To Hell and Back: Bob Dylan & Anaïs Mitchell’s Underworld Songs
Part 1: Blonde on Blonde
This post is the first in a three-part series where I put Bob Dylan’s songs of the underworld in conversation with those of Anaïs Mitchell in Hadestown. In her book on Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945, Rachel Falconer studies modern adaptations of a trope the ancients called katabasis. “The technical term for the story of a hero’s descent to the underworld is katabasis, which means literally ‘a going down’” (2). Falconer cites several classical descent narratives into the underworld, including Orpheus, Theseus, Jason, Heracles, Demeter, Aeneas, and Odysseus. As David Polanski reminds us, the Greeks and Romans didn’t have a monopoly on such myths in the ancient world. But it appears that Dylan’s main reference points were from ancient Greek and Roman mythology and epic poetry in the songs I’ll be studying for this series.
Dylan has imagined his way down into the underworld a number of times over his career. Late in his Nobel Lecture, for instance, he conjures up this scene:
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.
Dylan uses this story to set up a contrast between dead literature and living song. He unequivocally sides with the latter: “Our songs are alive in the land of the living.”
If only it were that simple. What about Dylan’s songs that are set among the dead? Not only is he familiar with classical katabasis, he also contributes to this tradition with original songs depicting a hero’s descent into the underworld. His most extensive early treatment of this theme appears on the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. [I previously wrote an article about mythic quest on this album in case you’re interested.] Recently he has renewed his interest in katabasis, most notably on the 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways and the 2021 film Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan. He stakes his claim for songs as expressions of life; but this claim is complicated by the fact that his latest works are often preoccupied with death and dramatize the border crossing from the world of the living to the underworld of the dead.
Why has this underworld theme, which Dylan experimented with in his mid-twenties, returned with renewed urgency over the last few years? One obvious answer is old age. As I write this, Dylan is in his early eighties. He has outlived many friends and collaborators, and is called upon far too frequently to issue eulogies for fallen comrades. It’s enough to make anyone dwell upon crossing over into “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns,” as Hamlet puts it in the “To be, or not to be” speech (3.1.78-79). But the obvious answers are rarely sufficient when it comes to Dylan, especially if those answers are merely autobiographical. If you want to understand his multilayered art, then you’re likely to make more headway by turning to other artworks that inspired him, or other artists he’s in conversation with, rather than narrowly fixating on the man himself.
One artwork that could have lit the spark for Dylan’s reignited interest in the underworld is Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country. We know from Dylan’s interview with Douglas Brinkley that he saw this play and was moved to tears by it. A lot of attention has been paid to the play’s 1930s American roots, but not enough attention has been paid to Girl from the North Country as a play about death and the afterlife [I wrote an article on this subject, too]. The narrator of the play, Dr. Walker, is clearly fashioned after the Stage Manager in Our Town, and like Wilder’s thirties classic, Girl from the North Country is an avant-garde play disguised in the homely garb of regionalism and naturalism. In the famous third act of Our Town, titled “Death and Eternity,” the dead of Grover’s Corner take control of the stage, and that is the fundamental condition for McPherson’s play, too.
Girl from the North Country is nominally about the downtrodden denizens of a Duluth boarding house in 1934; but really it is populated by dead souls in some purgatorial realm. The play is saturated with death: Nick Laine’s sister died as a child, Nick and Elizabeth lost a baby, daughter Marianne is seemingly impregnated by the Grim Reaper or a ferryman from the River Styx, boarder Elias drowns and then comes back out on stage for a show-stopping song and dance number, and the stage manager Dr. Walker ultimately admits that he committed suicide.
“My name is George Arthur Walker,” the stage manager announces at the beginning of the play. “I’m a doctor. Least I was. Back when this was our world. I healed some bodies in pain. But as we know pain comes in all kinds. Physical, spiritual. Indescribable” (12). The line that sticks out is “Back when this was our world.” Along with the echo of “our town” in “our world,” Walker is apparently referring to the distant past, back when the cast occupied the world of 1934 Duluth. But that’s not their world anymore. Now they are doomed to continually reenact their mistakes, like souls in purgatory—or like actors on stage. Dr. Walker harks back to a time when the characters were still in the world of the living, before crossing over into the underworld. By the end of the play Walker tells us that he committed suicide in December 1934. He has been a posthumous narrator all along, speaking from beyond the grave and across the footlights to the live audience. On one particular night that audience included Bob Dylan, witnessing his songs being performed by the Duluth dead in McPherson’s metatheatrical afterlife.
