The Soundscape of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”
Bob Dylan as (Nobel Prize-Winning!) Nature Writer — and Author of the #1 Green Song of the Folk Rock Era
(Part 14 of an eighteen-part series on Sixties folk rock and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Specifically, the series tracks the influence of environmentally themed songs from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in late 1962 to the first Earth Day in the spring of 1970.)
And so we arrive at #1, the toppermost of the poppermost, the zenith of the greenest, the #1 environmental song of the folk rock era. Well, #1 in one old folkie tree hugger’s opinion, anyway. Why does “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” deserve this ranking? Because it is not only a great song but an excellent piece of writing that engages with the natural world in interestingly complex ways. It’s a song that not only appeals to and furthers our appreciation for the natural world, but also makes us think. More than that — it rewards our thinking the closer we listen.
Let me deal right at the start with two questions potentially raised by my title. First, did Bob Dylan deserve to win the Nobel Prize for literature? The answer is yes. Now let’s move on.
The second question is what I would like to explore further here — can Bob Dylan really be considered a nature writer? I’ll give away my ending and proclaim at the start that the answer to this one too is yes. But it’s yes with an explanation.
So let me explain.
For the most part it seems clear that Dylan makes use of nature as scene-setter and metaphor in his songs, but it’s not usually a deep or knowing engagement with the natural world. If the nature writers we most admire are those who open our eyes to an ecocentric perspective — or in Lawrence Buell’s terms in The Environmental Imagination, who display a “dual accountability” to the realms of art, imagination, and culture on the one hand, and to fact, science, and the natural world on the other — well, that’s not what Dylan typically does (92–93).
For example, in “Workingman’s Blues #2,” the song begins, “There’s an evening haze settling over town, / Starlight by the edge of the creek.” It’s a nice description, but it is not central to the song that follows, which explores the issues raised by the next two lines: “The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down, / Money’s getting shallow and weak.” If anything, you could make a case that maybe the opening scene-setting description functions symbolically, to suggest an evening-like decline or a hazy uncertainty in the lives examined in the rest of the song. Or it’s just setting a scene, but as Buell also explains, if nature is there in a literary work to serve merely as “setting,” that almost automatically gives it secondary status (85) — just as in a diamond ring, the “setting” is not the most valued part of the ring.
Most often for Dylan, it seems, nature functions as metaphor — and he especially likes to focus on storms to suggest emotional upheaval. To cite one of many possible examples, consider several lines in “To Make You Feel My Love”: the song opens with “When the rain is blowing in your face, / And the whole world is on your case.” The rain is there to establish the premise that when it seems the whole world is against you, I’m there for you. Later, in one of the choruses, Dylan sings, “The storms are raging on the rolling sea, / And on the highway of regret. / The winds of change are blowing wild and free; / You ain’t seen nothing like me yet.” Those winds aren’t chinooks or siroccos, nor’easters or Washoe zephyrs or witches of November, or cool evening breezes — or any particularized sort of actual regional wind. They’re there simply to represent the notion of changing direction. In the same way, those storms aren’t raging on any particular sea — the sea is there to represent some internal state of being.
We could find lots of other examples of Dylan’s use of natural imagery, storms or otherwise, that function, often via the pathetic fallacy, to represent human emotional states. Suffice it to say that most of the time Dylan uses nature as metaphor employed within an anthropocentric frame of reference. He’s not typically engaging with nature on its own terms or in a way that indicates the naturalist’s desire to investigate or understand or comprehend anything about the nature of nature.
Except in one brilliant yet underappreciated song, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” which I would suggest is the most profound environmentalist song in the era of folk rock between the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring — marking the birth of modern environmental movement) and the first Earth Day in 1970 — when the environmental movement fully arrived in the American national consciousness. Among those who may have underappreciated the song’s quality is Dylan himself. He performed the song at his Carnegie Hall performance in the fall of 1963 but failed to include it on his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, which came out in January of 1964. It wasn’t released by Dylan until 1985, on Biograph. But truthfully, Dylan is a notoriously poor judge of the greatness of his own songs. After all, this is the guy who left “Blind Willie McTell” off all his (generally inferior) albums through the 1980s, only to have it stuck on 1991’s The Bootleg Series as an apparent afterthought.
