The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #63217   Message #1024873
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
25-Sep-03 - 08:23 PM
Thread Name: Should songs make sense?
Subject: RE: Should songs make sense?
Stories told orally should have space in them for the listener to make them personal, and that's even more true when they are sung stories. The power of the old ballads lies in the way they cut out so much of the detail a novelist would put in, and in the way they leave room in the story, things unexplained.

The same is true in, for example, Bob Dylan's Tangled up in Blue, or Townes Van Zandt's Pancho and Lefty.