When Brinkley asked if he had seen Girl from the North Country, Dylan replied,
Sure, I’ve seen it and it affected me. I saw it as an anonymous spectator, not as someone who had anything to do with it. I just let it happen. The play had me crying at the end. I can’t even say why. When the curtain came down, I was stunned. I really was. Too bad Broadway shut down because I wanted to see it again.
Dylan the spectator wished he could see and hear his songs performed in the underworld once again, but the pandemic intervened to make that impossible. Dylan the artist, however, kept remarkably busy during the pandemic. If he couldn’t see his songs performed in the underworld by others, maybe he could restage similar scenarios himself, using these themes as dramatic material for Rough and Rowdy Ways and Shadow Kingdom.
I wonder if Dylan snuck into any other Broadway musicals while he was in the neighborhood? The hottest musical in town before the pandemic was Hadestown, a “folk opera” about Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades, Persephone, and the Underworld. Singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell initially tried out the idea as a DIY theater project in Vermont. In 2010 she adapted Hadestown into a concept album for Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records.
Mitchell began collaborating with director Rachel Chavkin in 2012 on a new stage production as a fully developed musical. It debuted Off-Broadway in 2016 at the New York Theatre Workshop. After productions at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton in 2017, and London’s National Theatre in 2018, Hadestown made its Broadway debut in 2019. The musical has become the longest running show at Walter Kerr Theatre, located just blocks away from the Belasco Theatre where Girl from the North Country opened in 2020. Hadestown won the 2019 Tony for Best Musical, and Mitchell took home top honors for Best Book and Best Musical Score.
In interviews Mitchell has frequently cited Dylan as a formative influence. You can also go online and find videos of Mitchell covering “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “With God on Our Side,” the latter with her group Bonny Light Horseman and Justin Vernon (who played Orpheus on the 2010 Hadestown album). Did Dylan’s underworld songs influence Mitchell’s underworld songs? I think so. There are enough echoes of Dylan in the musical to seem less like a coincidence and more like a pattern. Did Hadestown in turn influence Rough and Rowdy Ways and Shadow Kingdom? Maybe, but that’s harder to pin down. “Influence” isn’t the best word for the kind of comparative study I’m doing here anyway.
Influence suggests a direct, intentional, documented cause-and-effect relationship, and that’s not my angle of approach. I’m interested in putting Dylan and Mitchell into conversation through their underworld songs and seeing what insights come from this juxtaposition. I’m aware that correlation does not imply causation. Dylan and Mitchell’s works are often remarkably similar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re modeling their work directly after each other. No worries: serendipity is perfectly welcome here. The light and shadows they cast on each other is mutually illuminating even if it’s only a happy accident.
In this three-part series, I’ll be offering a kind of critical triangulation. If it helps to visualize a Venn diagram, imagine the intersection of Dylan’s underworld songs (from Blonde on Blonde, Rough and Rowdy Ways, and Shadow Kingdom) with Mitchell’s Hadestown and with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The shaded overlap where these circles meet is where my project is located.
Blonde on Blonde
Nat Hentoff was present during the single-night recording session for Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). Listening to the playback of “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Hentoff innocently remarked, “‘The songs so far sound as if there were real people in them.’ Dylan seemed surprised that I had considered it necessary to make the comment. ‘There are. That’s what makes them so scary. If I haven’t been through what I write about, the songs aren’t worth anything’” (85). As Dylan transitioned away from songs focused on other people and their agendas, and toward more intimate material, it was important for his new songs to be rooted in the personal.
However, it would be a big mistake to conclude that the songs Dylan wrote from 1964 onward were exclusively personal. One of his gifts as a songwriter is his ability to hear echoes between his own thoughts, experiences, and relationships and those expressed in an eclectic range of sources, including religious scripture and ancient myth. For a good example of his sense of identification with myth, listen to how he relates personally to Odysseus in the Nobel Lecture:
In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good.
For the best examples of Dylan’s identification with myth, listen to the songs. He uses myths as guideposts or blueprints, making his songs simultaneously contemporary and timeless, personal and archetypal. To hang another fancy term on it, his underworld songs are like palimpsests, those ancient manuscripts on which generations of scholars added material on top of what was already written there. In palimpsests, the new is inscribed upon the old, effacing but never entirely erasing, retaining legible traces of what came before.