But others have recognized the brilliance of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” beginning with the Byrds, who recorded it in 1965. Most emphatically, Michael Gray has argued that “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” despite being “a song that has received less attention than almost any other in the whole of Dylan’s repertoire,” is not only one of Dylan’s greatest songs but “one of the very greatest and most haunting creations in our language” (197).
Dylan wrote the song while staying with Joan Baez in Carmel on the California Coast in the autumn of 1963, not long before he performed it at Carnegie Hall. The tune is based on the old Scots song “O Waly, Waly,” more familiar to us these days as “The Water Is Wide.” As is typical of Dylan’s practice, though, it’s not an exact copy of the tune. Dylan was haunted by the melody and wrote “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” under the influence of that haunting, but he was not necessarily remembering it exactly — or interested in reproducing it exactly. The lyrics owe something to the gospel song “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” one of the classic American folk songs collected on the Harry Smith anthology that Dylan (and every other Sixties folkie) knew so well. It’s clearly a song that is in part about the power and beauty of song, and in part about the power and beauty of the natural world, and in part about the way in which nature itself makes music — a music more moving than we can ever hope to produce. “Lay down your weary tune,” says the chorus, “and rest yourself beneath the strength of strings / No voice can hope to hum.”
One of the most striking things about the song is its wild abundance of sound devices. In the chorus alone we have five examples of alliteration: the n sounds in “lay down your weary tune”; the st in rest and strength and strings; the h’s in hope and hum, and s and ng sounds in song and sung. (Actually, the paired consonant sounds around a changed vowel sound there is known as consonance, but it still adds up to two repeated consonant sounds.) Then there is assonance in the small e in rest and yourself. And all that is in just four short lines of the refrain!
The overflow of sound play is, if anything, even more abundant in the five verses, with internal rhymes added to the mix along with more alliteration, assonance, and consonance. In several of the verses Dylan is not content with just pairs of repeated sounds but uses threes and fours, as in the s sounds in “Struck by the sounds before the sun.” And the b sounds in “The morning breeze like a bugle blew” and “The branches bare like a banjo moaned” (with the assonance of the o sounds as well — and another b in “best” in the next line). Further: the d sounds in “drums” and “dawn” and (in the next line) “down.” Then the l sounds in “last of leaves fell from the trees / Clung to a new love’s breast,” with five l’s in all that, along with the assonance of the u sound in clung and love. Then there are the w and h sounds in “watched its winding strum / The water smooth ran like a hymn / And like a harp did hum.” Note that the slant rhyme in those last two lines offers another example of consonance.
The song is also chock full of internal rhymes: “ocean” and “organ,” “crashin’” and “clashed” in stanza two; “wind” and “listened” in stanza three; “unwound” and “unbound” in stanza four; and the “er” sounds in “river’s mirror” in stanza five. All in all, I count twenty-eight examples of alliteration in the song’s twenty-four lines, two examples of consonance, seven examples of assonance, and five internal rhymes.
A couple of puns make an appearance as well. When Dylan speaks of laying down a weary tune, he means “lay” as in put it aside for the moment, but as someone who was already making records, he would also be familiar with the idiom about “laying down” a track. And it’s possible too that he is punning on the more prurient suggestions of “lay,” as he does in “One Too Many Mornings” (written around the same time), where he speaks of turning his head back to the room where “my love and I have laid.” The other pun comes when he speaks of crashing waves that like “cymbals clashed,” punning of course, as a self-aware writer might, on the notion of clashing “symbols.” Now, puns are a kind of figurative language, but of course they are figurative language built on homophones, or another sort of sound repetition.
