The Supremes, with their polished performances and family-friendly lyrics, helped to bridge a cultural divide and temper racial tensions. AP Photo/Frings

“We got to live together,” he sang, “I am no better and neither are you.”

Throughout history, artists and songwriters have expressed a longing for equality and justice through their music.

Before the Civil War, African-American slaves gave voice to their oppression through protest songs camouflaged as Biblical spirituals. In the 1930s, jazz singer Billie Holiday railed against the practice of lynching in “Strange Fruit.” Woody Guthrie’s folk ballads from the 1930s and 1940s often commented on the plight of the working class.

But perhaps in no other time in American history did popular music more clearly reflect the political and cultural moment than the soundtrack of the 1960s – one that exemplified a new and overt social consciousness.

That decade, a palpable energy slowly burned and intensified through a succession of events: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

By the mid-1960s, frustration about the slow pace of change began to percolate with riots in multiple cities. Then, in 1968, two awful events occurred within months of each other: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

Through it all, there was the music.

Coming of age during this time in Northern California, I had the opportunity to hear some of the era’s soundtrack live – James Brown, Marvin Gaye, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors.

At the same time, virtually everyone in the African-American community was directly connected in some way or another to the civil rights movement.

Every year, I revisit this era in an undergraduate class I teach on music, civil rights and the Supreme Court. With this perspective as a backdrop, here are five songs, followed by a playlist that I share with my students.

While they offer a window into the awakening and reckoning of the times, the tracks have assumed a renewed relevance and resonance today.

“Blowin’ in the Wind,” Bob Dylan, 1963
First made a hit by the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, the song signaled a new consciousness and became the most covered of all Dylan songs.

The song asks a series of questions that appeal to the listener’s moral compass, while the timeless imagery of the lyrics – cannonballs, doves, death, the sky – evoke a longing for peace and freedom that spoke to the era.

As one critic noted in 2010:
 

“There are songs that are more written by their times than by any individual in that time, a song that the times seem to call for, a song that is just gonna be a perfect strike rolled right down the middle of the lane, and the lane has already been grooved for the strike.”

This song – along with others such as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Chimes of Freedom” – are among the reasons Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke, 1964
During a 1963 tour in the South, Cooke and his band were refused lodging at a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana.

African Americans routinely faced segregation and prejudice in the Jim Crow South, but this particular experience shook Cooke.

So he put pen to paper and tackled a subject that represented a departure for Cooke, a crossover artist who made his name with a series of Top 40 hits.

The lyrics reflect the anguish of being an extraordinary pop headliner who nonetheless needs to go through a side door.

Singer Sam Cooke stands next to a huge reproduction of his head on the roof of a Manhattan building. AP Photo

Showcasing Cooke’s gospel roots, it’s a song that painfully and beautifully captures the edge between hope and despair.

“It’s been a long, a long time coming,” he croons. “But I know a change is gonna come.”

Sam Cooke, in composing “A Change is Gonna Come,” was also inspired by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”: According to Cooke’s biographer, upon hearing Dylan’s song, Cooke “was almost ashamed to have not written something like that himself.”
“Come See About Me,” The Supremes, 1964

This was one of my favorites of their songs at the time – upbeat, fun and necessarily “unpolitical.”

The Supremes’ record label, Motown, played an important role bridging a cultural divide during the civil rights era by catapulting black musicians to global stardom.

The Supremes were the Motown act with arguably the broadest appeal, and they paved the way for other black artists to enjoy creative success as mainstream acts.

Through their 20 top-10 hits and 17 appearances from 1964 to 1969 on CBS’ popular weekly live program “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the group had a regular presence in the living rooms of black and white families across the country.
“Say it Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud,” James Brown, 1968

James Brown – the self-proclaimed “hardest working man in show business” – built his reputation as an entertainer par excellence with brilliant dance moves, meticulous staging and a cape routine.

But with “Say it Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud,” Brown seemed to be consciously delivering a starkly political statement about being black in America.