Dylan’s most palimpsestuous work of the sixties is Blonde on Blonde. His grafting technique of combining the ancient with the cutting-edge is on striking, hilarious display right from the start. In “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” the singer commands, “Everybody must get stoned!” Is he talking about getting high? Yes, of course he’s talking about getting high! Just listen to the giggling singer and his baked band of merry pranksters. I’m probably not the first person to draw your attention to the song’s coded math: 12 x 35 = 420, a number which has emerged post-1965 to signify international Weed Day (April 20) and the time of the afternoon (4:20) when stoners fire up their first jay of the day, like lighting a candle in honor of Saint Bob, patron of the potheads.
Is “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” only about getting high? No, of course not! In fact, most of the lyrics refer to the gruesome biblical practice of stoning someone to death. Dylan is taking a very personal experience—feeling persecuted by clueless critics, faithless fans, and a series of incompatible lovers—and expressing it in terms of an ancient form of execution. The singer feels hounded by haters into the tomb: “They’ll stone you when you are set down in your grave.” This opening song marks the hero’s descent into the underworld.
All the songs that follow are doubtlessly personal in ways that only Dylan knows. That hasn’t stopped generations of fans from speculating about his inspirations—this one’s about Joan Baez, this one Edie Sedgwick, this one Sara Lownds, etc. I’ll leave the kiss-and-tell gossip to others. What I find most fascinating is Dylan’s palimpsestuous layering in Blonde on Blonde, mapping the personal onto familiar heroic quests. The primary myth invoked on the album involves Orpheus and Eurydice.
The story of Orpheus’s exploits can be found in a variety of classical sources, from Plato to Virgil to Ovid to Plutarch. But if you need a refresher on the myth, Robert Graves consolidates the whole story into a single paragraph in Greek Gods and Heroes:
Orpheus’s mother was Calliope, one of the Nine Muses, and she inspired poets. Besides being a poet, Orpheus played the lyre so well that he could not only tame wild beasts with his music, but make rocks and trees move from their places to follow him. One unlucky day his beautiful wife Eurydice trod on a sleeping snake, which woke and bit her. She died of the poison, so Orpheus boldly went down to Tartarus, playing his lyre, to fetch her away. He charmed Charon into ferrying him across the Styx without payment; he charmed Cerberus into whining and licking his feet; he charmed the Furies into laying down their whips and listening to him, while all punishments ceased; he charmed Queen Persephone into giving him the secret password for the Pool of Memory; he even charmed King Hades into freeing Eurydice and letting her follow him up on earth again. Hades made only one condition: that Orpheus must not look behind him until Eurydice was safely back in the sunlight. So he went off, singing and playing happily. Eurydice followed; but at the last minute Orpheus feared that Hades might be tricking him, forgot the condition, looked anxiously behind him—and lost her forever. (36-37)
Dylan freely borrows a number of these details from Orpheus and Eurydice, translates them into the language of sixties hipsterdom, and refracts them through the prism of his questing protagonist in Blonde on Blonde (note the acronym BOB) to produce a distinctly Dylanesque adaptation of the ancient myth.
Again, it begins at the beginning with “Rainy Day Women,” a song that, on one of its many levels, seems to restage the death of Orpheus. Dylan opens,
Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re trying to be so good
They’ll stone you just a-like they said they would
They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to go home
Then they’ll stone ya when you’re there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
Goaded by his music [“They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar”], the singer’s persecutors pummel him to death. Orpheus knows the feeling. According to Ovid in Book 11 of Metamorphoses, Orpheus was persecuted by the Maenads, who worshipped Dionysus and turned into a frenzied hit squad against anyone who didn’t do the same. Ovid recounts their brutal murder of Orpheus by raining down stones on him:
While the poet from Thrace was enthralling trees,
Wild beasts and even stones that followed him,
The Ciconian women, animal skins draping
Their raving breasts, saw Orpheus from the hilltop
Arranging a song to the chords of his lyre,
And one of them, hair floating on the breeze, said,
“There he is, the man who scorns us!” and hurled
Her spear at the Apollonian singer’s mouth,
But the shaft sprouted leaves and only grazed him.
The next missile was a stone. Stopped in midair
By the sound of voice and lyre, it fell at his feet
As if begging forgiveness for its audacity.
But the assault escalated without restraint,
And mad Fury ruled. Everything they threw
Would have been mollified by his music,
But the enormous clamor of Berycyntian flutes,
Of drums and breast-beating and Bacchic ululation,
Drowned out the lyre’s sound. The stones finally grew red
With the blood of the poet, unheard in the end. (Book 11, lines 1-19, emphasis added)
A bloody bad ending, one that sent Orpheus’s spirit down to the underworld of the dead. As we all know, it wasn’t his first trip.
