Ballad for a Friend (Dylanology 33)

A throwaway made up on the spot with a title slapped on it, or a masterful and perfectly balanced mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary? Dylan claims one thing, I the other. Prove me wrong!

Arches, mirrored

In January 1962, Bob Dylan sat down in front of a publisher’s microphone and recorded eight songs for the music publishing company Leeds Music. In his some-kind-of-autobiography Chronicles, Dylan recalls how he “was making up some compositions on the spot, rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there, anything that came into my mind – slapping a title on it”.

One of these songs was “Ballad for a Friend”, and there is nothing in Dylan’s description that fits. The song is carefully composed, not made up on the spot, and although it clearly stands in a certain tradition of folk song, it is the originality that stands out, not its derivative qualities. It is one of the true gems in Bob Dylans back catalogue of officially unreleased tracks.

Tony Attwood of Untold Dylan has noticed the same. In a recent piece, he asks:

If Bob was able to write this stunning original piece in 1962, or perhaps earlier, why then in 1963 was he copying the melodies and chord sequences of existing songs when writing the pieces that secured his legacy for the decades to come?

It’s a good question, which I obviously can’t answer, since it’s about why someone who is not me did what he did sixty years ago. What I can do is to take Attwood’s question as a point of departure for a discussion of what it is that Dylan is doing in “Ballad for a Friend”, where it came from, and where that would eventually lead.

I’ll start with Attwood’s initial characterisation of the song as a “stunning original piece”.

• Yes, it’s a stunning piece – one of those that stand out from the rest, and,

• yes, it’s because it is has an original quality.

• Why is that? What makes it stand out, and

• what gives it its originality?

• With regard to what?

What Kind of Tune is “Ballad for a Friend”?

Exquisite Rhythm

One of the stand-out features of “Ballad for a Friend” is the rhythm – both the relentless, driving rhythm of the guitar, and especially the phrasing of the song, constantly syncopated and varied (to such a degree that it actually makes no sense to make a detailed transcription. Not only would it take an enormous amount of time; it also wouldn’t be very useful, since the central features of the song would get buried in details).

So I will simply state the greatness of the rhythmical phrasing as a fact, and move directly on to a reduced representation of the melody, with all the rhythmical subtleties ironed out.

Melodic Transcription

That gives us this pattern for the melody of “Ballad of a Friend”, which is followed more or less exactly in all the verses (with the occasional deviation here and there):

That is all there is: twelve separate tones to which three lines of text of various length are fitted.

What is interesting is that while some of the characteristic of this tune are extremely rare, others are extremely common, and this combination may in fact be the main reason why the song stands out the way it does.

Triadic Melody

The entire melody consists of tones from the G major triad, G-B-d-g. Triadic melodies are common in tunes that are based on a sense of chord, e.g. “Rock Around the Clock” or “When the Saints Go Marching In”, as opposed to the mostly stepwise motion of tunes based on a sense of melody or mode (e.g. “Love in Vain”), or the repeated notes of the recitative-based genres (e.g. “It’s Alright Ma”). In this sense, there is nothing special about the melody.

There is one exception to the G major dominance: the e towards the end of the first phrase, marked in blue in the music example above. I will return to this e shortly.

The Inverted Arch

Overall, the melody forms an arch – or rather: an inverted arch:

The arch is one of the most common melodic shapes there is, going back to the earliest notated music. Take the Riddle Song as an example. The first three lines are identical arches placed on different scale steps, and the fourth is a wavy double-arch:

But while the arch is as old and common as music itself, the inverted arch, where the melody begins and ends on the highest note of the song, is very unusual. In fact, it is hard to come up with examples at all – with two possible exceptions, to which I will return.