I think that quite a lot of people who’ve heard Christmas In The Heart at this stage have been struck by what you could call the final note.

As with a number of the songs on the album, Dylan doesn’t sing all of the words to O Little Town of Bethlehem. Generally, you might only hear all of the verses of these precious old Christmas hymns in church, and likely only a traditionally-minded church at that. In his version, Dylan sings two of the original five verses of this song: the first and the third. The lyric was written by Phillips Brooks, an Episcopal priest from Philadelphia. The story is that he was inspired while on a visit to the Holy Land in 1865, and specifically while viewing the town of Bethlehem from a spot on a nearby hill. It is an exceptionally beautiful and poignant lyric, I think (although to some reviewers the song is apparently just another dull old holiday chestnut). The two verses that Dylan sings are these:

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may his His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still,
The dear Christ enters in.

The final word he sings, however, is not part of the original tune, but a feature of Bob’s own arrangement here. It is a great and a definitively conclusional amen.

Dylan, who spends most of the album, including this song, positively reveling in the gravelly nature of his voice, adopts for his great amen a voice of almost infinite softness. It is — to this listener — an amen infused with reverence, with humility and with a spirit of simple faith. It is a spine-shivering and deeply poignant moment.

Some would be quick to say, “Oh, c’mon; how can you make so much of one word?” But it is of moments like this, if you ask me, that a life’s work in popular music is made. I know that all fans could list other moments where Dylan sings a word or a phrase just so, in a way that kills, whether it’s “conceal” in Like A Rolling Stone or “they all went by so fast” in If You See Her, Say Hello or “you know it blows right through me like a ball and chain” in Brownsville Girl. It’s not just what he’s singing, in these instances, but the way he sings it. It’s even especially the way he sings it. Personally, one of my all-time most treasured bits of Bob’s singing appears, inexplicably-enough, on the Traveling Wilburys’ version of Nobody’s Child, when Bob sings a number of variations on the line “Got no mommy’s kisses, no daddy’s smile”. It’s devastating to me, loaded with humor and pathos and things indefinable, and I just happen to believe that it’s brilliant singing.

So, for this listener, the way in which Dylan sings this final word on the new album, amen, now enters the pantheon of such incomparable moments, when Dylan sings a word in a way that only he could, and wrings something out of it that seems almost like it wasn’t quite there before.

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