Orpheus is best known for his attempt to rescue Eurydice from the underworld, an impulse reenacted by Dylan through the song “I Want You.” The chorus couldn’t be more direct and unequivocal as a plaintive declaration of desire:
I want you
I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you
So where is she and what will it take to fulfill his desire to be with her again? There’s the rub:
The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
The spritely interplay between Dylan’s harmonica and Al Kooper’s up-tempo organ lend this melody a pop sensibility totally at odds with the morose scene described by the lyrics. [Oxford English Dictionary definition of lyric: “Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung; pertaining to or characteristic of song.”] Look at those adjectives: guilty, lonesome, cracked, washed-out. Pay attention to those verbs, with all their crying and sighing. Above all, note the cause for all this distress in the first noun: undertaker. The woman he pines for is dead.
People around the singer counsel him to get over it, refuse her, accept her loss and move on. He’ll have none of it: “But it’s not that way / I wasn’t born to lose you.” He is determined to get her back. Equipped with only his lyre, his lyrics, and the irresistible charm of his music (just listen to it!), he journeys into the underworld in pursuit of his lost muse. [OED etymology of music: ancient Greek, “art presided over by the Muses.”].
Dylan has long been attracted to the imagery of gates, never more so than in Blonde on Blonde, where so many songs straddle the threshold between life and death. “I Want You” gives us the first such reference:
The saviors who are fast asleep
They wait for you
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinking from my broken cup
And ask me to open up
The gate for you
Knock-knock-knockin’ on hell’s door. The protagonist is just getting started trying to cross over and back through the barrier that stands between him and his love.
In “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” he’s at it again: “Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can’t jump it.” He can’t leap over the gate that separates them, nor can he open the door: “I can take him to your house but I can’t unlock it / You see you forgot to leave me with the key.” The recurring prison imagery of “Absolutely Sweet Marie” (with references to “jail” and “penitentiary”) implies other barred doors, walls, and gates set up as obstacles between the outlaw Orpheus and his fugitive Eurydice.
Other songs on the album amplify the Orpheus and Eurydice source by adapting their doomed exodus out of the underworld. Robert Graves describes the first stage of the journey home as happy and hopeful. “Pledging My Time” captures that initial mood. The singer urges his lover onward and shows optimism that they’ll both make it out alive:
Won’t you come with me, baby?
I’ll take you where you wanna go
And if it don’t work out
You’ll be the first to know
I’m pledging my time to you
Hopin’ you’ll come through too
As the journey continues, the singer’s faith begins to falter. In the words of a pivotal song from Hadestown, doubt comes in. Or, as the Orphic protagonist of BOB puts it,
You say you love me
And you’re thinking of me
But you know you could be wrong
You say you told me
That you wanna hold me
But you know you’re not that strong
He doubts that she loves him as much as she claims, and he suspects he’s being played for a sucker. Trying to get her back was a fool’s errand—better to part ways instead:
I just can’t do what I done before
I just can’t beg you anymore
I’m gonna let you pass
And I’ll go last
Then time will tell just who has fell
And who’s been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine
The competing tensions in these two songs—hope vs. despair, faith vs. doubt—dramatize a central conflict in the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. One is a propulsive energy pushing forward in pursuit of love. The other is a regressive impulse tugging backwards, second-guessing, losing faith, cutting ties and losses, getting the hell out while you still can.
This back-and-forth vacillation eventually circles around to the most imposing barrier in the singer’s journey: the gate of the Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Listeners who want to reduce Dylan’s songs to a game of “pin the tail on the lover” make much of the fact that the name of Dylan’s new wife, Sara Lownds, seems more or less embedded in the title of the closing song, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” But in the present context, the figure serves a more significant role as goddess of the underworld. Like the woman in “I Want You,” the woman in “Lowlands” is a ghostly shade in the land of the dead:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
This is the first of 16 questions posed over the course of the song. The singer has come with the tools of his trade to make his appeal: “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I put them by your gate / Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” Blonde on Blonde traces the hero’s quest all the way to the gate of this underworld goddess, but then it leaves him stranded with no answers to his entreaties, waiting perpetually for admission.
