Who is the prince in the Bob Dylan song ‘Dignity’?
To say that not all of Bob Dylan’s best songs are on his most iconic albums is an understatement. Plenty of his best songs can’t be found on any albums at all. In most other hands, artists could and would build careers around songs like ‘Farewell, Angelina’, ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, ‘She’s Your Lover Now’, ‘Caribbean Wind’, ‘Blind Willie McTell’, ‘Series of Dreams’ or ‘Red River Shore’—and plenty have built careers on much weaker or worse songs than these—but such is the wealth of talent that Dylan is working with, none of them ever made their way onto any of his official studio releases.
Another such song is ‘Dignity’, an oddity which first appeared at the sessions for 1989’s Oh Mercy, where Dylan wrestled with a multitude of lyrics and arrangements of the song for a long time to try and bring it under his command before ultimately moving on from it. It was later considered for inclusion on Under the Red Sky a year later, before falling by the wayside and then finally surfacing in 1994 on the compilation album Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 3.
Despite the rarity of the song, Dylan has sporadically included it in his live shows over the years, famously during his appearance on MTV Unplugged and most recently surprising his crowd in Prague in 2024 with a one-off performance of the song in October.
All through the years, Dylan has blended real-life characters and fictional figures from history into his songs – Robin Hood, Einstein, Romeo, Cinderella, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound all appear in just ‘Desolation Row’ alone – and he draws on a similarly disparate cast of characters in the lyrics to ‘Dignity’.
The song opens with the images of a fat man, a bald man and a hollow man. In some versions, Dylan sings of a wise man instead. The song always mentions a Miss Marylou and, later on, an Englishman who sits combing his thinning hair. In one rendition, Don Juan can be found talking to Don Miguel. In every iteration, though, one character remains. Dylan sings of coming face to face with Prince Philip at the home of the blues in each of his searchings for Dignity.
“Said he’d give me information if his name wasn’t used,” Dylan playfully quips, having just dropped his name into conversation. “He wanted money up front, said he was abused, by dignity”.
And who knows, maybe Prince Philip really did feel abused by dignity, but he did not appear to be a man who was overly troubled by the public’s perception of him. A lesser man would have spent many sleepless nights embarrassed by any number of his utterances or actions, but perhaps it’s easy to forgive yourself for any blunder or gaffe when you are the king of the castle.
The British press is notoriously invasive, and while they may have encroached on his dignity at times, they treated any gaffes from the tongue of the prince with laughter more often than scorn. Then again, the press seems to be willing and able to turn a blind eye to even the worst crimes when it comes to the royal family, especially if they come from one of Philip’s sons. His grandson Harry hasn’t been quite so lucky or free from their attentions, though.
With its colonial, conquering and oppressing past and position of ruling over the land, the monarchy is one of the most heavily patriarchal institutions the whole world over. Prince Philip may have spent practically his whole life at the head table of the royal family, but he was always second to the Queen. Perhaps, for him, playing second fiddle to his wife on the throne of such a patriarchal establishment was the ultimate indignity, an idea that Dylan can capture and underscore in one simple, succinct verse.
As to where the covert meeting in the song took place, the “Home of the Blues” could either be found down in the Mississippi delta or down the street that losers use, in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts or else could be a reference to the blue blood running through the veins of the British royal family. When it comes to Dylan, the song is just as likely to be charged with myriad hidden and double meanings as it is to mean absolutely nothing at all.
In 1996, Dylan was booked to play a set at The Prince’s Trust Charity Concert in London’s Hyde Park. Backed onstage by his regular road band, along with Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, Dylan didn’t perform ‘Dignity’ that day—but the song might have been on his mind, given the occasion.
After the event, he was captured in a photoshoot alongside all the day’s performers. In the shots, Dylan is seen sitting between two very different princes—an eye-patch-wearing Roger Daltrey on one side and Charles (now, of course, The King) on the other.
And, just like Dylan sings in the song, dignity has never been photographed.
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