The songs Bob Dylan ripped off
The fact that Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of all time is undeniable. Over the years, the folk star has consistently reaffirmed his literary genius time and time again, even winning himself the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2016. Despite his songwriting talents, though, Dylan has repeatedly been accused of borrowing from, stealing from, and ripping off various other artists. As Pablo Picasso once said: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
Borrowing melodies and lyrics is something that is fairly commonplace within folk music, as songs were passed down through generations and gradually adapted. When Dylan first came onto the scene in the late 1950s, he was firmly entrenched in folk traditions and, as a result, borrowed from old folk tunes and standards. Responding to plagiarism claims in more recent times, Dylan has asserted, “It’s an old thing — it’s part of the tradition.”
An absolute disciple of the folk hero Woody Guthrie, Dylan relocated to New York in 1961, establishing the early days of the Bob Dylan that we all know and love. Unsurprisingly, given the intense influence that Guthrie had on the young Bob Dylan, his first LP is awash with tracks that have a direct lineage with Guthrie’s work. For instance, the Dylan track ‘Talkin’ New York’ is not dissimilar to ‘New York Town’ by Woody.
The most overt ‘borrowing’ from his hero comes on the track ‘Song to Woody’, which, as the title implies, is a tribute to Guthrie. Dylan’s effort evokes the ‘1913 Massacre’ by Guthrie, a pro-union masterpiece about the deaths of striking copper miners during the Italian Hall disaster. In Dylan’s track, he updates the lyrics “Take a trip with me to 1913, to Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country” to “‘Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63, a day that would live on in infamy” in an attempt to bring the sentiment of Guthrie’s track into the modern age, while paying tribute to his hero.
Those two Guthrie-inspired tracks were some of the only original compositions on Dlyan’s debut, with most of the tracklisting taken up by new arrangements of traditional folk songs. However, as Dylan progressed to include more of his own songwriting, he still found the opportunity to borrow inspiration from elsewhere. On his seminal 1964 track ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, he takes inspiration from John Jacob Niles, with the lyrics “Go ‘way from my window, Leave at your own chosen speed”, sounding eerily similar to Niles’ “Go away from my window, go away from my door” from the track of the same name.
Dylan also found a great deal of inspiration in classic cinema, regularly employing lines from notable films within his work. Channelling his inner Humphrey Bogart on the 1985 track ‘Seeing the Real You at Last’, Dylan shares, “Well, I have had some rotten nights, didn’t think that they would pass”, in staunch similarity to the Hollywood star’s line “I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over — but that’ll pass” from the 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon. Elsewhere, Clint Eastwood’s Bronco Billy asserts, “I’m looking for a woman who can ride like Annie Oakley and shoot like Belle Starr”, a sentiment shared by Dylan five years later on ‘Sweetheart Like You’, “You could ride like Annie Oakley, you could shoot like Belle Starr.”
Lyrical plagiarism is nothing to scoff about; it is an issue that has resulted in serious legal proceedings and the destruction of many different artistic reputations. With Dylan, however, his ‘plagiarism’ never feels particularly abhorrent. Rather than directly lifting lines or stealing lyrics, Dylan seems to have an endless ability to adapt influences to his own unique style, putting his own personality into each and every track, regardless of its origins. Nobody could knock the songwriting genius of Bob Dylan; it is incredibly unlikely that he will be removed from the artistic register anytime soon, even if he did borrow the odd line from other artists.
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