COLUMN: 'Ring Them Bells': Dylan wins Nobel Prize in Literature

The announcement was as terse as any song on “John Wesley Harding,” the spare and cryptic album Bob Dylan put out in 1967 following his brush with death in a motorcycle accident:

“The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.’”

With those 24 words, the Swedish Academy made official what hundreds of millions of people over three generations already knew — Bob Dylan is an American original, a mercurial talent who has shaped and reshaped himself, his art and his audience time and time again over the last six decades. For Dylan, like his fictional hero John Wesley Harding:

“... there was no man around/Who could track or chain him down/He was never known/To make a foolish move.”

That’s hyperbole, of course, but more often than not, when critics tried to pigeonhole Bob Dylan as a bluesman, a folk singer, a traitor, a has-been, a sociopath, a brainwashed Christian, or a failed Jew, he broke out of the straitjacket and soared to new heights.

As he wrote in one of his most transcendant songs, “It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”:

“My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards

False goals, I scuff

At pettiness which plays so rough

Walk upside-down inside handcuffs

Kick my legs to crash it off

Say okay, I’ve had enough

What else can you show me?”

Part Charlie Chaplin, part Houdini and part Shakespeare — Dylan has shown us plenty, and even if you didn’t get the raspy voice, you got the message, which is why, in some ways, the Nobel Prize for Literature makes even more sense for Dylan than the Grammy Awards he has won.

Do you have any idea how many thousands of hours have been spent in late-night conversations about the meaning of “Desolation Row,” to take just one obvious example? Multiply that by the hundreds of songs Dylan has written, and you are well into the hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of hours devoted to unlocking the meaning of life through the lyrics of one itinerant poet.

And if you think that lyrics can’t be poetry, guess again. Consider the words of the Psalmist, King David, from more than 3,000 years ago, who might well have been writing about Bob Dylan and his blues harp:

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.

Sing unto the Lord with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of a psalm.

With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord, the King.

 Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together...”

The whole earth applauds today for poetic justice as God throws that minstrel boy a coin.