At least that’s how I’ve long heard the song. But lately I’ve been rethinking that interpretation. In her introduction to A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature, Madeleine Scherer finds a metafictional dynamic at play in katabasis narratives. These tales often involve remembering dead spirits who are permanently separated from the living. And yet, the story about the descent effectively serves to bridge that divide, keeping the underworld shades alive in the overworld through the myth, poem, or song. Scherer uses the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as an ideal illustration of this dynamic:
While she remains lost to her living husband, however, Eurydice enters the realm of mythology through the singer’s katabatic quest: although Orpheus disobeys the laws of the underworld and thus fails to revive the spirit of his wife, her memory is saved through the act of narration itself, as the tale of the famous bard’s descent becomes a memorial to her existence. (5)
The same interpretation applies to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The song depicts the singer stuck down in the underworld, perpetually waiting at the gate. And yet, the very existence of the song testifies otherwise, for he couldn’t have written it and delivered it to us unless he survived to tell the tale. Furthermore, even if the underworld muse remains locked forever behind her gate, at least her story and her memory made it out. She is brought back to life every time someone listens to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” May her song always be sung.
The other source that has led me to rethink this song is Larry Starr’s Listening to Bob Dylan. Starr devotes an entire chapter to Dylan’s harmonica playing, describing the instrument as “his other voice.” The singer of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” vocally issues poignant pleas through five long verses. He keeps asking for entry, for guidance, for mercy, for love. He gets no reply. Finally, after the singer goes silent, we hear the harmonica. We heard a few notes of harmonica before the first verse, but that was over nine spellbinding minutes ago. The jolting reappearance of the harmonica wakes us up from a dream. This “other voice” sounds miraculous, like a beautiful rare bird has suddenly taken flight and burst into song.
Is this the reply the singer has been looking for? Does the muse of the album speak through music rather than words, like the mythic Philomela who is transformed into a nightingale? And if so, what is she trying to communicate through this music? Did the singer crack the nightingale’s code, or does he remain stuck inside the underworld with the overworld blues again? It’s a song and an album that raises far more questions than it answers. Whether you’re the singer or the listener, the best you can do is make the journey through to its conclusion then start all over again.
That’s myth for you. The stories endure because they raise perennial problems and tap into primal fears and desires that persist from generation to generation. Myths specialize in ritual repetition, not resolution. As Hermes and company put it in Hadestown: “It’s an old song / It’s an old tale from way back when / And we’re gonna sing it again and again.” Orpheus sang it, then Ovid sang it again, then Dylan breathed new life into it through his distinct voice, lyrics, and music. In the next installment, we’ll shift our focus to Hadestown and listen to Anaïs Mitchell remake the myth yet again, taking the old song from the old singers, adding her own inscriptions to the palimpsest, and retracing the well-trod road to hell once again.
Works Cited
Brinkley, Douglas. “Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind.” New York Times (12 June 2020). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/arts/music/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy-ways.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage.
Dylan, Bob. Blonde on Blonde. Columbia, 1966.
---. “Nobel Lecture in Literature.” The Nobel Prize (4 June 2017). https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/.
---. Official Song Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website,
http://www.bobdylan.com/.
Falconer, Rachel. Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
Graves, Robert. Greek Gods and Heroes. Dell, 1960.
Hadestown (Original Broadway Cast Recording). Sing It Again, 2019.
Hentoff, Nat. “The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’ Sounds.” New Yorker (24 October 1964). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances, ed. Artur Jarosinski. Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, 82-92.
Herren, Graley. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country.” New Hibernia Review 22.4 (2018): 97-113. https://www.exhibit.xavier.edu/english_faculty/584/.
---. “Mythic Quest in Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.” Rock Music Studies 5.2 (2018): 124-41. https://www.exhibit.xavier.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1576&context=english_faculty.
McPherson, Conor. Girl from the North Country. Music and lyrics by Bob Dylan. Nick Hern, 2017.
Mitchell, Anaïs. Hadestown. Righteous Babe, 2010.
---. Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown. Plume, 2020.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Hackett, 2010.
Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Polanski, David. “‘The last outback at the world’s end’: Bob Dylan and Franco Berardi in the Garden of Eden.” Affirmations: of the modern (8 August 2023), https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/10.57009/am.132.
Scherer, Madeleine. “Introduction: The Long Descent into the Past.” A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature, edited by Madeleine Scherer and Rachel Falconer. Routledge, 2020, pp. 1-18.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Second Quarto. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2006.
Starr, Larry. Listening to Bob Dylan. University of Illinois Press, 2021.
Absolutely awesome!! You and Laura are my Dylan whisperers. You uncover so much depth that changes my experience of his imagery and story telling. Thanks again Graley!!
Well done.