Dylan on Cash . . . Or?

Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan

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I came across some lines yesterday, written by Dylan about Cash:

Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger.

I was so impressed by this description that I followed it up to find the context, which proved to be Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, in which Dylan was talking about his own song "Man in the Long Black Coat" on the 1989 album Oh Mercy, which he recorded with Daniel Lanois, comparing it to Cash's "I Walk the Line":

I wasn't sure that we had recorded any historical tunes like what he [i.e., Lanois] had wanted, but I was thinking that we might have gotten close with these last two [i.e., "Shooting Star" and "Man in the Long Black Coat"]. "Man in the Long Black Coat" was the real facts. In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my "Walk the Line," a song I'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.

I'd always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. Next to Sam's records, all the rest sounded fruity. On Sun Records, the artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet. No justice for them. They were so strong, can send you up a wall. If you were walking away and looked back at them, you could be turned into stone. Johnny Cash's records were no exception, but they weren't what you expected. Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger. "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine." Indeed. I must have recited those lines to myself a million times. Johnny's voice was so big, it made the world grow small, unusually low pitched -- dark and booming, and he had the right band to match him, the rippling rhyhm and cadence of click-clack. Words that were the rule of law and backed by the power of God. When I first heard "I Walk the Line" so many years earlier, it sounded like a voice calling out, "What are you doing there, boy?" I was trying to keep my eyes wide opened, too. (pages 216-217)

In looking around the internet for this passage in full, I noticed that several sites had remarked that Dylan was quoting from various sources in penning his memoirs. To be precise . . . quoting without quotation marks. Plagiarism! Or is it? There's too much of such copying for Dylan to have been trying to deceive anybody. Or to put it another way, Dylan's was no dishonest deception, it was forthright deception -- Dylan living outside the law but being honest. A trickster. In an article "Bob Charlatan: Deconstructing Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One" for the New Haven Review (Issue 6, 2010, pages 71-83), Scott Warmuth argues that "Bob Dylan . . . has embraced camouflage to an astounding degree, in a book that is meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover" (page 71). For instance, the lines that had so impressed me:

Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger.

Warmuth notes that:

Almost every word there comes from [Jack] London's story "The Son of the Wolf," cut, pasted, recast.

Click on that short story. You can search for the sources of Dylan's phrasings. His copying. As Dylan might have said, "Only those in the music business would understand that." And read Warmuth's entire article -- it's only thirteen pages, and has much of interest to relate about Dylan's tricky literary language that leads us deep in wandering mazes lost, unacknowledged.