The track’s straightforward, unadorned lyrics allowed it to quickly become a black pride anthem that promised “we won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve.”
“Respect,” Aretha Franklin, 1967

If I could choose only one song to represent the era it would be “Respect.”

It’s a cover of a track previously written and recorded by Otis Redding. But Franklin makes it wholly her own. From the opening lines, the Queen of Soul doesn’t ask for respect; she demands it.

The song became an anthem for the black power and women’s movements.

As Franklin explained in her 1999 autobiography:
 

“It was the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher – everyone wanted respect. It was also one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement. The song took on monumental significance.”

Of course, these five songs can’t possibly do the decade’s music justice.

Some other tracks that I share with my students and count among my favorites include Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” and Lou Rawls’ “Dead End Street.”
 

Michael V. Drake, President, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bob Dylan in 1991. Xavier Badosa, CC BY-SA

One side of the debate was occupied by those who deny that a songwriter should be identified as a poet. The Swedish Academy, supported by popular opinion, presented the counter-argument, and Dylan is now listed first among the “Most Popular Literature Laureates”, ahead of such luminaries as Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus or Toni Morrison.

This is a surprising spot in literary history for someone who once described himself as a song and dance man, but Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius insists that Dylan “can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition”. Dylan himself seems to demur: toward the end of his Nobel address he says, “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read”.

The sung-not-read distinction has long been a key issue in this debate. Composer Pierre Boulez argues that specialisation has divided speech from music, so that now each must obey discrete and specific laws of semantics and structure. They are no longer necessarily in harmony, though they still find points of connection, in song. As poet and critic David Orr notes, “A well-written song isn’t just a poem with a bunch of notes attached; it’s a unity of verbal and musical elements”.
Orr doesn’t offer the Academy’s argument that a songwriter can be a poet, insisting instead that there is a distinction between a poem and a song. He has a lot of support for this, because though there are songs that are remarkably poem-like; and poems that work better in spoken than in written form, there are distinct differences, in terms of genre and of function, between the two forms.

Poems, generally speaking, behave on the page, and operate against silence. Song lyrics, generally speaking, perform in sound, and operate in a relationship with musical apparatus.

The use of language differs too, in the two forms. Both song lyrics and poems exploit and rely on linguistic devices such as imagery, expressiveness, rhythm, cadence, concision, and word association. Poets have at their disposal little more than grammar, syntax and lexical choices.

Musicians have all that, plus a stack of sonic resources. These include melody, harmony and instrumentation; the stressing or slurring, and stretching or truncating of words, as needed to fit the musical shape; as well as meaningless but useful utterances. While rarely found in any but the most experimental of poems, oo-oo-oos and la-la-las can perfectly punctuate a song, enrich its song texture, and capture its listeners.

Songs also make more use of repetition than do poems: in part because the music may demand that a phrase or line be repeated; in part because the conventions of song include the use of a refrain, which is rare in contemporary poetry, largely because it doesn’t suit the poems though it is often vital in a song. Tom Wait’s Time — a very poetic song — includes a chorus that is all repetition:
 

And it’s time time time / and it’s time time time / and it’s time time time / that you love / and it’s time time time.

I love this, when Waits sings it, and it provides an important transition between the wild imagery of the verses. But when I read these lines, in the absence of the music and the voice, I feel as though I am in the presence of a mistake.

Does any of this matter — need the boundaries between song and poem be patrolled and policed? Possibly not. After all, as 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico suggests, we humans came to language through song; and song and poetry together built the linguistic domain we now inhabit.

But there’s more to it than theory; there’s also taxonomy, and the distribution of resources that follows cultural classifications. Musicians can become rich and famous from their work; poets rarely do. Musicians can compete for the distinction associated with what is still called “high” culture, but poets rarely get to enjoy the rewards of “popular” culture.

Bob Dylan, for example, has won a shelf full of Grammies for the same body of work that delivered his Nobel Prize in Literature. Oxford Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage has won the Ivor Novello Award, but that was specifically for his song lyrics: his poetry was not eligible.

