Popular Music as Literature

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 26, 2025

In the preface to Beowulf to Beatles: Approaches to Poetry (1972) David R. Pichaske writes, “Laughter and unqualified ridicule are the usual reactions within the halls of academia to any mention of rock and roll lyrics as poetry.” Pichaske’s conviction that “such reactions are no longer entirely justified” led him to publish the first poetry textbook to balance the work of acknowledged literary titans such as the British Romantic William Wordsworth, whose poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807) closes the anthology, with that of contemporary rock stars such as Jim Morrison of The Doors, whose song “Twentieth Century Fox” (1967) opens the volume.

For many, “such reactions” persist, as evinced by controversy surrounding singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s ninth Nobel Prize nomination in 2004, the same year Christopher Ricks, professor of humanities at Boston University, published his critical study Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Filmmaker Gordon Ball, who teaches literature and film at the Virginia Military Institute, explained his rationale for repeatedly nominating Dylan for the Nobel Prize in literature: “Poetry and music are linked, and Dylan has helped strengthen that relationship, like the troubadours of old.”

As Ball’s comment implies, Dylan’s merger of poetry and music is hardly new. Even before the medieval troubadours, the Anglo-Saxon scops, the Greek poets and the Old Testament prophets were singing lyrics that have long been collected and studied as literature. But in the 1960s contemporary songwriters, following the example of Dylan, whose own influences were plentiful, redefined popular songwriting, often composing lyrics that demonstrate the aesthetic sophistication and thematic relevance of the finest English-language poetry.

As with other major literary transformations that developed during the second half of the twentieth century, World War II was largely responsible for the emergence of what Pichaske labeled “the poetry of rock.” Migration during the war years lifted two musical genres beyond their isolated audiences, which were primarily in the rural south. Jazz and blues songs performed primarily by and for African Americans, “race music” as it was called, was renamed “rhythm and blues” after the war, and, like its white counterpart, hillbilly music—redubbed country and western—the popularity of rhythm and blues spread to urban areas.

Both genres were edgier than mainstream music, a result of their folk roots, tackling subjects such as infidelity, hard drinking, and poverty. Pioneers of these early genres such as the bluesman Robert Johnson and the country singer Jimmie Rodgers lived the dangerous lives they wrote and sang about. Their postwar musical heirs, such as Muddy Waters and Hank Williams, respectively, wrote lyrics about everyday hardship, conveying the genuine emotion of their words with ragged, passionate vocal styles, a contrast to the smooth delivery of mainstream crooners, whose generally sentimental or lighthearted love songs were still written by professional lyricists.

While many of these lyricists, notably Cole Porter, were poets in their own right, crafting memorable lyrics marked by wit, irony, and a deft handling of rhyme and rhythm, their subject matter only occasionally and subtly tested the boundaries of propriety. Songs such as Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ Stone” (1950), however, glorify the freedom of the open road as opposed to the stasis of middle class, domestic life portrayed by postwar radio and television shows such as “Father Knows Best” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

“Rollin’ Stone” was a precursor of the rock ’n’ roll era. That song provided the name for perhaps the most definitive rock ’n’ roll band, The Rolling Stones; it influenced the title for a definitive rock ’n’ roll song written by Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965); and it ultimately inspired the title of the magazine that has chronicled the genre since 1971, Rolling Stone.

14th June 1969: British rock band the Rolling Stones in 1969, after the death of founder member Brian Jones. They are, from left to right; drummer Charlie Watts, new member guitarist Mick Taylor, vocalist Mick Jagger, guitarist Keith Richards and bass player Bill Wyman. (Photo by Len Trievnor/Express/Getty Images)

Williams, sometimes called “the Hillbilly Shakespeare,” who died at age twenty-nine after writing thirty-six top-ten country and western songs, also sang about the unsettled life and paved the way for rock ‘n’ roll music with songs such as “Move It on Over” (1947), which is rhythmically and melodically nearly identical to the song often credited with jump-starting the rock ’n’ roll era, “Rock around the Clock” (recorded in 1952 by Sunny Dae and His Knights; rerecorded by Bill Haley and His Comets in 1954).

The merger of country and western with rhythm and blues, which found its voice in the early songs of Elvis Presley, helped create rock ’n’ roll, a genre that liberated contemporary songwriting both lyrically and musically, offering expression to the restlessness of a generation of young people stifled by the expectations of an increasingly conservative postwar culture.

The booming economy that closely followed the war affected young people’s spending potential in unprecedented ways, and they increasingly became the target audience of record producers and songwriters. Artists such as Chuck Berry, for example, sang about cars, girls, and rock ’n’ roll itself, writing catchy, witty lyrics delivered at driving speed to an electrified musical backing.

