In Tune

Prior to a couple of days ago the only version I'd heard of Dylan himself singing Lay Down Your Weary Tune was the one on Biograph. Then I had the good fortune to get to hear the one from Bob Dylan Live at Carnegie Hall 1963 which brought a great, great song alive for me again. The live version seems to me to be more rhythmically alive than the original recording, more unpredictable, such that the listener is forced to engage with the details of the singer's phrasing and the way this intermeshes with the less than fore-square strumming of the guitar. As more than one commentator has noted, the Carnegie Hall version is possibly the perfect riposte to the persistently daft notion that Dylan can't sing. And I'd add to that the absolute proof it offers that, far from being himself rhythmically challenged musically as some misguided souls contend, it's the Bobster who challenges our ears to catch his sense of what is rhythmically possible within seemingly ordinary song structures.

I was further reminded on listening to the live version of the perfection of the lyric. There really isn't a word out of place. Even the repeated poeticism in the chorus, rest yourself neath the strength of strings, works, not sounding at all naively precious (as it invariably does when employed by Dylan-imitators of the period.) You would need to go below the strings in laying down, thus maintaining the integrity of the imagery, but singing 'beneath' would both mess up the rhythm of the line as well as fracturing the aural smoothness with that plosive 'b'. As it is neath nicely echoes the 'th' of strength and its open vowel helps the line sing.

The word is also so entirely appropriate to the world of Scottish ballads that Dylan is conjuring that it would seem odd for the speaker/singer not to employ it. Plus this singer makes it sound like colloquial slang rather than anything to with poetry. It just sounds right, as does the whole song.