As long as the river flows in only one direction, it seems likely that poets will continue to resist attempts by songwriters to occupy their patch.
 

Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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In the Words of Bob Dylan (a recent favourite of India’s Prime Minister):

NOTHING WAS DELIVERED (WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN)

Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you
Not out of spite or anger
But simply because it’s true
Now, I hope you won’t object to this
Giving back all of what you owe
The fewer words you have to waste on this
The sooner you can go

Nothing is better, nothing is best
Take heed of this and get plenty of rest

Nothing was delivered
But I can’t say I sympathize
With what your fate is going to be
Yes, for telling all those lies
Now you must provide some answers
For what you sell has not been received
And the sooner you come up with them
The sooner you can leave

Nothing is better, nothing is best
Take heed of this and get plenty rest

(Now you know)
Nothing was delivered
And it’s up to you to say
Just what you had in mind
When you made ev’rybody pay
No, nothing was delivered
Yes, ’n’ someone must explain
That as long as it takes to do this
Then that’s how long that you’ll remain

Nothing is better, nothing is best
Take heed of this and get plenty rest

Courtesy: Copyright © 1968, 1975 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1996 by Dwarf Music

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A portrait of Indian poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore. Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

But as Bob Dylan might croon, “the Times they are mistaken.”

A Bengali literary giant who probably wrote even more songs preceded Dylan’s win by over a century. Rabindranath Tagore, a wildly talented Indian poet, painter and musician, took the prize in 1913.

The first musician (and first non-European) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore possessed an artistry – and lasting influence – that mirrored Dylan’s.
 

Bengal’s own renaissance man

Tagore was born in 1861 into a wealthy family and was a lifelong resident of Bengal, the East Indian state whose capital is Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Born before the invention of film, Tagore was a keen observer of India’s emergence into the modern age; much of his work was influenced by new media and other cultures.

Like Dylan, Tagore was largely self-taught. And both were associated with nonviolent social change. Tagore was a supporter of Indian independence and a friend of Mahatma Gandhi, while Dylan penned much of the soundtrack for the 1960s protest movement. Each was a multitalented artist: writer, musician, visual artist and film composer. (Dylan is also a filmmaker.)

The Nobel website states that Tagore, though he wrote in many genres, was principally a poet who published more than 50 volumes of verse, as well as plays, short stories and novels. Tagore’s music isn’t mentioned until the last sentence, which says that the artist “also left … songs for which he wrote the music himself,” as if this much-loved body of work was no more than an afterthought.

But with over 2,000 songs to his name, Tagore’s output of music alone is extremely impressive. Many continue to be used in films, while three of his songs were chosen as national anthems by India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, an unparalleled achievement.
The Bengali national anthem, ‘Amar Sonar Bangla.’

Today, Tagore’s significance as a songwriter is undisputed. A YouTube search for Tagore’s songs, using the search term “Rabindra Sangeet” (Bengali for “Tagore songs”), yields about 234,000 hits.

Although Tagore was – and remains – a musical icon in India, this aspect of his work hasn’t been recognized in the West. Perhaps for this reason, music seems not to have had much or any influence on the 1913 Nobel committee, as judged by the presentation speech by committee chair Harald Hjärne. In fact, the word “music” is never used in the prize announcement. It is notable, however, that Hjärne says the work of Tagore’s that “especially arrested the attention of the selecting critics is the 1912 poetry collection ‘Gitanjali: Song Offerings.’”
 

Dylan: All about the songs

It may be that the Nobel organization’s downplaying of Tagore’s significance as a musician is part and parcel of the same thinking that has long delayed Dylan’s receiving the prize: uneasiness over subsuming song into the category of literature.

It’s rumored that Dylan was first nominated in 1996. If true, it means that Nobel committees have been wrestling with the idea of honoring this extraordinary lyricist for two decades. Rolling Stone called Dylan’s win “easily the most controversial award since they gave it to the guy who wrote ‘Lord of the Flies,’ which was controversial only because it came next after the immensely popular 1982 prize for Gabriel García Márquez.”

