On Bob Dylan's Plagiarism

pla·gia·rism | ˈplājəˌriz(ə)m | Noun: The act of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

But first…

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Think Twice

If you love any Bob Dylan songs, one is probably “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” The song (hereunder DTT) is a somber but acerbic meditation on a breakup that could’ve happened the morning it was recorded. It’s whispered and whined like a pet grieving its master, it’s plucked and sung with a precision Dylan could rarely be bothered to conjure — that he rarely needed to conjure. It’s a weeping wound, an exposed nerve, a lonesome whistle blowing.

What you may not know is that Dylan cribbed the kernel of DTT from his buddy, Paul Clayton. Clayton was a collector, singer, and writer of folk songs, and also a stagemate, co-road-tripper, and fellow Mardi Gras reveler of the former R. Zimmerman’s. Clayton had written a song, “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone?” As the story, recounted with precious little detail by Barry Kornfeld, goes:

“I was with Paul one day, and Dylan wanders by and says, ‘Hey, man, that's a great song. I'm going to use that song.’ And he wrote a far better song, a much more interesting song — ‘Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.’”
(From Robbie Woliver’s Bringing It All Back Home).

What exactly did Dylan take from Clayton’s song?

Musically: Dylan’s chord progression is clearly based on Clayton’s. If you’ll permit some light music theory: Clayton’s first line travels from a I to a vi; so does Dylan’s. Clayton’s second line travels from a II to a V; Dylan’s fourth line does likewise. Clayton’s last line is a I V I; so is Dylan’s. Dylan’s vocal melody diverges here and there for a note, but is overall only a few percentage points different.

Lyrically: Dylan took Clayton’s “It ain’t no use” motif — a pivotally tone-setting element of DTT. “It ain’t no use” establishes DTT as a breakup song unlike others. The singer isn’t pining for his lost love; he’s rejecting her overtures. Whatever she did has rendered the singer disconsolate, bound for somewhere, nowhere, anywhere but here.

He also took “ … sit and wonder why,” “You’re the one that made me travel on,” and “I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road,” which doesn’t appear in Dylan’s original studio recording, but does appear in nearly all subsequent versions (e.g., the light-speed version on Before The Flood — Mumford & Sons could never).

Okay then — what did he not take?

A lot. Clayton’s song has no rooster crowing at the break of dawn, no kiss-offs as biting as “You just kinda wasted all my precious time,” no turns of phase as heartrending as “Goodbye is too good a word, babe/So I’ll just say, ‘Fare thee well.’” Many of the lines that stick out, that stir us, that are identifiably Dylan, are indeed Dylan’s.

And, if I may render a value judgment, Dylan’s song is a much more compelling performance. DTT is a monologue as movingly delivered as any this side of Olivier’s “To be or not to be.” “Ribbons” feels like an earnest bit of undergraduate poetry. It doesn’t fail to convey its message of heartbreak, but Clayton’s staid, uninflected vocal and unidimensional dulcimer do little to elevate it above its genre tropes. Kornfeld was right: DTT is wittier, more poignant, and more skillfully performed.

Copyrighting The “Folk Tradition”

Here’s the thing though: DTT is far from the only time Dylan based an “original composition” on another song. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (DTT’s album) in particular is littered with songs whose musical and/or lyrical motifs originated somewhere other that Bob Dylan’s brain. These include:

• “Blowin’ In The Wind,” which comes from “No More Auction Block”

• “Girl From The North Country,” which comes from “Scarborough Fair”

• “Masters Of War,” which comes from “Nottamun Town”

• “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which comes from “Lord Randall”

• “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” which comes from “Lady Franklin’s Lament”

• “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance,” based on “Honey, Won’t You Allow Me One More Chance?”

• “I Shall Be Free,” based on “We Shall Be Free”

Beyond Freewheelin’, the list goes on. Dylan’s catalog — especially his very early and very late work — is littered with what you could sympathetically call “quotations.”

In the context of folk music, quotation is anything but unusual. The so-called “folk tradition” is defined by a DNA-esque marginal evolution, where small mutations — Woody Guthrie sang “House Of The Rising Sun” with all major chords, and then Dave Van Ronk introduced a haunting array of major and minor chords — characterize the music’s course from person to person, generation to generation. There is a perspective from which Dylan’s cribbing is nothing more than a continuation of the folk tradition.

