geography in song lyrics

Watching the superb and sublimely acted recent film A Complete Unknown has inspired me to revisit the songs of Bob Dylan. In doing so, I have once again been impressed with his geographical vision, marked by effective invocations of place. His frequent use of place names in lyrics has even drawn cartographic attention, as can be seen in figure posted below. (Although impressive, the map does not seem to capture all the places that Dylan has mentioned in his songs; Ashtabula in northeastern Ohio, for example, is apparently missing.*)

Dylan achieved fame as a songwriter in part by drawing on, and synthesizing, a remarkable range of musical traditions. Although he initially gained attention for folk music, the blues genre has arguably been a greater influence over the course of his career. The album that he was working on in the second half of the film signals as much in its title: Highway 61 Revisited. Highway 61 (officially, U.S. Route 61) is often known as the “Blues Highway,” as it wends its way through the land of the Delta Blues in the Inland Delta of northwestern Mississippi (not to be confused with the actual delta of the Mississippi River – the so-called Bird’s Foot Delta – in southern Louisiana). Significantly, Route 61, as it was originally constituted, stretched from New Orleans to Duluth, Minnesota, Dylan’s birthplace, and beyond. Its northern reaches are not far from Dylan’s hometown, the small mining city of Hibbing in the Mesabi Iron Range.

Intriguingly, Dylan implies a journey from one end of Highway 61 to the other in his acclaimed song “Tangled Up in Blue,” generally regarded as a fictionalized, semi-autobiographical account:

I had a job in the Great North woods

Working as a cook for a spell

But I never did like it all that much

And one day the axe just fell

So I drifted down to New Orleans

Where I was looking for to be employed

Working for a while on a fishing boat

Right outside of Delacroix

Dylan’s choice of Delacroix, a town of 48 residents (in 2000), is also intriguing. Locally called “The End of the World” (originally “El fin del Mundo”), Delacroix was originally settled by Isleños, Spanish-speaking people from the Canary Islands. It is also known for the annual blessing of its fishing fleet.

One of the early scenes in A Complete Unknown features Dylan singing his folk tribute to Woody Guthrie, “Song to Woody,” to Guthrie himself, mute and restricted to his bed, as well as to folk-icon Pete Seager. Although moving and effective, the scene itself is fictional. “Song to Woody” was one of the first original songs that Dylan recorded, but it is never ranked, to my knowledge, as one of his best. It is a different story, however, with his 1983 homage to Willie McTell, a Georgia-born practitioner of the Piedmont Blues, described in his Wikipedia article as “singing in a smooth and often laid-back tenor, which differed greatly from the harsher voices of many Delta bluesmen …” Although relatively little known, in large part because Dylan was unsatisfied with the recording and only released it years later on a “Bootleg” album, “Blind Willie McTell” is now regarded by many critics one of Dylan’s best songs.  Greil Marcus goes so far as to rate it as his greatest recording, provided, that is, if the listener is in “the right mood.” I would unreservedly put it among his top five. As commentator michaelg4411 pithily summarizes it on a YouTube offering of the song, “Hundreds of years of American history distilled into a six-minute masterpiece. Stunning.”

* Mentioned in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”: “I’ll look for you old Honolulu, San Francisco, Ashtabula.”