I grew up with a cassette copy of Bringing It All Back Home. It was the first Bob Dylan album that I remember hearing, and I knew that my Boomer parents and classic-rock-loving peers revered it. That said, people definitely respected Bob more than they enjoyed him. I did enjoy a lot of Bringing It All Back Home, though I had no idea what any of the songs were supposed to be about. I liked the melodies, though, and Bob’s singing didn’t put me off. I thought “Mr Tambourine Man” was intriguing, seemingly weighted with some deep countercultural significance that I wasn’t privy to.
Here’s Baby Bob singing the song at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964.
“Mr Tambourine Man” made its most profound impact on popular culture through the Byrds cover, though I didn’t hear their version until much later. I’m not that wild about Roger McGuinn’s singing, but the harmonies are nice, and the twelve-string guitar is magical.
Fun fact about the Byrds: before settling on their name, they considered “the Berds” and “the Burds”, and I can’t decide which would have been funnier.
After the Byrds version became a smash hit, the song was covered about a thousand more times. Most of those covers are Byrds soundalikes, but Odetta’s 1965 recording takes the tune in a very different direction: she does it as an extremely slow 12/8 shuffle with bluesy seventh chords and vocal phrasing reminiscent of Billie Holiday. Unlike the Byrds, she doesn’t skip any verses, so it takes her almost eleven minutes to get through the whole thing. I adore it.
(Update: no wonder Odetta didn’t imitate the Byrds, her version came out before theirs did, and in fact a month before Bob’s version did too.)
Stevie Wonder’s 1966 recording is more typical, recreating the Byrds version but with more tambourine. It won’t change your life or anything, but Stevie does sing way better than Roger McGuinn.
Con Funk Shun’s version from 1974 is the most radical reworking I have ever heard. They take out all the chord changes, and just groove out on F#m the whole time. Hip!
There have been some instrumental recordings of the tune, mostly by guitarists. I like John Scofield’s version from 2023. It doesn’t have much edge to it, but he plays beautifully.
There have been many theories about who the Tambourine Man is. Guesses range from Jesus to Bob’s drug dealer. From the 500 Songs Podcast, I learned that the Tambourine Man is actually Bob’s friend Bruce Langhorne, who plays the electric guitar part on the recording. Langhorne had a large Turkish frame drum with metal bells that Bob mistook for a giant tambourine.
I transcribed Bob’s recording because I’m going to use it in theory or aural skills class next semester as an example of a I-IV-V song. I had originally planned to assign the kids to write harmony vocals for it, either by reconstructing the Byrds arrangement or by coming up with their own ideas. However, when I tried harmonizing it myself, I struggled more than I expected to, because the melody is weirder and more complicated than it sounds. This is true of a lot of Dylan songs! Let’s dig in and see why.
Here’s my chart of the chorus and first verse. The recording is in F major, but Bob is playing guitar in D major with a capo on the third fret. I’ll be talking about it in F. The tempo is medium fast, 175 beats per minute, and the eighths have just the faintest hint of swing. The Byrds go much slower, around 115 BPM, with a strong backbeat. They square off some of the rhythms, placing phrases on downbeats where Bob anticipates. Their eighth notes are extremely straight, and the feel is stiff. Aside from Roger McGuinn’s 12-string guitar part, everything else is played by Wrecking Crew session musicians.
Anyway, back to Bob’s recording. It’s definitely a folk song, but it sounds fresher and hipper than Pete Seeger or Joan Baez’s material. There are two reasons for that, the harmony and the rhythm. Let’s talk about the harmony first. There doesn’t seem to be much to it; the whole song is just I, IV and V in F major, and every note in the melody is from the F major scale. But the relationship between the melody and the chords is sometimes surprising.
- Listen to the very first line, “Hey Mr Tambourine Man.” The first syllable of “Tambourine” is on a D, which fits the Bb chord underneath it. But that note is anticipating the next measure, which is a C chord, and the D isn’t part of that chord. The phrase comes to rest on the word “Man”, sung on an A, which is also not a chord tone on C. These are gentle conflicts, but they are still conflicts. These are gentle conflicts, but they are still conflicts.
- Next, listen to the line “there ain’t no place I’m going to”. It feels like there are two suspensions that resolve: “ain’t” on D resolving to “no” on C, and “place” on B-flat resolving to “I’m” on A. However, this all takes place over a Bb chord. The D and B-flat are chord tones, but they don’t get the emphasis. The C and A are chord tones of the tonic F chord, but they gently fight the Bb chord.
- Finally, listen to the line “in the jingle-jangle morning.” The first syllable of “morning” is on a B-flat, which feels like a suspension that resolves to the second syllable on A. But this is over a Bb chord, once again reversing your expectations.
I colored all the accented melody notes that conflict with the underlying chords red in my chart. None of this is wildly disruptive, but there’s just enough independence of the melody and chords to make the song sound blues-derived, not Mozart-derived.
How about the rhythm? Most of the tune is simple quarter notes, but they’re almost all sung on the offbeat eighth notes, half a beat earlier than you would naively expect them. In the chorus, the only phrase that starts on a downbeat is “play a song for me”, all the others are anticipated. In the verse, there are a couple of phrases that start on downbeats, but they also include accents on the “and” of one, the weakest eighth note offbeat in the whole bar: “reTURNed into sand, vanISHED from my hand.”
Bob’s guitar part seems like basic folkie strumming: bass-chord-bass-chord on the quarter notes plus some offbeat eighth notes at the ends of the bars. At the ends of the phrases, he adds color by accenting suspended seconds and fourths on weak offbeats before resolving them. There’s also some added rhythmic interest from Bob’s subtle hypermeter disruption. The end of the chorus has an extra hypermeasure tacked onto the end of it, and Bob also adds and drops bars and half bars throughout.
My general theory of Bob is that people are right to love his songs, but that we focus too much on the lyrics and not enough on the music. Bob writes great lyrics, but without the musical setting, they wouldn’t stay with you in the same way. If I had first encountered “Mr Tambourine Man” as a poem, I might find it intriguing, but I don’t know that I would stay interested. I would read “to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands” and think, sure, sounds cool, nice alliteration, but what does it mean? Possibly nothing? In a song, the sound and rhythm of the words is all the meaning you need.
It’s easy to forget how beautiful Bob’s tunes are when you hear them sung in his un-beautiful voice over his bare-bones arrangements, but then you hear them sung by Odetta or backed by Roger McGuinn’s jangly guitar, they reveal their full loveliness. Bob has only become more sonically ornery with age, but the rest of us can sing and interpret the songs however we want. They’re never difficult to play, and they reward all the attention you care to give them.