Bob Dylan on one of his biggest regrets
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The inspiring true story behind Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’
Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was inspired by one of the musicians who played on the record, Bruce Langhorne. His life was full of unthinkable adversity, which he valiantly overcame to become Dylan’s right-hand man.
As a child, Langhorne always knew he wanted to be a musician, but it never occurred to him to be a guitarist until a heartbreaking tragedy occurred. Up until he was 12, he looked destined to become a professional violin player. Tragically, after a disastrous incident involving homemade fireworks, Langhorne gave up his classical music dream after horrifically losing two fingers and a chunk of a thumb on his right hand.
All those years spent dedicating his time to mastering the violin were squandered, and Langhorne had to reassess what he wanted to do with his life. Due to his disability, it seemed improbable that he’d have been able to make it as a professional musician, but at 17, Langhorne decided to learn the guitar.
Even though it had been five years since he’d played an instrument, his instincts had stayed with him, and it didn’t take Langhorne long to pick it up. As only half of his right hand worked, he couldn’t play the guitar like everybody else, and out of necessity, Langhorne established his unique style, which took him to the top.
“Since I have fingers missing, some styles of guitar playing were forever unreachable for me. Like, I couldn’t really play good flamenco. Classical was difficult for me, though I did play some classical,” he said in an interview with Richie Unterberger. “But since I couldn’t develop technique to the point where I could just play the entire repertoire of guitar music, I had to develop a technique based on my own aesthetics. Because I had to listen to everything and say, okay, this sounds okay with three voices.”
He continued: “I used each of my fingers to generate a line, a polyphonic line, or I would play, which is why I say I really needed someone who had a thread going to really do my job. Because then they could generate a couple of lines of polyphony, or a rhythmic structure. And then I could enhance that.”
Rather than viewing his disability as a stumbling block, it instead became the making of Langhorne. He added: “I got to be a very good accompanist for that reason. Because I was really forced to listen. So I listened. And that’s very essential for an accompanist.”
If it wasn’t for him developing the finger-picking style, then he’d never have garnered such a reputation to be an accompanist, and his paths wouldn’t have crossed with Dylan’s, which spurned the creation of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man‘.
In the liner notes for Biograph, Dylan wrote, “‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ I think, was inspired by Bruce Langhorne. Bruce was playing guitar with me on a bunch of the early records. On one session, [producer] Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. It was as big as a wagon wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind.”
Langhorne’s story is an inspiration to us all. He didn’t let his disability stop him from chasing his dream, even if he had to adjust it. While the firework incident undoubtedly defined his life, it did so positively and made him a musical enigma.
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