Nobel Lecture
5 June 2017
When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering
exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see
where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most
likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile
and purposeful.
If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start
with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two.
From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an
older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I
loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and
blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one
genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and
imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was
the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once,
and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to
get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.
(...)
When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory – tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.
That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/
Thoreau says, even today, with Homer and the "wanted man" delivering the above lecture:
The coward ever sings no song,
He listens to no chime,
He has no heart, he has no tongue,
To build the lofty rhyme.
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