ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the extraordinarily high level of rhythmic irregularity in Bob Dylan's music between 1961 and 1964. This musical phenomenon is immensely significant at a socio-historical level. Apart from recordings of pre-war acoustic blues, which were both scarce and irregular, and some of Woody Guthrie's songs, there was nothing to compare with Dylan's informal rhythms in the prior history of recorded popular music, and there has been very little since. The chapter discusses the four types of pause-like bars: 'structural and regulating', 'fractional', 'ambiguating', and 'dynamic' or 'anti-pause-like' bars. In some of Dylan's early songs rhythmic irregularity operates not in terms of numbers of beats in bars, but at the hypermetric level of how many bars there are in a period. All of Dylan's riff-based blues are Highly Irregular, and 'Highway 51 blues' is not alone in being close to metric chaos.