Aside from making the song a really good choice to teach sound devices in an intro to poetry class, the soundplay in “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” makes clear that Dylan is highlighting sound in the the song. This is a song about listening — specifically, about listening to nature, source of a kind of aural beauty that puts to shame the pale imitation of it that is available in the music we poor mortals make. The song is devoted almost exclusively to sounds of the geophony, sounds made by the earth and its systems. It’s the sounds of water, flowing and falling, in ocean and stream, of waves and ripples, and the sounds of the air in breeze and wind. This is in keeping with what I mentioned earlier about Dylan’s proclivity to use storms as metaphor. He is attuned to the sounds of weather and water, but truthfully does not tend to focus on sounds of the biophony (from living things). If music has its source in the geophony, then every song — or so “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” suggests — is a song of the earth, drawing inspiration and influence from the flow of sounds around us. The wind instruments, the percussion of thunder and rainfall and crash of wave, the resonances created by the flow of fluids over stone and leaf — this is where we got the idea for music and for the instruments we make music with. If nothing else, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” shows us that Dylan is an keen listener, paying close attention to the sounds of the world.
The song’s many similes make much of the case that the sounds of nature are a kind of music — the best kind of music: “The morning breeze like a bugle blew”; “The ocean wild like an organ played”; “The crashing waves like cymbals clashed”; “The waters smooth ran like a hymn”; “The branches bare like a banjo moaned.” (Note that in that last one Dylan is probably thinking of his Greenwich Village compatriot Geoff Muldaur’s great instrumental piece “Mole’s Moan.”) The many similes suggest that nature is imitating music in all these ways, but it works the other way around, too — suggesting that music is our imitation of nature — and that nature is the source of our fascination with sound. Further, it is the source of our music-making attempts.
While the song makes a clear claim that human music comes from nature and imitates the sounds of nature, it is also possible that Dylan’s abundant wordplay hints at an extension of the argument from music to language — suggesting that language too has its origins in the sounds of nature. If that is what Dylan is suggesting, that ties in with some pretty interesting ideas from evolutionary psychology about the origins of both music and language. Several evolutionary theorists — beginning with Darwin himself, grand-daddy of the field, in The Descent of Man — have suggested that music may have been a kind of proto-language, making possible the development of language through its manipulation of meaningful sounds and proto-grammatical rules of rhythm and melody. So we need to listen to the music of nature, suggests Dylan, because that’s ultimately where all music comes from — and where all our sound-making endeavors, including language use, come from. Given that reading of the song, then Dylan deserves consideration as a writer — and specifically, in this case, as a nature writer dealing with some fundamental ideas regarding the natural origins of both language and music.
What got me thinking along these lines was my sense that some of the comparisons Dylan makes seem a little peculiar. The morning breeze sounds like a bugle? Dawn sounds like drums? The ocean sounds like an organ? Bare branches sound like a banjo? A river moves with a winding strum? And hums? And sounds like a harp? (Is he thinking mouth harp or harp with lots of strings?) Though Michael Gray makes the interesting case that the seeming antithesis between the “clean” ocean and a “musty” organ is “resolved by the impression of depth . . . common to both” (202), the comparisons seem strikingly odd at first.
So what is Dylan up to with these strange comparisons? Most of them seem to derive from simple soundplay: think of an “ocean” playing like an “organ,” or the “crashing waves [that] like cymbals clashed”? Is not the sound similarity as much — or more — in the rhymed words themselves rather than in the sounds these different objects make? Same thing with bare “branches” sounding like a moaning “banjo.” The words “branches” and “banjo” sound similar because of the internal rhyme, for sure — but do bare branches stirring in the wind really sound like a banjo?
What is suggested by some of these descriptors are a couple of different theories of language. Is Dylan suggesting — as Emerson had in “Nature,” or as more recently David Abram has in The Spell of the Sensuous and Being Animal — that language can be traced back to its source in nature? We might think, for example, of the word “banjo” as descriptive of its sound, especially when you think of its drumlike head and the percussive attack when the strings are plucked. (Some quick research suggests that the word banjo could derive from the Greek word pandura for a lute-like instrument or the Bantu word mbanza — both of which have some of the same sound qualities.)
