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THE GOSPEL SONGS OF BOB DYLAN
by Tom Piazza

Bob Dylan's songs are nearly always the record of a struggle - between appearance and reality, or between justice and its opposite, or between the demands of the self and some higher truth. Nothing is taken for granted; one is always choosing.

When Bob Dylan let it be known, in 1979, that he had been born again, it seemed to some that he had renounced the complexity and questioning of his earlier work in favor of what they saw as the pre-packaged answers of religion. As time has gone by, though, it is clear that Dylan encountered the Gospel the same way he has encountered everything else he has looked into - with the full complexity of a whole human heart and mind.

When there is the possibility of choice, there is always, just behind it, the reality of judgment. The awareness of judgment hovers behind the insistent questions in "Blowin' in The Wind"; it stares out at the listener from between the lines not only of what he once called his "finger-pointing" topical songs, like "Masters of War," but his more imagistic song-poems of the mid-1960s such as "Maggie's Farm" and "Like A Rolling Stone," although the targets are a little more ambiguous. In the years just before his conversion, in albums like Blood On The Tracks and Desire, the finger begins to point, ever more unmistakably, toward the self.

"I think of a hero," Dylan once remarked, "as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom." When Dylan began performing the Christian material publicly, he presented himself, in a sense, as Exhibit A. The songs were a form of personal testimony, and they were accompanied by spoken testimony as well. Yet before too long Dylan eliminated this directly evangelical component of his performance. Perhaps he felt a trap waiting there, one more head on the hydra of vanity, a disproportionate emphasis on his own persona, while it was the song that was, and is, the important thing. He has never stopped performing the songs.

In any case, for a while, on this recording, we can separate what Dylan is saying in his gospel songs from the drama of his saying it. Here, as in his other work, you find the range of human experience; there is serenity, turbulence, joy, gratitude, the hot iron glow of temptation and guilt and pride, there is damnation and hope, mystery and plain talk, all riding the constant and sometimes torturing undertow of the flesh and the world's concerns. In this way we see, again, how rooted Dylan is in the grain of American music, the Saturday night/Sunday morning tug-of-war that has lent tension and fire to the fact of the Gospel in the singing of Ralph Stanley, Little Richard, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, and Hank Williams, among so many others.

Truth, whatever its specifics may be, is never argued for; it is revealed. And in these songs the truth of the human heart is revealed, striving after that which will heal it, ennoble it, and, finally, save it from itself.

Tom Piazza
www.tompiazza.com

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