The one singer Bob Dylan called his favourite: “Gone but not forgotten”
Very few people would describe Bob Dylan as the finest vocalist of his generation, but many would deem him their favourite singer. While he may lack the pinpoint projection of Luciano Pavarotti and the range of Freddie Mercury, Dylan never fails to find a voice apt to frame the tone of his epic songwriting. From the yelping folkie of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” to the gravelly scapes of ‘Murder Most Foul’, Dylan has set a fine example for fellow musicians.
Dylan’s greatest strength is undoubtedly his songwriting. Peter, Paul and Mary, The Byrds and Van Morrison demonstrated how the troubadour’s music might have sounded with more conventional vocals during the 1960s. These renditions softened the radiowaves and introduced more fans to Dylan’s work, but once the originals click, there’s no going back.
Over the years, several iconic singers have stepped in to endorse Dylan as a unique singer. “It’s a funny voice,” Mick Jagger once said while defending Dylan’s honour during an appearance on Dutch television in the 2000s. “It’s like a voice that’s never been one of the great tenors of our time, but it’s got a timbre, a projection, and it’s got a feeling to it.”
Similarly, the Welsh singer Tom Jones recalled the moment he finally got on board the Bob Dylan bandwagon. In the early 1960s, he heard some of Dylan’s material and found his voice somewhat alienating, but the penny finally dropped in the summer of ’65. “I wasn’t struck by Dylan’s voice at first,” Jones told The Guardian. “But then I heard ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and I’ve been a fan ever since. The lyrics are fantastic.”
Throughout his career, Dylan has shown that he can adopt different singing styles. The unique yelps in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ appeared much more calculated and purposeful when, four years later, he gave a more conventional vocal performance on Nashville Skyline. Clearly, Dylan recognised the importance of finding a unique vocal identity, something that ensured his lyrics met ears around the world.
In his moments of calculation, Dylan has leant on many years of vocal evolution. Most apparently, the voices of folk artists like Woody Guthrie and Odetta Holmes gilded the Earthy, timeless quality of Dylan’s early material. Later, he became infatuated with singers from all walks of life, from the soulful groove of Stevie Wonder to the unique Celtic undulations of Van Morrison.
In a 1978 interview with Rolling Stone, Dylan chirped up in a mostly unrelated conversation, saying, “For some reason, I’ve just thought of my favourite singer.” Prompted by the interviewer, he elaborated, “Uum Kulthum. The Egyptian woman who died a few years ago. She was my favourite.”
“I like Middle Eastern music a lot, Umm Kulthum, she was a great Egyptian singer,” explained Dylan in a different interview where he once again waxed lyrically about the influential performer. “I first heard of her when I was in Jerusalem.”
He added: “I think she is popular all over the Middle East, she did mostly love and prayer-type songs, her father chanted those prayer, she was so good that he allowed her to sing professionally. She is gone now but not forgotten”
Dylan revealed that “it was her heart” that primarily drew him to Kalthoum, who passed away in 1975. There is a distinctive quality in the Egyptian singing tradition that is at once transcendent and culturally grounded. With strong ties to the Sufi and dervish vocal styles, the sound also carries religious weight. “That’s where my singing really comes from… except that I sing in America,” Dylan noted. “I’ve heard too much Leadbelly really to be too much influenced by the whirling dervishes.”
If you are thinking that you have heard of countless performers and songwriters which Dylan has labelled his favourite yet never made too much fuss about Kathlum, you’d be right. But the main distinction here is the word singer, Dylan’s work never relied on such a thing so it’s to be expected that he didn’t speak too often about the subject.
Dylan isn’t alone in his thoughts on Kulthum. Robert Plant, the frontman of Led Zeppelin, also described her as a favourite. “The way she sang, the way she could hold a note, you could feel the tension, you could tell that everybody, the whole orchestra, would hold a note until she wanted to change,” Plant said in a 2010 interview. “When I first heard the way she would dance down through the scale to land on a beautiful note that I couldn’t even imagine singing, it was huge: somebody had blown a hole in the wall of my understanding of vocals.”
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