John Wesley Harding (album) - Songs

Songs

Most of the songs on John Wesley Harding are noted for their pared-down lyrics. Though the style remains evocative, continuing Dylan's strong use of bold imagery, the wild, intoxicating surreality that seemed to flow in a stream-of-consciousness fashion has been tamed into something earthier and more crisp. "What I'm trying to do now is not use too many words," Dylan said in a 1968 interview. "There's no line that you can stick your finger through, there's no hole in any of the stanzas. There's no blank filler. Each line has something." According to Allen Ginsberg, Dylan had talked to him about his new approach, telling him "he was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning something. He wasn't just making up a line to go with a rhyme anymore; each line had to advance the story, bring the song forward. And from that time came some of his strong laconic ballads like 'The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.' There was no wasted language, no wasted breath. All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental." Even the song structures are rigid as most of them adhere to a similar three-verse model.

The dark, religious tones that appeared during the Basement Tapes sessions also continues through these songs, manifesting in language from the King James Bible. In The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, Bert Cartwright cites more than sixty biblical allusions over the course of the thirty-eight and a half minute album, with as many as fifteen in "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" alone. An Old Testament morality also colors most of the songs' characters.

In an interview with Toby Thompson in 1968, Dylan's mother, Beatty Zimmerman, mentioned Dylan's growing interest in the Bible, stating that "in his house in Woodstock today, there's a huge Bible open on a stand in the middle of his study. Of all the books that crowd his house, overflow from his house, that Bible gets the most attention. He's continuously getting up and going over to refer to something."

The album opens with the title song, which references Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, although some commentators find religious significance in the character's initials ("JWH" as Yaweh ). Dylan discussed "John Wesley Harding" when he spoke with Rolling Stone Magazine in 1969:

"I was gonna write a ballad on ... like maybe one of those old cowboy ... you know, a real long ballad. But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune, and I didn't want to waste the tune, it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that ... I knew people were gonna listen to that song and say that they didn't understand what was going on, but they would've singled that song out later, if we hadn't called the album John Wesley Harding and placed so much importance on that, for people to start wondering about it ... if that hadn't been done, that song would've come up and people would have said it was a throw-away song."

Music critic Tim Riley writes that "'As I Went Out One Morning' has more to do with the temptations of a fair damsel who walks in chains than with America's first outlaw journalist, Tom Paine." In his album review in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus wrote, "I sometimes hear the song as a brief journey into American history; the singer out for a walk in the park, finding himself next to a statue of Tom Paine, and stumbling across an allegory: Tom Paine, symbol of freedom and revolt, co-opted into the role of Patriot by textbooks and statue committees, and now playing, as befits his role as Patriot, enforcer to a girl who runs for freedom—in chains, to the South, the source of vitality in America, in America's music—away from Tom Paine. We have turned our history on its head; we have perverted our own myths..."

In "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine", the narrator is addressed in his dreams by St. Augustine of Hippo, the bishop-philosopher who held the episcopal seat in Hippo Regius, a Roman port in northern Africa; he died in 430 A.D. when the city was overrun by Vandals. Riley notes that in "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine", Dylan twists St. Augustine's "symbolic stature to signify anyone who has been put to death by a mob." Throughout the song, the narrator's vision of St. Augustine reveals to him "how it feels to be the target of mob psychology, and how confusing it is to identify with the throng's impulses to smother what it loves too much or destroy what it can't understand." The opening lyrics are based on the labor union song "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night". The last line continues the "Joe Hill" theme, echoing the last line of Woody Guthrie's "Ludlow Massacre": "I said God bless the Mineworkers' Union, and then I hung my head and cried".

The album's most overt Biblical reference comes in "All Along the Watchtower", inspired by a section in Isaiah dealing with the fall of Babylon. As Heylin writes, "the thief that cries 'the hour is getting late' is surely the thief in the night foretold in Revelation, Jesus Christ come again. It is He who says, in St. John the Divine's tract: 'I will come on thee as a thief, and Thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.'" Dylan later said of John Wesley Harding that he "'had been dealing with the devil in a fretful way.'" "All Along the Watchtower" would soon gain great fame in a dramatic interpretation by Jimi Hendrix.

"All Along the Watchtower" is also notable for its vi-V-IV chord progression. Jimmy Page would use this cadence for the coda to "Stairway to Heaven," John Entwistle of the Who would use it in the opening bars of "Fiddle About", and it would later find popular use in heavy metal music. Dylan himself would return to this progression in Desire's "Hurricane".

"The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" is perhaps the album's most enigmatic song, structured as a (possibly insincere) morality play. The song details Frankie Lee's temptation by a roll of ten dollar bills from Judas Priest. As Frankie thinks it over, he grows anxious from Judas's stare. Eventually, Judas leaves Frankie to mull over the money, telling him he can be found at "Eternity, though you might call it 'Paradise'." After Judas leaves, a stranger arrives. He asks Frankie if he's "the gambler, whose father is deceased?" The stranger brings a message from Judas, who's apparently stranded in a house. Frankie panics and runs to Judas, only to find him standing outside of a house. (Judas says, "It's not a house ... it's a home.") Frankie is overcome by his nerves as he sees a woman's face in each of the home's twenty-four windows. Bounding up the stairs, foaming at the mouth, he begins to "make his midnight creep." For sixteen days and nights, Frankie raves until he dies on the seventeenth, in Judas's arms, dead of "thirst." The final two verses are the most impenetrable. No one says a word as Frankie is brought out, no one except a boy who mutters "Nothing is revealed," as he conceals his own mysterious guilt. The last verse moralizes that "one should never be where one does not belong" and closes with the song's most quoted lines, "don't go mistaking Paradise for that home across the road."

Each of the album's next three songs features one of society's rejects as the narrator or central figure. "Drifter's Escape" tells the story of a convicted drifter who escapes captivity when a bolt of lightning strikes a court of law. "Dear Landlord" is sung by a narrator pleading for respect and equal rights. "I Am a Lonesome Hobo" is a humble warning from a hobo to those who are better off.

Self-styled 'Dylanologist' Al Weberman claimed "Dear Landlord" was inspired by Dylan's own conflicts with manager Albert Grossman, but many critics have challenged this notion. Most interpretations rest on who the 'landlord' is supposed to be, with most explanations ranging from a literal representation to a metaphor for God.

"There's only two songs on the album which came at the same time as the music," Dylan recalled in 1978, referring to "Down Along the Cove" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight". "The rest of the songs were written out on paper, and I found the tunes for them later. I didn't do it before, and I haven't done it since. That might account for the specialness of that album."

Lyrically, those same two songs stand out from the rest of the album. They are warm, cheerful love songs, lacking any of the Biblical references found throughout the album. "If John Wesley Harding was the album made the morning after a dark night of the soul," wrote Heylin, "these two songs suggested a newly cleansed singer returning from the edge." Accentuating the difference is the use of pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake on both tracks. The overall sound of these two tracks sounds closer to country, anticipating the country rock movement to follow as well as Dylan's next album, Nashville Skyline.