Chronicles: Volume One

Chronicles is largely a story of art and music as imitation and inheritance. The text charts Dylan’s multitude of early influences, from musicians like Woody Guthrie and Dave Van Ronk to visual artists like Picasso and Red Grooms. It explores how he absorbed art, music, culture, and history, learning from those around him until he was ready to channel this accumulation of knowledge and inspiration into his own work. As folk music is traditionally passed down orally, imitation is an integral part of the genre. Chronicles illustrates how Dylan expanded on that tradition, embracing a diverse array of influences to write his songs.

Dylan began his foray into folk music by learning songs from records and fellow musicians. He was “into […] the traditional stuff with a capital T” (228) and had no particular interest in writing his own songs. These early learnings, along with his apprenticeship under artists like Woody Guthrie and Dave Von Ronk, reflected the oral tradition of folk music. At the Gaslight club in Greenwich, Dylan would watch Van Ronk play, feeling as if he “was sitting at the feet of a timeworn monument” (261), absorbing all the lessons he could from the more seasoned artist. Similarly, when he first heard Woody Guthrie’s music, he felt as if Guthrie was speaking directly to him, saying he was “leaving this job in [Dylan’s] hands” and passing his music down to him (246).

Dylan’s first attempts at songwriting also mirrored folk traditions. He “changed words around and added something of [his] own here and there” to traditional songs like “Cumberland Gap” and “Shady Grove” (228). These small changes were something “others did […] all the time” (228); many folk musicians set new words to traditional melodies, shifted lyrics around, or borrowed arrangements. Woody Guthrie, for example, took “a lot of old Carter Family songs and put his own spin on them” (283). Although some saw this as “derivative,” Dylan saw nothing wrong with borrowing from other artists, and he enjoyed how “circles hook up with themselves” (288) when influences overlap and artists share their music.

As Dylan began to write more original songs, there was often the sense that he “didn’t write [a song] so much as [he] inherited it” (213). The music seemed to come from somewhere else as if Dylan “had seemingly inherited something metaphysical from a bygone era” (111). He was clearly directly influenced by folk musicians like Guthrie and Van Ronk, but more obscure experiences, like hearing “Pirate Jenny” at Theatre de Lys, also had a profound impact. Dylan musses that “it might not have dawned on [him] to write” songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Who Killed Davy Moore” without hearing “Pirate Jenny” or that he “wouldn’t’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write” hundreds of his lines without the guidance that listening to blues musician Robert Johnson provided (287-8). All this suggests that Dylan’s music didn’t come solely from himself but from this web of inspirations and influences. Like generations of folk musicians that came before him, he took the work that was passed down to him and made it his own.