"Are we rolling, Bob?"

Since this is a blog about writing, nobody writes like Bob Dylan.  Consider this ...

If you’d had listened to Robert Johnston singing, "Better come in my kitchen, 'cause it's gonna be raining out doors," as many time as I listened to it, sometime later you just might write, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."


And this ...

Big Bill Broonzy had a song called "Key to the Highway." "I've got a key to the highway / I'm booked and I'm bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin' because walking is most too slow." I sang that a lot. If you sing that a lot, you just might write,

Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down on Highway 61

You'd have written that too if you'd sang "Key to the Highway" as much as me.

A couple of anecdotes about the inevitability of his songwriting taken from an acceptance speech he recently gave for some award.  Rolling Stone Magazine, God blessum, shares the entire speech here.  It is remarkable, if you have some time.  Absolutely remarkable.  I am amused and flattered by Dylan's suggestion that in a different world, if I had listened to "Key to the Highway" as much as he did I might have ended up writing "Highway 61 Revisited."  Instead of him.

Anyway, I was looking on U-Tube to see if I could find a tape of the thing.  I couldn't, but this popped up instead.  I wonder what Bob would say about a computer-generated voice giving us the news ...



I wonder what Brian Williams would say too.

Me?  I got to be going.  I'm going to put an egg in my shoe and beat it.