When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.
He finally delivered a 4000-word long lecture and the Nobel Prize for Literature (and the prize money) is officially his.
“Spanish is the Loving Tongue” is a song based on the poem “A Border Affair” written by Charles Badger Clark in 1907. Clark was a cowboy poet who lived throughout the American West, and was named the Poet Laureate of South Dakota in 1937. The poem was set to music in 1925 by Billy Simon. Over the years, the song was recorded by many top recording artists, including Bob Dylan, Ian and Sylvia, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Marianne Faithfull, Emmylou Harris, Michael Martin Murphey, and The Chad Mitchell Trio (under the name “Adios, mi Corazon”).
May 27: Bob Dylan released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan 1963
“..easily the best of [Dylan’s] acoustic albums and a quantum leap from his debut—which shows the frantic pace at which Dylan’s mind was moving.You can see why this album got the Beatles listening. The songs at its core must have sounded like communiques from another plane.”
~John Harris (Q Magazine, 2000)
” I think it was the first time I ever heard Dylan at all… And for the rest of our three weeks in Paris, we didn’t stop playing it.”
– John Lennon (about The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
