Bob Dylan Nobel Prize for Literature Speech 2016

When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature.
I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was.
If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly.
From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother.
Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues.
Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand.
And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses.
And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype.
Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only once.
I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.

He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. He was mesmerising.
I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses,
the way he held his guitar, the way he stood. Everything about him. He filled me with conviction.
Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight in the eye, and he transmitted something.
I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

Somebody handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it.
And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known.
It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated.
I must have played that record a hundred times.

It was on a label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other artists on the label
I’d never heard of any of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly,
they had to be good, so I needed to hear them.
I wanted to learn this music and meet the people who played it.
They were more vibrant and truthful to life.  I was playing for small crowds,
sometimes no more than four or five people in a room or on a street corner.
Some songs were intimate, some you had to shout to be heard.

But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world.
And I had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school, reading that gave you a way of looking at life,
an understanding of human nature,and a standard to measure things by.

I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics.
And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally.
I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.
Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school:
Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

So what does it all mean? Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by these very same themes.
And they can mean a lot of different things. If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important.
I don’t have to know what a song means.  When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references,
scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea into one story,
I don’t think he would have worried about it either – what it all means.

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words,
“The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests.”
I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good.

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld who traded
a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory, tells Odysseus it was all a mistake.
“I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality.
And if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth
rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were,
they were preferable to being here in this dead place.

That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living.
They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage.
Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.
And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard:
in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.

I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”