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Decoding Dylan: Searching For The Sources To The Songs Of Bob Dylan
Two years ago, Dylan obsessive and freelance writer Domenico De Luca embarked on a journey into the deeper world of the songs of legendary music artist Bob Dylan. Armed only with a Spotify account, Weeniepedia, Google, Google’s Newspaper Archive and YouTube, De Luca listened to thousands of songs, read the lyrics to hundreds more and searched endlessly on the internet for the hidden sources to the songs of Bob Dylan.
Here in Decoding Dylan: Searching for the Sources to the Songs of Bob Dylan, De Luca shares his findings. Inside these pages, you’ll find the sources to such songs as ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,’ ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe,’ ‘Tombstone Blues,’ ‘Just Like a Woman,’ ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and many, many more. Decoding Dylan is essential for any Dylan fan wanting to find out more about how the man also known as Robert Zimmerman, Elston Gunn and Blind Boy Grunt goes about creating the songs that have captivated the world.
Here in Decoding Dylan: Searching for the Sources to the Songs of Bob Dylan, De Luca shares his findings. Inside these pages, you’ll find the sources to such songs as ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,’ ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe,’ ‘Tombstone Blues,’ ‘Just Like a Woman,’ ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and many, many more. Decoding Dylan is essential for any Dylan fan wanting to find out more about how the man also known as Robert Zimmerman, Elston Gunn and Blind Boy Grunt goes about creating the songs that have captivated the world.
172 pages, Paperback
Published May 19, 2026
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July 5, 2026
The idea of Bob Dylan being a great songwriter and at the same time a musical magpie who borrows tunes, words, riffs, anything he feels like, from older songs dates from around 1963, as soon as he started slinging out his grand anthems. The first batch, Masters of War, Blowin’ in the Wind, etc, all had Dylan’s words set to the tunes of folk songs. It was accepted, there was no problem. Gradually he began writing the tunes as well, starting in 1965. But then later the pesky nitpickers of the internet started noticing that since say around 1980ish he'd gone back to his old ways much weirder. In the lyrics there were direct quotes from such obscure sources as old Hollywood westerns, Henry Timrod the forgotten Civil War poet, and from Confessions of a Yakuza, a Japanese gangster novel. Gradually, it seemed as if Dylan had found a new method of writing songs, and that every bit of them, lyrics and melodies, could be traced back to these obscure sources. You got that idea, even as you loved all the great albums he issued since Time Out of Mind.
You know, James Joyce was the same. It’s entirely possible that there isn’t a line in Ulysses that he didn’t find from somewhere, in an old theological treatise, or a Dublin newspaper, or rambunctious chat that that he remembered from all the good times in the pubs with his mates; and Molly’s soliloquy is just JJ writing down everything that Nora said.
See a pretty thing, pluck it up in your beak, take it to your nest, use it later, it’s a recycled world, as it should be.
I was hoping this book would be an attempt to draw all of this intriguing morass together but NO it isn’t, it’s merely a jovial essay by a jovial guy who thinks he has spotted a bundle of Bob’s borrowings that have heretofore been unbeavered. Some of them, we must say, are stretchers.
The very first chapter deals with Blowin’ in the Wind. Every Bob fan knows that the melody is loosely based on the old slavery lament No More Auction Block. Now Domenico is here to tell us that the How many this /How many that pattern in the lyrics was inspired by Eddy Arnold’s I Really Don’t Want to Know (1954)
How many arms have held you and hated to let you go?
How many? How many? I wonder
But I really don’t want to know
How many lips have kissed you and set your soul aglow? Etc etc
Domenico continues:
I know what you’re thinking – “It’s just a dopey love song!” Yes it is but it’s not only that Blowin in the Wind starts each verse with How many… but it’s the sound of Eddy Arnold singing those words that cements the connection. Track down a recording of his 1954 No 1 hit and you’ll see what I mean.
Well, nobody has to do any tracking any more, everything is on youtube. So I listened to Eddy, and no, I didn’t see what Domenico meant. The sound of Eddy singing those words is the sound of a typical country crooner singing a dopey love song with common or garden lyrics.
