"Part of it may be that so many singers of protest songs seem so damned self-righteous."

Yeah...just like most of the membership here seem whenever they start discussing politics, social issues, religion, morality, incidents in the news, each other's posts and general attitude, etc.

We are daily awash here in a sea of self-righteous posturing. Thank God it is not all put into song, eh, Don? ;-)


You are quite correct that Bob Dylan deliberately altered his voice after becoming enamored of folk music. He did this instinctively, mainly because he had fallen in love with the music of people like Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and a bunch of the old acoustic blues singers. He took on all the husk and bark of those men...with rather remarkable results. Some liked it, some didn't. I can well understand why you didn't like it, and I didn't like it at first either. My natural instinct is to sing purely and on key, not through the nose, with resonance, without the husk and bark.

I can't fault Dylan for doing it at the time, though, because it's so common for young people to take on an accent or vocal style in that way. Why do country singers all seem to sing with a "twang"? Why do male country singers wear big hats? Well, because they grew up wanting to, that's why. They were imitating a style they admired. All young Bob was doing was imitating a style he admired...and that style was the style of the specific musicians he was inspired by the most at the time. He probably considered it "realer" than singing "pretty", but it's not a style you admire. Fine.

I quite agree that deliberately singing badly is not required in order to sing folk music. ;-) It can also be rather hard on the vocal chords.

I feel that by 1965 Dylan had become an extremely effective singer in his own right, with his own style. He had considerably moved away from the Guthriesque thing by that time, both vocally and lyrically.