Abstract
John McCombe’s chapter offers a revealing discussion of “western” codes of masculinity in Dylan’s work. McCombe’s “goal is to demonstrate how Dylan’s westerns regularly conform to, yet occasionally subvert, gender-based binaries that distinguish the classical Hollywood western.” In so doing, McCombe proves how “integral popular music can be to conversations about masculinity, domesticity, and the western genre.” The chapter analyzes a number of Dylan’s western-themed songs that are laced with autobiographical echoes of Dylan’s struggle to balance career and home life. This analysis finally demonstrates how these “increasingly complex song westerns also suggest that a ‘Polyvocal Dylan’ is a product of the manner in which cinematic discourses collide with gender discourses at a particular moment of ideological crisis for the western and western hero.”
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Notes
- 1.
See Toth and Otiono’s Introduction to the present collection.
- 2.
Readers will no doubt recognize Marqusee’s allusion here to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
- 3.
Some of the film’s incidental music was provided by Jerry Fielding (Heylin 2009, 432).
- 4.
Note that all but two of the songs on Desire are co-writes with Jacques Levy. The exceptions are “Sara” and “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below) .” Typically, Dylan scholars view Levy as having collaborated exclusively on lyrics, rather than music, so my close readings of these Dylan-Levy efforts acknowledge the partnership, even though I occasionally use shorthand such as “Dylan’s speaker,” merely for the sake of concision.
- 5.
Shelton considers the three albums in question— Planet Waves , Blood on the Tracks and Desire —to be so closely linked thematically that he speaks of them as a “trilogy” (2003, 462).
- 6.
For more on the history of Cinco de Mayo, see Hayes-Bautista (2012).
- 7.
One live version of “Isis” with this intro was recorded on 4 December 1975 in Montreal, Quebec, and later released on the 1985 compilation Biograph .
- 8.
Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
- 9.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “stones” have been synonymous with testicles since the twelfth century.
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McCombe, J. (2019). Bob Dylan’s “Westerns”: Border Crossings and the Flight from “the Domestic”. In: Otiono, N., Toth, J. (eds) Polyvocal Bob Dylan. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17042-4_7
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