Of course, we might object that there is nothing about the particular sounds made by oceans that suggest the word “ocean” or “organ.” And bare branches on trees don’t make the “anch” sound we hear in the words “branches” or “banjo.” And then we’re back to the familiar Saussurean idea that words are arbitrary signs. There is no particular reason other than linguistic convention to call branches “branches” or banjos “banjos” (especially if you are not convinced by my explanation in the previous paragraph). But if that’s the case, then we still have reason to admire what Dylan is up to. Now what he is doing is exposing the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign — even in the place where we might most expect to see a relationship between sound and source in nature, a song about listening to nature. And he is engaging in some wonderfully fresh linguistic play in the process. Now he is taking advantage of an arbitrary sound similarity between, say, “ocean” and “organ” to make us see (and hear) the world in a new way. And he is showing us how to take delight in the musicality of language as well.
There is one more key point to make about the ways “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” functions as environmental message. And this point, too, ties in with recent explorations in evolutionary psychology. Everything about the song suggests that it is meant to be sung in chorus. Not only does the song begin and end with the highly singable chorus, but that chorus also follows stanzas one, two, and three. And the whole song is in ballad meter, with the four lines in each verse (and the refrain) rhyming lines two and four (so: ABCB) and with beats per line of 4–3–4–3. It’s a very familiar form, with a chorus repeated five times, and that familiarity would encourage people to sing along. Of course, this was early Dylan, when he was still interested in writing anthemic songs that would galvanize people into coming together for a purpose and a cause: think of songs like his first hit, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or the eminently singable refrain from the title song of the album he first wrote “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” for, The Times They Are A-Changin’.
So, great, he wanted people to sing along. Why, you might ask, is that compatible with an environmental message? Well (and thank you for asking), we might first point out that this then might be the earliest song in the folk-rock era to identify love of nature as a cause worth singing about — and singing it together — just as Dylan had been doing already with issues of social injustice.
But the singalong nature of the song is also one more element that ties in with the very origins of human nature. Joseph Jordania is one of those who has argued for music as proto-language, pointing out that hominids had co-evolved with lions in Africa, and that early hominids would have likely been scavengers. So a band of, say, Homo erectus would have waited for a lion to make a kill, and then tried to scare the lion away by making a lot of noise. Or perhaps they would want to make sure that the lions didn’t think of them as prey, so they’d make a lot of noise to keep the lions away. And what better way to make a lot of noise than to sing — preferably in unison, which would also demonstrate the capacity of the group to work cooperatively. Jordania notes that singing in harmony could have had the further effect of suggesting even greater numbers than there actually were.
From there, music also would have offered additional evolutionary advantages: solidifying social bonds (because you know the same songs and sing them together), scaring off or intimidating rival bands of hominids, demonstrating health and fitness, wooing — and so on. To this day we use song in these ways, affirming common purpose when we join together in a protest song or a national anthem. And we have been known to use song to impress members of the opposite sex — especially if you demonstrate dexterity and agility by also picking on, or wailing on, guitar strings as you sing. Being certain of course, to grasp and display the guitar in decidedly phallic fashion.
Of all his songs, then, Dylan’s “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” makes a case for nature’s restorative power (perhaps essential to our psychological well-being) and its inestimable importance as the source for music. He is the first songwriter of the folk rock era to point to love of nature as a focal point for group solidarity and as occasion for celebration. In fact, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” seems prescient in anticipating a shift in environmental attitudes — Ted Gioia in The Birth and the Death of the Cool speaks of 1969 as the time when “ecology morphs from Silent Spring alarmism to back-to-nature grooviness” (122). But here Dylan was making that move within a year after Silent Spring, as part of his general shift away from what he called “finger-pointing” songs. Steven Goldberg makes the point that “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” signals Dylan’s transition from politics to mysticism. Dylan was moving away from topicality and toward universality, and “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” is indicative: in this great song, he returns us to an appreciation of the natural world, where our music — and maybe our capacity for language — has its roots.
Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London, 1871.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1971. 8–45.
Gioia, Ted. The Birth and Death of the Cool. Golden, CO: Speck, 2009.
Goldberg, Steven. “Bob Dylan and the Poetry of Salvation.” Saturday Review, 30 May 1970. 43–45.
Gray, Michael. Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan. New York: Cassell, 2000.
Jordania, Joseph. Why Do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution. Logos, 2011.