Performers such as Berry, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly were among the first mainstream performers to write their own lyrics, rather than interpret the songs of others, as their popular contemporaries such as Frank Sinatra had been doing. Holly’s death on 3 February 1959, commemorated in Don McLean’s “American Pie” (1971), is called “the day the music died.”

Rock ’n’ roll music mellowed in the early 1960s; the period was characterized by a string of popular ballads (“It’s Now or Never,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight”) recorded in 1960 by Presley, freshly returned from Germany where he had spent the last years of the 1950s serving in the United States Army. This hiatus, which lasted until the so-called British Invasion of 1964, marked by The Beatles’ first tour of the United States, made room for a pivotal new brand of music—urban folk, which spawned Bob Dylan.

Another effect of the economic boom that followed the war was the dramatic rise in the number of Americans attending college over the next two decades, both veterans and their baby-boomer offspring. Many baby boomers reached college age in the early and mid 1960s as urban folk music gained popularity.

The genre defined itself against rock ’n’ roll—then dominated by songs written with new dance styles in mind, such as “The Twist”—as music for a sophisticated audience, blending socially conscious lyrics with music that did not distract listeners with the temptation to dance. Pete Seeger was at the forefront of this movement, which evolved out of the work of another working-man’s musician, Woody Guthrie.

A champion of the oppressed, Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” in 1940, as a rough-edged response to songwriter Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Guthrie’s song includes a verse that challenges Berlin’s notion of “a land that’s free”:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

The modern, more-refined folk movement had an unlikely literary ally in its crusade against consumerism, discrimination, and conformity in the Beat writers. The most prominent figurehead among this movement was the novelist Jack Kerouac, whose penchant for recreational drug use and jazz music distinguished him and his fellow Beats from Seeger and his folk followers.

In 1963 Bob Dylan merged the influence of these two groups by uniting folk rhythms with the highly imagistic and symbolic lyrics characteristic of the Beats in the apocalyptic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which borrows its structure from the medieval ballad “Lord Randall.” Dylan had enrolled in the University of Minnesota the year Buddy Holly, one of his musical heroes, died. Dylan dropped out shortly after discovering two books that prompted him to hitchhike to New York City and begin a career that revolutionized American music and culture: Guthrie’s Bound for Glory (1943) and Kerouac’s On the Road (1957).

In New York City Dylan began a disciplined routine of self-education, reading voraciously while churning out folk songs others began rerecording. His “Blowin’ in the Wind,” recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary, reached number two on the Billboard pop chart and brought Dylan national recognition as a protest singer, rallying his listeners against discrimination, war, and poverty.

His lyrics began to draw a clear distinction between the blind, constraining ways of the older generation and the lucid, liberating potential of the young, warning “mothers and fathers,” “senators and congressmen,” and “writers and critics” that “the old road is rapidly fading,” in “The Times They Are A-Changing” (1964).

Dylan attracted the attention of his Beat mentors, who welcomed his ability to infuse popular music with poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Bookstore, a haven for Beat writers, welcomed Dylan when the singer performed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, and Dylan formed an enduring friendship with several Beats, including Allen Ginsberg.

The Beat influence became more prominent in Dylan’s new songs, such as “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1965), with richly textured lyrics about transcending the banal that seemed to strain against the confines of the folk medium. In the summer of 1965 Dylan substituted an electric guitar for his acoustic model at the Newport Folk Festival and appalled folk purists such as Seeger with his new rock songs “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” acerbic diatribes that displaced Dylan’s concern for broad social causes, with a more universal concern for individual freedom.

Rock music, as the variety became known in the 1960s, extended Dylan’s reach, carrying his work not only to the jukebox but also onto college syllabi, to the resentment of such poet-scholars as John Ciardi, who complained about his nephew’s considering Dylan a poet: “Like all Dylan fans I have met, he knows nothing about poetry. Neither does Bob Dylan.”

Other writers such as Paul Simon also found their way to mainstream listeners by writing increasingly complex folk songs that highlighted poetic lyrics. Dylan’s first meeting with the Beatles when they toured America in 1964 proved instrumental to heightening the literary level of popular songwriting.

It was shortly after this meeting that Dylan moved beyond folk music and The Beatles began writing more mature lyrics. During the second half of the decade America welcomed a host of first-rate lyricists whose careers flourished on U.S. soil—some British, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones; some Canadian, like Leonard Cohen and Robbie Robertson; and many native, like Simon, Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, and Jim Morrison of The Doors.

Some bands, such as Morrison’s (who alluded to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, 1954) and the Canadian band Steppenwolf (after Herman Hesse’s novel), took literary names. Others based songs on literary classics, such as “Richard Corey” (1966), Paul Simon’s nod to Edwin Arlington Robinson, and “White Rabbit” (1967), Jefferson Airplane’s homage to Lewis Carroll.

