In his autobiography Chronicles One, Bob Dylan talks about stumbling upon the song “Pirate Jenny” from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Within a few minutes, he felt that he “hadn’t slept or tasted food for about thirty hours. I was so into it. . . .This was a wild song. Big medicine in the lyrics. Heavy action spread out. Each phrase comes at you from a ten-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another one comes like a punch on the chin. And then there’s always that ghost chorus about the black ship that steps in, fences it all off and locks it up tighter than a drum. It’s a nasty song sung by an evil fiend, and when she’s done singing, there’s not a word to say. It leaves you breathless.”
You gentlemen can say, "Hey gal, finish them floors!
Get upstairs! What's wrong with you! Earn your keep here!
You toss me your tips
and look out to the ships
But I'm counting your heads
as I'm making the beds
Cuz there's nobody gonna sleep here, honey
Nobody! Nobody!
Then one night there's a scream in the night
And you say, "Who's that kicking up a row?"
And ya see me kinda starin' out the winda
And you say, "What's she got to stare at now?"
I'll tell ya.
There's a ship, the black freighter
turns around in the harbor
shootin' guns from her bow . . .
- from “Pirate Jenny,” lyrics: Bertolt Brecht/Marc Blitzstein, melody: Kurt Weill
Dylan writes about taking the song apart, trying to find out what made it tick. The song reminded him of Picasso’s painting Guernica. “This heavy song was a new stimulant for my senses, indeed very much like a folk song but a folk song from a different gallon jug in a different backyard. . . . I took the song apart and unzipped it — it was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge.”
As he studied the song, he decided that what he really wanted to sing were songs that didn’t exist — songs that transcended the information in them, the character and the plot. He needed to write his own songs. The first efforts were rough, didn’t quite work. He kept trying. Dylan connected with John Hammond, legendary talent scout for Columbia Records, a short while later and Hammond gave Dylan a record by an obscure bluesman, Robert Johnson. Again, Dylan studied the music.
Over the next few weeks, I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition. The songs were layered with a startling economy of lines. . . . I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction — themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them.
John Hammond told me that he thought that Johnson had read Walt Whitman . . . I couldn’t imagine how Johnson’s mind could go in and out of so many places. He seems to know about everything, he even throws in Confucius-like sayings whenever it suits him. As great as the greats were, he goes one step further. You can’t imagine him singing, “Washington’s a bourgeois town.” He wouldn’t have noticed and if he did, it would have been irrelevant.
In a few years time, I’d write songs like “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Who Killed Davey Moore,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and some others like that. If I hadn’t gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad “Pirate Jenny,” it might not have dawned on me to write them, that songs like these could be written. In about 1964 and ’65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson’s blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down — that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write . . . Everything was in transition and I was standing in the doorway. Soon I’d step in heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up. Not quite yet though.