ABSTRACT
It wasn’t until the publication in 2004 of his Chronicles, Volume One that Bob Dylan revealed he had been strongly influenced by Bertolt Brecht, ‘the antifascist Marxist German poet-playwright whose works were banned in Germany’ (Dylan, 2004, p. 272), and especially by ‘Pirate Jenny’, one of the ballads in The Threepenny Opera (1928), to which he was exposed during an off-Broadway performance of Brecht songs in the early 1960s (Dylan, 2004, pp. 272–6). After listening to that and other pieces, dismounting and re-assembling them many times, Dylan would compose and sing ‘in a few years’ songs such as ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, ‘Who Killed Davey Moore’, ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’: in 2004 he maintained that without Brecht’s example those songs would never have been born (Dylan, 2004, p. 287). In the same autobiographical book, Dylan wrote that he was (at about the same time) influenced by French existentialist playwright and novelist Jean Genet: ‘The songs I’d write would be like that’ (Dylan, 2004, p. 89). none of Dylan’s critics before 2004 ever dared to suggest an influence on Dylan by the best-known German communist poet of the twentieth century, or by one of the exponents of the Parisian intellectual scene that had produced engagé songs by the likes of Boris Vian, Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré. Surprise was the reaction of those who had been writing essays and books on how Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash or William Blake, and the Bible, had moulded Dylan’s poetry and music.
