What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan

by Steven Rings

Overview

Discover a new side of the songs of Bob Dylan by exploring the virtues of rough sounds, peculiar intonation, and a raspy voice.
 
Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he’s written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan’s music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar.
 
Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan’s songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings. Rings begins—where else?—with Dylan’s voice, exploring its changeability, its unmistakable features, and its ability to inhabit characters, including the female narrator of “House of the Rising Sun.” Rings then turns to Dylan as an instrumentalist, examining his infamous adoption of the electric guitar in 1965, as well as his stylistically varied acoustic playing, which borrows sounds and techniques from Black blues musicians, among other influences. Rings charts the histories audible in Dylan’s harmonica as well as piano, which has been central to his music making since his earliest days of imitating Little Richard in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Finally, Rings guides readers through one of Dylan’s most famous songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” analyzing its musical sources as well as variations in live performances. A companion website of audio and video examples helps readers notice the nuances and idiosyncrasies inherent in Dylan’s work and, even more importantly, their effects.
 
A close look at an underdiscussed but essential aspect of Dylan’s oeuvre, What Did You Hear? offers a fresh understanding of a singular performer, his musical choices, and the meanings that we can hear in his imperfect sounds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226843315
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/28/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Steven Rings is associate professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Tonality and Transformation and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory.

Table of Contents

How to (Not Just) Read This Book

Introduction

Part I: Voicing

Chapter 1. The Fashioned Voice

Chapter 2. Identity and Plurality

Chapter 3. The Empathic Voice

Chapter 4. Words-Music (1): Speechward

Chapter 5. Words-Music (2): Songward

Part II: Playing

Chapter 6. Guitar: Sound and Symbol

Chapter 7. Harmonica: Breathing Room

Chapter 8. Piano: Seeking and Finding

Part III: Sounding “Hard Rain”

Chapter 9. What Did You Hear, My Blue-Eyed Son? The Musical Sources

Chapter 10. Six Crooked Highways: Time and Harmony in the Guitar Part

Chapter 11. I’ll Know My Song Well: “Hard Rain” in Performance, 1962–1978

Chapter 12. I’ll Tell It and Think It and Speak It and Breathe It: “Hard Rain” in Performance, 1980–2017

Afterword: On Perfection

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Notes

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Rings hears what others don’t—because as he listens, sounds spark thoughts. This takes him inside Bob Dylan’s songs, hearing how their elements—rhythms, melodies, words, and sounds—make what we hear as whole and finished. But that way of listening also takes Rings outside the songs, to hear what they hear: the musical gestures that have shaped them, that have spoken to them. In Rings’s pages, that conversation comes fully to life.”

— Greil Marcus, author of “Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs”

“The best study of Bob Dylan’s musicianship to date. At once a compendium of thinking on the totality of his music and a close study of several songs, the book offers bountiful insights that will excite readers both avidly and casually interested in Dylan.”

— Sumanth Gopinath, author of “The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form”

“What Did You Hear? sings like that Japan ’94 ‘Hard Rain,’ spotlighting not Dylan the songwriter but Dylan the performer. Through detailed argument and copious musical examples, Rings breaks down Dylan’s technique on his various instruments: voice, guitar, piano, harmonica. The sounds Dylan fans have loved for decades now have a conceptual framework, demonstrating just how much care Dylan puts into the delivery of his words, not just the writing of them. Rings knows his music theory but doesn’t rely on the reader to, making his analysis easily accessible for the layperson. The most intriguing Bob Dylan book I’ve read in some time.”

— Ray Padgett, author of “Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members”

“A dive into the chords, not just the words, of the Dylan canon. This an exploration of why the ‘crackin’ breakin’ shakin’ sounds,’ as the Minnesota bard once termed them, are as important to his persona as the lyrics that most critics—and fans—focus on. . . . Rings, an associate music professor at the University of Chicago, breaks down the various components—vocals, guitar, harmonica—that enhance the picture.” 

— Kirkus

From the Publisher

2025-07-19
A dive into the chords, not just the words, of the Dylan canon.

This an exploration of why the “crackin’ breakin’ shakin’ sounds,” as the Minnesota bard once termed them, are as important to his persona as the lyrics that most critics—and fans—focus on. Making well-argued points that sometimes get lost in academic prose, Rings, an associate music professor at the University of Chicago, breaks down the various components—vocals, guitar, harmonica—that enhance the picture. He quotes Richard Manuel of the Band dismissing Dylan’s guitar work—“he’s astrummer”—and notes blues purists copping an attitude about his singular harmonica styles. The author occasionally references French postmodern structuralists, though his New Criticism forebears seem equally applicable to his approach, which often includes note-by-note analyses of the changes in different performances and recordings. (He also references Quora posts and other Dylan fanboy message boards in the course of these obsessive travels.) Luckily, he includes links to the snatches of songs he writes about, which should make it easier for the lay reader to follow along at home. To demonstrate the inseparability of sound and sense, Rings quotes the original notation, “Words-Music,” that Dylan used as he typed out “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in a borrowed Greenwich Village apartment, refuting the urban legend that the original draft was intended to be a poem. Liner notes are not Nobel-worthy. “Dylan’s idiosyncratic sounds are not incidental to his art, a troublesome husk we can discard once we have extracted his celebrated words,” the author writes. “Rather, his art lives in the noisy encounter between words and music.”

Worthy fare for Dylan obsessives and (patient) casual fans alike.

Kirkus Reviews