The 1950s singer Bob Dylan crowned as “the best songwriter” of all time
Anyone who has ever tried to write a great song is always going to be living in the shadow of what Bob Dylan did.
Dylan never claimed that he wanted to be one of the greatest songwriters in the world by any stretch, but when you look at his track record, there aren’t that many people who have managed to carve out a place in rock and roll history with the same quality songs that he has. But the main point behind most of Dylan’s songs usually comes from keeping things simple instead of trying to make the most verbose song ever made.
That said, Dylan likes to talk a lot in his songs, and some of his story-driven tunes have more than their fair share of details laced throughout everything. He was willing to lay everything out on the table when working on records like Blood on the Tracks, but even when he was using strange guitar tunings or rethinking the way that he worked on some of his biggest tunes, the meat of the song could usually be thrown together with just a few chords.
Because when you look at Dylan’s heroes, people like Woody Guthrie weren’t trying to wow the audience by being the greatest guitarist in the world. He wanted to tell a story every time he sang, and if he wanted the rest of the world to sing along with him, he was going to need to use the simple tools to get everyone on board. That’s how you take the audience with you, but Dylan was also looking far beyond the folk tradition.
Rock and roll kept things simple in the exact same way when Little Richard and Chuck Berry came to the forefront, but the country world wasn’t that far away from what Dylan was doing either. He had a great respect for people like Johnny Cash, and while he had carved out a place of his own by the 1960s, Dylan felt that he wanted to cover the kind of ground that Hank Williams didn’t get to finish.
A lot of what Williams was singing about wasn’t that abnormal by rockstar standards, and Dylan felt that few people were able to make lyrics roll off their tongue as easily as Williams could, saying, “There’s an infinite amount of different kinds, stemming from a common folk ballad verse to people who have classical training. Modern 20th-century ears are the first ears to hear these kinds of Broadway songs. There wasn’t anything like this. These are musical songs. These are done by people who know music first. And then lyrics. To me, Hank Williams is still the best songwriter.”
It might sound strange coming from someone who was known more for the hillbilly stripe of music, but Williams wasn’t into writing about simple living all the time. A lot of his best songs dealt with the same tales of loneliness and heartache that so many songwriters have talked about all too often, so it wasn’t out of the question for Dylan or even his friends like Tom Petty to discover what Williams did and apply it to their own playing.
In fact, Nashville Skyline practically feels like a love letter to that style of music in many respects. Dylan wanted the chance to see how people made those songs sound so achingly beautiful, and while he did get a few classics out of the deal with ‘Lay Lady Lay’, he wouldn’t dare to try and touch the legacy that Williams had on Music Row and the rest of the deep south.
He and Dylan seemed worlds apart whenever they made one of their songs, but there’s a lot more in common with most songwriters than people realise. Anyone could listen to ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and ‘Lovesick Blues’ and assume what Williams was supposed to be, but in Dylan’s eyes, all he saw was a guy who had done his fair share of living and telling everyone what it was like.
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