Unlike Tagore’s Nobel announcement, in which his songs were an afterthought, the presentation announcing Dylan’s award made it clear that aside from a handful of other literary contributions this prize is all about his music. And therein lies the controversy, with some saying he shouldn’t have won – that being a pop culture icon who wrote songs disqualifies him.

But like many great literary figures, Dylan is a man of letters; his songs abound with the names of those who came before him, whether it’s Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in “Desolation Row” or James Joyce in “I Feel a Change Comin’ On.”

Why not celebrate Bob by being like Bob and reading something unfamiliar, great and historically important? Tagore’s “Gitanjali,” his most famous collection of poems, is available in the poet’s own English translation, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats (who won his own Nobel in literature in 1923). And YouTube is a great repository for some of Tagore’s most celebrated songs (search for “Rabindra Sangeet”).

Many music lovers have long hoped that the parameters of literature might be writ a bit larger to include song. While Dylan’s win is certainly an affirmation, remembering that he’s not the first can only pave the way for more musicians to win in years to come.

Author is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music, University of Minnesota

This article was first published on The Conversation

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Politically I do not know where he stands today.'

Image:  Pierre Guillaud/AFP

I’m not really sure how I feel about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Firstly, there is nothing sacred about Nobel, whose fortune was made by inventing, manufacturing and selling military explosives. We can go past that one as it’s an old story and even war profits may theoretically be used for peace. Were they? Here again we get into uncomfortable territory. Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize when a less deserving candidate must have been hard to find. More recently, Barack Obama did. Charming as he may be, his peace record is abysmal.

Wait. We are not talking of the Nobel Peace Prize here. That, the Bob Dylan of the 1960s may well have deserved for songs like Blowing in the Wind, Masters of War, With God on Our Side, The Times They Are A'Changing or civil rights songs like Oxford Town and Only a Pawn in their Game”. I grew up with these songs. We sang them at protest rallies when I was a student in America fighting against the Viet Nam war. Best of all, you didn’t need to be a great guitarist to learn the few chords that most early Dylan songs required.

To be truthful, at the very beginning of my introduction to his work, almost anybody sounded better than Dylan when they sang his songs. There were so very many who did, from Joan Baez to the Byrds and Peter, Paul and Mary. At least when they sang, you could understand the words. Not so at first for me with Dylan. But soon, the Dylan delivery, the nasal twang and the long, free verse mouthed without breaking for breath, interspersed with short bursts of a harmonica that seemed to care nothing for its audience’s pre-conceived ideas of music, grew on me. And obviously I wasn’t the only one. Millions around the globe were hooked. The poetry and the music were a package, inseparable. When you got a better voice, or a more technically accomplished musician, you didn’t feel the words in the same way.
 

The man and his art

So much for Dylan the musician and poet. What of the man? The politically charged Dylan gave way to the lover who either perennially walked out of relationships or made a brave face as others walked out on him. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is a classic of that genre. His fierce independence politically and personally meant that no one could take him for granted, including fans like me. So we suffered as he went from being the Lefty pacifist, to becoming a born-again Christian, to asserting his Jewish roots as Robert Zimmerman. Frankly I never enjoyed these later avatars though recognising his right to explore himself in every way that he wanted to.

Musically, of course, he was able to reinvent himself from acoustic folk to electric rock and for a long while that created a delicious amalgam best exemplified by the album Blonde on Blonde. Politically I do not know where he stands today. Is he a critic of the American war machine that created Bin Laden to fight communists, that first armed Saddam Hussain and then invaded Iraq to capture natural resources, that allies with Israel and Saudi Arabia to create Islamic jihad and recolonise the world? There is no evidence of this in his music today. This is not the Dylan of the '60s and '70s.

Luckily he has not won a Nobel Peace Prize. That I would gladly have seen on musicians like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger or even Joan Baez.

This is a prize for literature. For his unique blend of poetry and music and his precocious ability to capture the pulse of his times. That I can celebrate. 40 saal der, par durust. (40 years late, but nevertheless right). To say it in Dylan’s words:

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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