The two songwriters Bob Dylan said could never be replaced
While Bob Dylan is often considered a truly singular talent, that doesn’t mean he was without inspiration. In fact, he wore a lot of those influences on his sleeve, never denying the impact figures like Woody Guthrie had on him. However, his aim was always to be unique, knowing that uniqueness ensures an artist can never be replaced. Or at least, that’s how he felt about these two figures.
Bob Dylan’s influences are broad, but he handles them in a unique way. His love for Woody Guthrie is as close as he ever came to having a traditional idol. As he wrote tracks like ‘Song For Woody Guthrie’, he made no secret of his desire to be just like the political folk legend. “I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple,” Dylan once said, with his younger years being a simple mission to become a musician working in the lineage of his hero.
But beyond that, his relationship with influence is complex and often oddly passive-aggressive. Dylan never seemed to enjoy being an influence on anyone else. He started a feud with the Beatles when he felt they were getting too close to stealing his style, he rarely ever acknowledges new artists who speak openly about his impact on them, and he is clearly of the mind that to be truly great, an artist would exist solely in their own lane.
To him, that thought process is the thing that pushed him. He always wants to be one step ahead, moving beyond what his peers are doing and ensuring those inspired by him could never even catch up, let alone overtake him. “I just think I’ve taken things to a new level because I’ve had to. Because I’ve been forced to. You have to constantly reshape things because everything keeps expanding on you,” he once told Rolling Stone.
“You don’t write the kind of songs I write just being a conventional type of songwriter,” he said, bigging up his own talent. But as he made his point, he picked out two names he saw as existing on the same irreplaceable plane as him. He continued, “And I don’t think anybody will write them like this again, any more than anybody will ever write a Hank Williams or Irving Berlin song. That’s pretty much for sure.”
Hank Williams is a perfect example of a star that burned bright and all too fast as he died young at the age of 29. But the shortness of his life made no difference as he emerged and utterly shook up country music. In his few years, he wrote songs that are still classics today and true country standards that have been covered to no end. He’s one of those artists that many have imitated, but no one has ever lived up to.
Irving Berlin is the same but in a different way. When we talk about the world’s ‘songbook’, it all comes down to people like Berlin. As purely a songwriter, not a musician, Berlin penned famous track after famous track. He wrote ‘ White Christmas’, ‘Cheek To Cheek’, ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ and hundreds, no, thousands more. He’s a figure that soundtracked an era as his music came to represent that moment in Hollywood.
In both cases, they’re men that changed musical history and have been referenced ever since as golden examples of songwriting talent. Clearly Dylan hopes to be in those ranks too, or already believes he’s there.
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