Dylan’s songs often echoed the titles of Kerouac’s novels: “Desolation Row” (1965), “On the Road” (1965), “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965), and “Visions of Johanna” (1966).

After his recovery from a 1966 motorcycle accident, Dylan seemed to mellow in much the same way as Elvis Presley after his military service. Dylan’s John Wesley Harding (1968), while lyrically astute, was stripped of the psychedelic influence of his monumental 1966 record Blonde on Blonde and signaled the beginning of the country-rock movement that characterized the early part of the next decade.

A new group of singer-songwriters, including James Taylor and Jackson Browne, blossomed in the 1970s. While the emphasis in popular music shifted back to dance in the mid seventies, the influence of Dylan and his fellow poets of rock carried on in their own work as well as in that of such American songwriters as Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen.

The lyrics of many of these songwriters have been collected in individual volumes in recent years: Hank Williams: The Complete Lyrics (1993); Bob Dylan’s Lyrics: 1962–2001 (2004); Paul Simon’s Lyrics, 1964–2008; and Lou Reed’s Pass through Fire: The Collected Lyrics (2008).

Pichaske’s work on music and culture in the 1960s is still among the finest secondary resources. Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (2004) is the best of many critical analyses of Dylan’s lyrics. Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman’s American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV (2003) is an indispensable source of the historical and cultural context within which popular music has developed. Brian Ward’s study is an incisive look at the role songwriters such as James Brown and Sam Cooke and others in the industry played in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

Topics for Discussion and Research

Many of the early protest songs of Bob Dylan confront the social issues that characterized the postwar years: “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Talking World War III Blues,” and “With God on Our Side,” for example, are all reactions to the Cold War. “The Death of Emmett Till,” “Oxford Town,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” address racial inequality. Students might listen to the songs and read the lyrics to analyze how Dylan treats these subjects as both social critic and poet.
Students might compare both William Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” In what ways might these pieces be thematically similar? What aspects of Romanticism can be found in Dylan’s song?
In his 1965 song “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,” Dylan wrote, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” What other writers of the postwar years embrace this theme and in what ways? Students might also analyze Dylan’s own evolution or rebirth in three songs that seem to reflect his, and perhaps his generation’s, evolving views regarding authority: “Maggie’s Farm,” “Dear Landlord,” and “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Can the differing stances these songs convey be reconciled?
The lyrics of Paul Simon are frequently concerned with alienation, superficiality, and the often-empty promise of the American dream. Students might analyze the lyrics of “The Dangling Conversation,” “I Am a Rock,” “America,” and “The Boxer” and discuss how Simon poetically renders the themes that writers such as J. D. Salinger treat in prose.
Allusions fill the work of American songwriters during the 1960s. Students might analyze the references to biblical, historical, and cultural figures in popular songs of this era and discuss why these figures might be important to the songwriters who allude to them. David Pichaske’s chapter “A Poem is a Thing,” in Beowulf to Beatles and Beyond, devotes a helpful section to this subject. Students might also analyze Don McLean’s highly allusive song “American Pie” and discuss it as an allegory of popular music history in the postwar years.
Choose a song by one of the artists discussed here. Listen to it, then read the lyrics. How is the experience different? Is the meaning different? Defend your answer.

Resources

Jim M. Curtis, Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society, 1954–1984 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987).
Provides several helpful chapters for students interested in popular music as literature, particularly “Chapter 12: Dylan’s Words in Freedom,” and “Chapter 13: High Culture as Popular Culture.”
Michael Gray, The Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (New York: Continuum, 2004).
A painstakingly researched and carefully detailed study of Dylan’s work through 1997’s Time Out of Mind.
David R. Pichaske, Beowulf to Beatles and Beyond: The Varieties of Poetry, revised edition (New York: Macmillan, 1981).
This revised edition of Pichaske’s 1972 anthology is an excellent text that teaches all the elements of poetry through the works of the traditionally acknowledged masters of poetry and contemporary songwriters.
David R. Pichaske, A Generation in Motion (Granite Falls, Minn.: Ellis Press, 1989).
This slightly modified reprint of Pichaske’s 1979 volume is an essential study of the development of the counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the music that grew out of it.
David R. Pichaske, The Poetry of Rock: The Golden Years (Peoria, Ill.: Ellis Press, 1981).
Analyzes the genesis and development of the great lyricists of the 1960s, devoting chapters to Dylan, The Doors, The Jefferson Airplane, and others.
Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco, 2003).
Analysis of Bob Dylan’s lyrics as they relate to the seven deadly sins, the four virtues, and the three graces.
Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
An indispensable chronicle of the evolution of popular music in America, which includes two compact discs so that many texts can be heard, not merely read.
Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Traces the contribution of African American singers, songwriters, and record producers in the struggle for racial equality during the postwar years.