Bob Dylan is a fraud (so says Joni Mitchell)

WanderingDruid · Jan 13, 2011

Hmmmm! I wonder?

WanderingDruid · Jan 13, 2011

Another Sandy Denny great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PhdiSTh7U0

WanderingDruid · Jan 13, 2011

Ok, more than 20 posts. LOL

mamaKCita · Jan 14, 2011

QueerPoet said:

Again, don't let my sig pic influence your opinion: This thread is about the harsh things Joni Mitchell said about Bob Dylan. Is he a fake prophet? A false poet? What in the world brought Joni to such conclusions?

QP
Click to expand...

i wouldn't know. like i said, i was never a listener to either. i simply followed a tangent created and reinforced by your pic. i'm indifferent to the actual topic outside of learning about something i have no previous knowledge of.

Heat · Jan 14, 2011

It seems that in part her statements stems from feeling that he may have plagaraized Henry Timrod, possibly others.

She is not the first to make these observations.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Henry Timrod, sometimes known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy.

Bob Dylan’s latest album made its debut at the top of the charts.

Readers’ Opinion

But maybe you’ve heard his words, if you’re one of the 320,000 people so far who have bought Bob Dylan’s latest album, “Modern Times,” which made its debut last week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

It seems that many of the lyrics on that album, Mr. Dylan’s first No. 1 album in 30 years (down to No. 3 this week), bear some strong echoes to the poems of Timrod, a Charleston native who wrote poems about the Civil War and died in 1867 at the age of 39.

“More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours,” the 65-year-old Mr. Dylan sings in “When the Deal Goes Down,” one of the songs on “Modern Times.” Compare that to these lines from Timrod’s “Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night”:

A round of precious hours
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.

“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.
Click to expand...

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/arts/music/14dyla.html?_r=1

RooRshack · Jan 14, 2011

fire_in_the_soul said:

not here to argue or 'play devils advocate with you'. I know we are imprinted it's 'all for fun' - i don't believe it. You have your own opinions and I have mine and they are not really that different, we are led by the nose, by these 'masters' of publishing, film, music, propaganda (PR), education, science to believe the intention of 'devils' advocate' - WHO wants to advocate for evil?, really?

look into the lead of canned heat, janis, or jimi, and a couple of others, wasted. leaders of the soul in the way they played, taken out (not to lunch). lennon too. obvious assassinations, at least to me.

we're left with 'dylan/zimmerman' oh boy... yes, the people of hollywood change their names because they operate in fraud. They've been changing their names long before arriving on the hollywood scene. It's not the circumstances of hollywood that brought the tradition on, it's the people who founded hollywood. The same ones who stole film technology and brought it to the west-coast where they wouldn't be compelled to pay licensing fees. For flicker-films (early porn) and other demoralizing behaviours. Hiding one's past by changing one's name is only one aspect of it.

& if you like the guys tunes, who am I to argue? That's what they want us to do.
Click to expand...

You seem to have some interesting ideas. Too bad they're buried and long dead, beneath the crushing weight of all that crazy....

WanderingDruid, don't threadcrap to increase your post count, edit your post to incorporate anything else you have to add, and go post meaningful things in other threads.

antithesis · Jan 15, 2011

To be honest, she kind of sounds like a bitch.

QueerPoet · Jan 16, 2011

Heat said:

It seems that in part her statements stems from feeling that he may have plagaraized Henry Timrod, possibly others.

She is not the first to make these observations.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/arts/music/14dyla.html?_r=1
Click to expand...

Awesome research! :sunny: And helps to explain why Joni said what she said about Dylan.

QP

Log in or Sign up

Bob Dylan is a fraud (so says Joni Mitchell)

WanderingDruid Member

WanderingDruid Member

WanderingDruid Member

mamaKCita fucking stupid.

Heat Smile, it's contagious! :) Lifetime Supporter

RooRshack On Sabbatical

antithesis Hello

QueerPoet Senior Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Bob Dylan is a fraud (so says Joni Mitchell)

WanderingDruid Member

WanderingDruid Member

WanderingDruid Member

mamaKCita fucking stupid.

Heat Smile, it's contagious! :) Lifetime Supporter

RooRshack On Sabbatical

antithesis Hello

QueerPoet Senior Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches