In the first verse Dylan begins with a simple
statement of his intention to pursue his faith in his muse, combined with clear
intimations of mortality which seem to motivate him. From the beginning the use
of the pronoun 'we' involves the listener intimately in this process. ...Every
step of the way, we walk the line... he sings, echoing Johnny Cash's I
Walk The Line, that powerful statement of the intention to remain
faithful which is so pronounced in its intensity to be 'true' that we begin to
doubt whether the singer can truly remain on this path. The effect here is
similar, especially as we are instantly cast into the arena of self-doubt: ...your
days are numbered/And so are mine.... This line, with its admission of the
effect of the ageing process, echoes Dylan's own ...every hair is numbered/
like every grain of sand... , with its fatalistic overtones. The next few,
wonderfully compressed, lines add to the effect - the singer is telling us that
we are trapped by fate, our spirits confined by the constraints of time and
age: ...Time is piling up/We struggle and we scrape/All boxed in/Nowhere to
escape... These lines eloquently express what so many people feel when they
reach middle age. Our past histories 'pile up' on us, creating a kind of prison
of the mind for ourselves. The line 'struggle and scrape' uses the 's'
alliteration that recurs throughout the song, most notably in the 'hissing'
sound of the title word itself. The next lines begin to explore the classic
blues dichotomy between city and countryside, which here takes on a symbolic
dimension. The city is seen as a 'jungle' in which both singer and audience are
trapped, continually trying to escape from. The 'country' which the singer was
'raised' seems in comparison to be a place of freedom, of inspiration and the
singer tells us, in a wonderfully resonant phrase (again using the 's'
alliteration) that his problems have come from him becoming trapped in the
'city': ...I've been in trouble since I set my suitcase down...
The nature of the spiritual and inspirational crisis
that Dylan describes is deepened in the next lines, which again resonate
powerfully with some of his own previous lyrics: ..Ain't got nothin' for
you/ Had nothin' before/ Don't even have anything for myself anymore... Again
the expression is clipped, terse, and very world-weary. In Like A Rolling
Stone the cry of ...When you ain't got nothin', You got nothin'
to lose... had been triumphant, symbolising how young people were shaking
off the shackles of older kinds of morality. In contrast, in the later Too Much
Of Nothing Dylan warns of the dangers of throwing off received
wisdom, suggesting that such actions lead to...the waters of oblivion....
Here Dylan seems - as he will suggest in more detail
later in the song - that he is drowning in those waters. The next lines
intensify this effect – sliding from the poetic into the colloquial with a
resigned grace: ...Sky full of fire/pain falling down... is another
skilfully compressed couplet. It is 'pain' that is 'falling down' from the sky,
not 'rain'- though of course, the sky itself is on fire. The singer's
suppressed, fiery anger turns into the cynicism of ...There's nothing you
can sell me/I'll see you around... the cursory brush-off of 'I'll see you
around' suggesting that he is trapped in an inspirational void. This sense of a
lack of inspiration is made explicit in the following ...My powers of
expression and thoughts so sublime/ Could never do you justice/ In reason or
rhyme... Here the singer decries his own poetic abilities before leading us
into the first refrain of ...Only one thing I did wrong/ Stayed in Mississippi a day too
long... Clearly 'Mississippi'
is the place where he feels trapped. The suggestion seems to be that his
inspirational crisis has been caused by hesitancy, a fear of 'moving on' from
one 'state' to another, perhaps in this case from youth to middle age, or from
one mindset to another. In any case, a great 'rolling river' seems to yawn
between the narrator and the freedom to be inspired that he so desires. Here
the 'state of Mississippi'
symbolises 'the state of the blues' that the singer finds himself in. The
Mississippi Delta is generally referred to as 'the cradle of the blues'. So the
singer regrets that he has let himself 'drown in his own tears' for just a
little too long.
In the second verse the singer seems to fade away
from us, as if he is a kind of ghost. Again symbolism is contrasted with rather
cynically colloquial phrases. We begin with some quintessential blues imagery
indicating the singer's mind set: ...The devil's in the alley/ Mule's in the
stall... he mutters, before further indicating his world-weariness: ...Say
anything you wanna/ I have heard it all... He seems distracted now, making
a few mysterious references to wishing he was ...in Rosie's bed... He
tells us he feels like an invisble 'stranger' and sounds lost, dejected... So
many things we never may undo... and, rather pitifully, ...you say
you're sorry, I'm sorry too... He seems lost in a kind of existential
despair. ...I need something strong... he darkly hints ...to distract
my mind... hinting at some potential plunge into 'substance abuse'. He
declares that he was guided towards the subject of the song by some cosmic or
heavenly force, stating that ...I got here following that Southern Star/ I
crossed that river just to be where you are... In Version One, Dylan
performs this verse with a kind of resigned your somehow courageous tone,
making it perhaps the most moving section of the performance. This is the blues
in all its nakedness, a soul crying out in the wilderness. The singer has
followed his muse across the wide river and now he seems stranded, looking back
regretfully on the past mistakes.
Yet as Dylan has always known, the true magic of the
blues lies in the way it can posit hope through adversity. In the song's
climactic final verse he depicts himself as broken, yet strangely carefree. He
is still 'stuck in Mississippi'
and, having absorbed the pain fully, he has plumbed the deepest emotional
depths. Here he graphically depicts the feeling of being 'beyond pain', when
the soul has suffered so much that nothing else can touch it or make things
worse. The metaphor he follows here is that of being drowned in this pain, as
if he has reached that point of near-death semi blissfulness where the pain has
finally begun to ebb away. Employing more alliteration he memorably begins: ...My
ship's been split to splinters/ I'm sinking fast... He tells us he's sunk
into a kind of timeless void. ….I'm drowning in the poison/ Got no future,
got no past.... And now, as the waters of the great river overcome him, his
transcendence begins. The pain is numbed. He feels calm, reflective. ...My
heart is not weary... he whispers, ...it's light and it's free... And,
neatly completing the nautical analogy: ...I got nothing but affection for
those who sail with me... In this transcendent moment the narrator's
'heavy' self pity and anguish is replaced by 'light' compassion. He surveys the
frantic stressfulness of modern life from a distance of calm detachment: ...
Everybody's movin if they ain't already there/ Everybody's got to move
somewhere.... Ceasing to struggle, he begins to float to the surface. Now
he reaches out his hand, to his lover or to his audience: ...Stick with me,
baby/ Stick with me anyhow... Then, in another dramatically ironic
juxtaposition of the colloquial with the metaphorical, he declares, with
beautifully measured understatement: ...things should start to get
interesting right about now... so drawing us into the present moment he's
experiencing.
The next lines again delicately set metaphor against
self-effacing wit: ...My clothes are wet/Tight on my skin/ Not as tight as
the corner I've painted myself in... Dylan's use of the classic blues
technique of using self-deprecating wit to counterpose and fight despair has
rarely been so refined. The sense of emotional ambiguity here reflects the
classic lines from Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (1963) : ...thinking
and wonderin'/Walkin' down the road/I once loved a woman/ A child I'm told/ I
gave her my heart but she wanted my soul... Here again the singer deploys ironic humour to con us into thinking
that he’s really OK. But we know better. Now he attempts to resort to romantic
cliché, clutching out to his lover’s hands in the hope of rescue: …I know that fortune is waiting to be kind/ So give
me your hand and say you’ll be mine…. But
just as he appeals to his lover, or perhaps his saviour, for rescue, we know
that he cannot be saved from drowning. The song’s last lines confront death
head on: …the emptiness is endless/cold
as the clay… followed by the deliciously enigmatic …you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way… before the final ‘stayed in Mississippi’ kicks in. These lines seem to
sum up the emotional price of the turmoil that the singer depicts. As he sings
in Shelter From The Storm (1975) …something there’s been lost…
Perhaps Bob Dylan’s greatest quality as a performer
is his willingness, even as he grows old, to continue to search for some
elusive notion of perfection. In concert he continually remodels and rephrases
the expression and emotion in his songs, as if continually grasping for the
perfect way of using the words and music he has conjured to express what is in
his heart. In the first version of Mississippi on Tell
Tale Signs he comes as close as he ever has. Yet it’s quite possible that
this version was merely the first complete performance of a song which he later
rerecorded for Love And Theft and
then reworked in concert many times over. Over the years there are many
instances where a version of a song he has appeared to pass over for official
release has, in retrospect, become virtually definitive. Here, as with the
version of Blind Willie McTell
released on The Bootleg Series 1-3,
the simplicity of the musical arrangement throws the nuances of Dylan’s vocal
expression into the sharpest relief. As he sang in 1964’s Restless Farewell: ….. it's not to stand naked under unknowin' eyes/ It's
for myself and my friends my stories are sung….
