BOB DYLAN’S TOMBSTONE BLUES: THE SUN’S NOT YELLOW….

EXTRACTS…  FULL VERSION HERE….

There are six pairs of two verses in the song, each consisting of three rhyming lines and a final line which rhymes with the last line of the succeeding verse. To some extent this structure follows the ‘talkin’ blues’ format, with the insistent rhyming allowing for comic exaggeration and the final line making a dramatic, and often sardonic, comment on the rest of the verse. Like Subterranean Homesick Blues, the song is also influenced by the quick-fire tongue-in-cheek wit of Chuck Berry in songs like Back in the USA and You Never Can Tell. The various individuals who inhabit the verses make only fleeting appearances. As with the numerous characters in Desolation Row and Highway 61 Revisited many of them can be seen as symbolic representations of established values or beliefs. Here Dylan clearly relishes placing such characters in weird juxtapositions in a caustically funny way that sometimes echoes the anarchic wordplay of Beat novelist William Burroughs. Its anti-establishment bent is clear from the beginning. It cannot, however, be labelled a ‘protest song’. No direct observations on inequalities in American society are made. Dylan’s concern here is rather to satirise the mentality of a range of conventional thoughts and attitudes and thus to expose their essential hollowness.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Tombstone Blues

We begin with ….The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course… which sounds like a twisted version of a line from a Disney movie, as if the singer is referring to sleeping ‘cartoon children’ or perhaps the Seven Dwarfs. This is immediately set against an absurdist reference to American history: …The city fathers are trying to endorse/ The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse… Local patriarchs are, it seems, engaged in a ridiculous attempt to revive the spirit of the American Revolution, of which the famous ‘ride of Paul Revere’ to warn the American insurgents of British troop movements is supposed to have played a key role. Revere’s ride entered American patriotic mythology when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride (which exaggerated the importance of Revere’s exploits for poetic effect) was published in 1861. Here Dylan’s ire is directed at the way American local government officials try to ‘wrap themselves in the flag’, as indicated by the ironic payoff line …But the town has no need to be nervous…. Another ‘revolution’ is clearly not about to occur…

PAUL REVERE’S RIDE                       HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Three more ‘historical’ characters are then introduced in quick succession. We are told that …The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits/ To Jezebel, a nun, who violently knits/ A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits/ At the head of the Chamber of Commerce… Belle Starr was an associate of Wild West outlaws such as Jesse James. Over the years her story, like that of other ‘Western cowgirls’ like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, has been heavily mythologised in comics, dime store novels and Hollywood movies which portray her as a fearless and bloodthirsty whisky-swilling gunslinger. Jezebel is an Old Testament figure from the Book of Kings who has come to symbolise female treachery and licentiousness. Dylan appears to delight in the sacrilegious joke of making her a nun. The rest of the verse descends into extreme comic absurdity, as Jezebel ‘violently knits’ (an apparent contradiction in terms) a bald wig for the famous serial killer who now is apparently a highly respectable businessman. Perhaps the Ripper heads a local business organisation but he may even be leading the US Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest and most influential business organisation and a potent symbol of American capitalism. By placing this notorious (and again highly mythologised) figure in such a position, Dylan gleefully establishes a darkly comic link between capitalism and the violence which is endemic in American society and culture.