But, but, but: the issue of the copyright.

Here’s how Woody Guthrie “copyrighted” his songs:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

A heavy quoter himself — he took the melody for “This Land Is Your Land,” arguably the most iconic American folk song, from the Carter Family’s “When The World’s On Fire” (which itself was sourced from the hymnal “Oh, My Loving Brother”) — Woody took up the socialist view on copyright: Private property is a myth, songs belong to no one, do whatever you want.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan takes the capitalist point of view: “All songs written by Bob Dylan” (“Corrina, Corrina” and “Honey … ” excepted). Or, in economic terms: “All proceeds to flow directly to Bob Dylan, Inc.”

The financial implications of this point of view are profound. In 2020, Bob Dylan sold his catalog of 600+ original songs to Universal Music for upwards of $300 million. DTT represents 3.3% of Bob Dylan’s total Spotify streams (156 million out of 4.4 billion total streams). Let’s say Dylan took 10% of Clayton’s song — is Clayton owed 10% of 3.3% of that $300 million — $990,000?

Legally, no.

But The Songs Are Just So Good

If we define “plagiarism” like the Oxford English Dictionary does, as “taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own,” copyrighting other writers’ lyrics and music is at least fractional plagiarism.

What it usually isn’t, in Dylan’s case, is copyright infringement. Why? Because traditional folk songs have no single authors, and so their contents tend to live in the public domain. So, excepting instances like DTT — which did result in lawsuits, settled out of court, and apparently productive of little friction between Dylan and Clayton — it may be plagiarism, but it isn’t law-breaking.

Does is bother anyone that Dylan profited off of so many chord progressions, lyrics, and melodies that came from other songs? Yes, some. Joni Mitchell is one of the most vocally irritated: In 2010, she told the Guardian, “Bob is not authentic. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”

But in the scheme of things, Mitchell is the exception, not the rule. Look no further than Bob Dylan’s trophy case for evidence: Committees for the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, France’s Légion d’honneur, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, the Oscars, the Golden Globes, and Princeton’s honorary doctorate program (among many others) haven’t considered it disqualifying.

Part of why people aren’t bothered is because they don’t know. Practically no one outside folk circles has heard of Paul Clayton, much less knows he’s responsible for the kernel of DTT. As for the even more distant sources of songs like “Masters Of War,” “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Blind Willie McTell,” and “Moonlight,” you’d almost have to be a Lomax to clock Dylan’s quotations.

But the other reason — possibly the main reason — people don’t seem to care is that the songs are just so damn good.

DTT is a quantum qualitative leap forward from “Ribbons.” Dylan’s “Song To Woody” infused Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” with a different kind of wist and reverence. “Blind Willie McTell” is a downright haunting snapshot of the blood of the land, spattered across American cities and towns — a tableau “St. James Infirmary” wasn’t designed to conjure. We can argue over whether Bob’s versions always bettered their sources, but we can’t argue his ability to turn a creative impetus into something singularly special.

It’s a species of what has always tempted people to abide artists’ antisocial behavior: Sufficiently good work makes people forgive — or ignore — unethical acts. Copyrighting songs that include other songwriters’ lyrics and melodies absolutely constitutes Bob flirting with, if not crossing, the boundary of creatively ethical behavior. But some vocal opponents excepted, no one — me included — seems to mind.

To explain this, I’ll quote Joan Baez, who has as many reasons as anyone to harbor ill Dylan-will: “I put his music on and any remaining resentment evaporated like a gift from Heaven. It was only then that I could only be grateful for having been his friend, for having had access to his music, for having been a part of those wild years … . There is nothing negative left at all. He gave us the absolute best.”

There is an interesting ethical implication here, similar to the one that Raskolnikov wonders at in the early pages of Crime And Punishment: Sufficient greatness entitles the great one to a special behavioral rubric. Whether or not we listeners commit to this ethical re-rubricization consciously, it’s happening.

If you have thoughts about Dylan’s ethics, or the ethical implications of listening to these songs, I’d love to hear them — in the comments here, or at the next installment of His Back Pages, on Sunday, February 23, at Cafe Wha? at 6:00 PM.