Thanks very much to Joe of Argyle Heights, Brooklyn, for the following email and eloquent tribute to Dylan:

Just a note to thank you for your defense of Bob Dylan’s body of work from political/cultural harpies. I first heard “The Times They Are A-Changing” (the album) in 1964 at St Augustine High School from a young English teacher in my Junior year. He was trying to show us that there was a bigger world beyond the confines of our Brooklyn working class homes and the sundry tortures then inflicted by adolescence and by some of our more physical Christian Brother overseers. We responded favorably — not as much to the music but to the effort by “Mr. Gallagher” — who I learned at a class reunion before Christmas had died – to show us that Dylan songs could be analyzed just like poetry. We only got into Dylan’s music when we heard “Subterranean Homesick Blues” a year later on the top 40 stations. Since then – has it really been 43 years? – his music and poetry has been a constant in my life. And he continues to produce beautiful songs ( “Working Man Blues #2″ from 2006 I just never get tired of). I feel, as you do, that Dylan is a uniquely American artist and my life would have been diminished without the humor and the heartache and the great humanity and unquenchable spirit his music has provided me and many others in dark days, under bright skies and in the every day struggle to be good.

Thanks, Bob.

PS: My next door neighbor would describe himself as a leftist and I suppose I would consider myself more of a moderate/conservative. We seldom discuss politics – yet we have no problem trading Bob Dylan songs on guitar at the drop of a hat. That’s because Dylan’s songs –even the “political” ones — transcend politics. Now if I could only get my 16 year old son to get beyond Dylan’s scratchy voice and listen…Can’t help but think that one day, another generation will re-discover this national treasure.

I do believe that new generations are continually having their minds blown on discovering Bob’s music, and I’m certain that will go on for a long, long time.

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Maybe this is an appropriate segue: From CubaNow.net, there is an article called Bob Dylan: the journeys of the Great Chameleon, by Hermann Bellinghausen. It’s basically just the writer’s reflection on Bob, containing genuinely inoffensive stuff like this:

The verbal richness that accompanied him during the 1960´s will probably not come back, but his easiness is still intact. It is said that in the early 1980´s he ran into Leonard Cohen in a café in Paris (who had decided to imitate Dylan and to start singing in 1967, when he was a famous novelist and poet). Dylan asked him how long it had taken him to write Hallelujah, Cohen’s most famous song. Cohen said: ¨Four or five years¨, and then he asked Dylan how long it had taken him to write the well-known I and I. Dylan answered without mercy or modesty: ¨15 minutes¨.

Now, as far as I can discern (I’m not a regular reader), CubaNow.net takes a distinctly pro-regime and ultra-left-wing point of view on things. Yet, in this article on Bob Dylan, there is not a single attempt to hang the old labels of lefty troubadourship on him. No mention of anti-war songs. No mention of Vietnam. There is a glancing mention of civil rights and MLK’s March on Washington; one that is entirely accurate and appropriate.

What the heck is going on here? I don’t know, but I do like it.

Now, I hope I haven’t gotten the writer fired … or worse.

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Many Christians are celebrating Easter this weekend, and, this year, it is coinciding with the Jewish holiday of Purim. Thanks to Dovid Kerner for sending along a link to his Purim sing-a-long; it contains both historical and topical content. (And I think it also has some kind of Dylan reference, although I can’t put my finger on it.) Click here to go to YouTube or play below.

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