Lay Down Your Weary Tune

LAY DOWN YOUR WEARY TUNE

Approximately fifteen years before his conversion to Christianity, and inspired by the beautiful setting of Joan Baez’s cottage in Carmel, California, Dylan was thinking about the presence of God in nature.[i] It’s astonishing that such an important work could remain unavailable to the public until the release, with much critical fanfare, of Biograph in 1985.

Although there are some similarities between the song’s mystical epiphanies and “Chimes of Freedom”, “Mr Tambourine Man,” and also the later “Every Grain of Sand,” “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” somehow does not seem intimately connected with anything else in Dylan’s canon. It’s about the divine chord in nature, about music as a force infusing the natural world. It’s also a song about transcendence, and tuning into this supernatural music, while at the same time cultivating a totally humble and receptive state of consciousness.

The medieval mind thought that music was an expression of the order of the created universe, and that God’s music could be heard in the movement of the spheres. To the medieval thinker, all human music was in imitation of this divine harmony. However, there is an earlier, pagan understanding of the music of nature as expression of the consciousness of gods. This song, then, is about submission to this overpowering natural music. As human music has the ability to overpower us, the more so does the divine music of nature. Both the tune and the words are hymn-like, and there is a definite echo of a psalm about the piece. Dylan, the psalmist, is suggesting that we allow ourselves to be guided by the music of the natural world. In a heightened state of consciousness, with his inner ear (like the inner eye that receives visions in other songs) tuned in to the divine chord, he is able to discern the natural orchestra, the “morning breeze like a bugle,” the “drums of dawn,” “the crashin’ waves like cymbals”. The human musician can only stand “unwound,” like a stringed instrument that has been detuned, before this music. It does not ask for or expect appreciation; like the hoot owl of “Blind Willie McTell,” for which “the stars above the barren trees” are the only audience, there is the same sense here that these natural instruments are playing for the benefit of each other, and in harmony with one another, because man has forgotten how to listen: “The branches bare like a banjo played / To the winds that listened best”. This beauty is barely perceptible to our neglectful human ears; in other words, it speaks like silence. It gives rest, it “restoreth the soul,” as the psalm says. The pilgrim of the 23rd Psalm lies down in “green pastures,” and is led beside “still waters” (the sense is that one can rest, away from the chaos and adversity of the world) and here too the subject comes to rest next to a still river (so still, in fact, that the water resembles a mirror). This is a hymn, not about God especially but about the divine power of nature, and thus natural music’s power, to soothe and comfort the weary soul, and especially the soul who, like Dylan, had come to resent the pressures of his success. No doubt his time at Carmel gave him such comfort. He might have wanted to remind himself of exactly why he was interested in music in the first place.

Moreover, the song is further proof that Dylan’s genius at songwriting came from his ability to tune into a music and a language that was pre-existent. The answer to questions like “where do your songs come from” should have been obvious. They came from his environment, from the music of the rails. In his sleeve notes to Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2, he had written: “An’ I sung my song like a demon child…An’ I’d judge beauty with these rules / An’ accept it only ‘f it was ugly”. The roots of Dylan’s own music were uglier than Joan’s, the beauty in his songs of an entirely different kind (One could very well ask the question, just whose voice is the more natural, Joan’s or Bob’s?). In the sleeve notes, he writes about the transformative effect hearing Joan Baez’s voice had on him, and it seems that here is the germ for “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” and also the key to the shift in his response to beauty. He berates himself for thinking that “beauty was only ugliness an’ muck,” and credits Joan’s voice with giving him a new concept of beauty as something beyond dissection or explanation, a sound that “held hymns ‘f mystery”. The imagery of a music that he cannot “pick apart” directly echoes “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” such as in “the sounds a streams,” “the weakest winds that blow” and “gypsy drums”.[ii]

The music Dylan hears in “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” similarly cannot be understood or picked apart (indeed, the best listeners are the winds themselves, not human ears). Dylan had clearly found an inexplicable beauty in Joan Baez’s voice, and in Carmel, he found equal submission to the music of nature. It was not from his own past experience, as one who had “heard the iron ore train sing”; it was the advent of a new vision that would come to fruition in “Mr Tambourine Man”. We see the beginning of change in Dylan, in this song, from the people’s prophet of “Hard Rain,” who will “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it / And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,” to the artist who, in 1966, announced “I accept chaos”. In this context, the images from the liner notes of a young Dylan “yankin’” up the grass by its roots, and hurling a rock across the tracks, represents a Dylan with a will to ask questions, a subversive rebel with the impulse to change things; here, however, we see an acceptance of beauty, a kind of passive acceptance of mystery which is also the perspective in “Mr Tambourine Man”. It may be stated that the attraction to Dylan stems from the fact that he never did stand “unwound beneath the skies,” and that most of his admirers have always preferred him to sing his song “like a demon child”. We do not generally admire Bob for his passivity, for his tendency to stand in awe of beauty, and his defiance has always been more interesting. Nevertheless, these songs of submission before the mystery are among his most striking.