 'bout Alicia Keys
Couldn't keep from crying
But she was born in Hells Kitchen
And I was living down the line
I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I've been looking for her even clear through Tennessee.