(Ed. Note: This week we are pleased to present works first published by our esteemed co-editor Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar in Literally Stories UK. The theme of the week is music. All through the weekend too. Dale has a wonderful way of injecting his passion and fresh insights into his work. I think you will agree–Leila)

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” – Emily D.

“I is another.” – Rimbaud

Bob Dylan is a bard of the old school, and also of the school that never gets old.

Long after every single Hollywood movie ever made will be penned by androids, computers, zombies, vampires, and “AI,” scattered humans everywhere will still be searching out the work of Bob Dylan, whether to read or listen to it.

When Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” his longest song, in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, he confirmed that he deserves a Nobel Prize.

With a terrifying title from Shakespeare, this long song and short fiction is a mini-novel about the Kennedy assassination. And all assassinations, and all murders ever committed, now and in the future. Almost as if to prove that he’s a poet and story-teller more than a musician, Dylan doesn’t even sing this song. He speaks it. He tells the tale like an ancient bard, maybe even going as far back as Homer.

Dylan is often compared to Shakespeare, and for good reason. It could be that a more apt comparison is with the older writer. Homer, like Bob, spent his life traveling from town to town and speak-singing his story-songs to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. This image of Homer has been accepted for so long that it’s become a fact of fiction that tells the truth, as real as any other Greek mythology, from Zeus to Athena.

Dylan has always cited literary writers as some of his most important, if not his most important, influences. He claimed that “Blood on the Tracks” was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short stories. He listed his two favorite writers as Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud. He read T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in high school. He resurrected Charles Baudelaire in “Idiot Wind.” He said that all writers and artists should read John Keats and Herman Melville.

He acknowledged Walt Whitman’s genius. He went to the grave of Jack Kerouac and read Kerouac’s poetry aloud with Allen Ginsberg. He wrote his songs on a typewriter. He created an absurdist book of prose poems, and he composed a memoir that isn’t his best work but is highly readable, filled with signs of the times, then and now.

Someone once compared Bob Dylan to Ernest Hemingway, another writer for whom Dylan has expressed his approval. Both writers diagnosed their times, and fought the wars of their times. While Hemingway went to Italy as an ambulance driver, Dylan went to Mississippi as a liberal Jew who stood out in an open field and sang Civil Rights protest anthems, surely as dangerous as Hemingway heading to the front as a non-combatant who wanted to help injured soldiers.

Bob Dylan has already entered the ranks of great American authors. When we look back at history, we see that there are millions of authors who did not deserve a Nobel Prize, and many authors who did deserve it who didn’t receive it. Harold Bloom, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, and Leo Tolstoy are a famous half dozen of these. A hundred years from now (yes we will still be here), Dylan will be seen as a writer who deserved such a prize, and then some. His humanity, and his ways of expressing it in English story-language that never gets old-fashioned, will last a very long time, even, or especially, as the rest of the mainstream world continues to become more robotic, inhuman and tyrannical.