Good stuff from Dylan on folk music and songwriting
I ran into these words from Bob Dylan in an article about his Nobel prize in the January 2017 issue of the magazine Sojourners (thanks to my mom). These quotes are taken from a speech Dylan gave when accepting a MusiCares Person of the Year Award in 2015:
“I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. For three or four years…I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere…If you sang John Henry as many times as me…you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too. …If you’d listened to Robert Johnson singing, “Better come in my kitchen, ’cause it’s gonna be raining outdoors” as many times as I listened to it, sometime later you just might write A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”