The version of Mississippi on Disc Two adds bass and drums,
attempting to build the song towards a
series of musical climaxes at the end of each verse. The vocal is more
restrained and controlled, tinged with a more consistent sense of regret. The
players seem a little hesitant and the song never achieves the sense of uplift
of the Love And Theft version, though
its musical structure clearly presages the final recorded version. It loses the
sense of vulnerability that characterises the first version, though it is
interesting as a ‘work in progress’.
The third
version is quite different. A number of lines are omitted and others
substituted. Some are rearranged. Of course, this may actually be an earlier
version of the song. But its use of fuller instrumentation (though the rhythm
section is more restrained here) suggests that this was an alternative
development of the ‘naked’ original. The rhythm is slightly jauntier, almost
veering towards a reggae beat, and organ is prominent featured. Dylan’s vocal
is more expansive here - he stretches out phrases confidently. There seems to
be an attempt to make the song less obviously ‘poetic’ and more direct in the
manner of other Time Out Of Mind songs
like Standing
In The Doorway and Not Dark Yet.
The tone of this version is more obviously confessional: … I'm standing in the shadows with an aching heart/ I'm
looking at the world tear itself apart… he begins. In the alternate
second verse he begins …. Well I been
loving you too long, I know you ain't no good/It don't make a bit of difference
to me, don't see why it should… The
first line here echoes an Otis Redding song and there’s a more direct reference
to the ‘woman done me wrong’ theme than occurs elsewhere. The most memorable
change of lyric is in the final verse, where the singer depicts himself as so
spiritually bereft as to be ‘invisible’:
….Winter goes into summer, summer
goes into fall/I look into the mirror, don't see anything at all… The third version is the one closest to the
general tone of Time Out Of Mind, yet
it still somehow does not fit with that album’s overall sombreness and
intention to communicate by stripping back metaphor. Mississippi is ultimately too ‘poetic’ for that
collection of songs and fits more neatly into the playful ambiguities of Love And Theft, although even there it
seems to stand alone from the other material.
What makes Mississippi such a triumph is its universality, its
emotional openness and honesty. Here Dylan bares his soul for all the world to
see, yet he carries it off with supremely graceful aplomb. His dilemmas and
despair are those which all of us in the ‘jungle’ of modern life all share. The
song is a metaphorical summation of the struggle which Tell Tale Signs dramatises, summing up the plight of the outsider
poet: ‘a stranger nobody sees’. The poet weighs the burdens of the earthly life
and sees himself drowning in it all. He foresees the inevitability of his
death, mourns the death of his youth, yet despite it all he is determined to
carry on. Mississippi is perhaps his most eloquent
summation of the aesthetic of the blues - that of the transmutation of
suffering into a means of spiritual survival. And in the version which begins Tell Tale Signs we are allowed in to
experience that process in a way that is sometimes painful, sometimes
beautiful, but always expressively and uncompromisingly intimate.
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This series will continue very soon. Naturally I will be devoting more space to the album's 'original' songs rather than the live versions.
Check out the great Dylan website VISIONS OF DYLAN
At Jamsbio online mag there's an article about best Dylan sites . If you've enjoyed my stuff here why not contact them on the form at the bootom and mention this site!
As usual I'd welcome any comments in the box below or at chris@chrisgregory.org
My books WHO COULD ASK FOR MORE: RECLAIMING THE BEATLES and BE SEEING YOU: DECODING
THE PRISONER can be bought from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on these links (OK well you have to pay a bit of money too!)
I am now working on a book on Bob Dylan which will be called DETERMINED TO STAND. Thought I'd mention that before someone else nicks the title! The book concentrates on Dylan's work of the 1990s and 200s.
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