I think there must be some kind of Searching for Dylan’s Sources Derangement Syndrome afflicting some otherwise sensible Dylanologists. When Domenico considers Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright he mentions briefly Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons by Paul Clayton (and by many other people too); when we listen to that we hear immediately that it was Bob’s source. Like Mozart fiddling with one of Salieri’s pieces, he takes a harmless doleful folk song and turns it into a low key introspective masterpiece. But Domenico brings in Think Twice by Brook Benton, So Long Baby by Big Maceo, Night Latch Blues by Yank Rachell, Boar Hog Blues by Jazz Gillium, Banty Rooster Blues by Big Joe Williams, and Sea of Heartbreak by Don Gibson. He sees some very ordinary words common to all these songs and he connects them all together.
When Domenico tells me Bob’s source for It Ain’t Me, babe was Carla Thomas’s It Ain’t Me I’m beginning to think this whole book is a parody. I dutifully listened to this unmemorable pop song. D says
First off, most obviously, Dylan swipes the title of this song by taking the “Babe” Carla sings on the last line of her song and placing it after her “it ain’t me” that ends the song. “Babe, it ain’t me” becomes “It Ain’t Me, babe”.
Someone might have kindly told Domenico that the phrase “it ain’t me” and the word “babe” were quite common in the demotic speech of young Americans in the early 60s – you know, hence them appearing in Carla’s song and Bob’s song.
I’m reminded of the judge who told the criminal in the dock that if he’d put the ingenuity, patience and hard work he’d put into his crimes into a legitimate business he would have by now been a very rich man. And if only Bob had not been like Frankenstein and nailed all his songs together phrase by phrase from five or six obscurities then, you know, he’s have probably been able to write some really good stuff.
There is a big study still to be written about all this because it is a real issue, underneath all the fun and games, but fans will have to wait. This little book’s heart is in the right place but possibly not its ears.
You know, James Joyce was the same. It’s entirely possible that there isn’t a line in Ulysses that he didn’t find from somewhere, in an old theological treatise, or a Dublin newspaper, or rambunctious chat that that he remembered from all the good times in the pubs with his mates; and Molly’s soliloquy is just JJ writing down everything that Nora said.
See a pretty thing, pluck it up in your beak, take it to your nest, use it later, it’s a recycled world, as it should be.
I was hoping this book would be an attempt to draw all of this intriguing morass together but NO it isn’t, it’s merely a jovial essay by a jovial guy who thinks he has spotted a bundle of Bob’s borrowings that have heretofore been unbeavered. Some of them, we must say, are stretchers.
The very first chapter deals with Blowin’ in the Wind. Every Bob fan knows that the melody is loosely based on the old slavery lament No More Auction Block. Now Domenico is here to tell us that the How many this /How many that pattern in the lyrics was inspired by Eddy Arnold’s I Really Don’t Want to Know (1954)
How many arms have held you and hated to let you go?
How many? How many? I wonder
But I really don’t want to know
How many lips have kissed you and set your soul aglow? Etc etc
Domenico continues:
I know what you’re thinking – “It’s just a dopey love song!” Yes it is but it’s not only that Blowin in the Wind starts each verse with How many… but it’s the sound of Eddy Arnold singing those words that cements the connection. Track down a recording of his 1954 No 1 hit and you’ll see what I mean.
Well, nobody has to do any tracking any more, everything is on youtube. So I listened to Eddy, and no, I didn’t see what Domenico meant. The sound of Eddy singing those words is the sound of a typical country crooner singing a dopey love song with common or garden lyrics.
I think there must be some kind of Searching for Dylan’s Sources Derangement Syndrome afflicting some otherwise sensible Dylanologists. When Domenico considers Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright he mentions briefly Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons by Paul Clayton (and by many other people too); when we listen to that we hear immediately that it was Bob’s source. Like Mozart fiddling with one of Salieri’s pieces, he takes a harmless doleful folk song and turns it into a low key introspective masterpiece. But Domenico brings in Think Twice by Brook Benton, So Long Baby by Big Maceo, Night Latch Blues by Yank Rachell, Boar Hog Blues by Jazz Gillium, Banty Rooster Blues by Big Joe Williams, and Sea of Heartbreak by Don Gibson. He sees some very ordinary words common to all these songs and he connects them all together.
When Domenico tells me Bob’s source for It Ain’t Me, babe was Carla Thomas’s It Ain’t Me I’m beginning to think this whole book is a parody. I dutifully listened to this unmemorable pop song. D says
First off, most obviously, Dylan swipes the title of this song by taking the “Babe” Carla sings on the last line of her song and placing it after her “it ain’t me” that ends the song. “Babe, it ain’t me” becomes “It Ain’t Me, babe”.
Someone might have kindly told Domenico that the phrase “it ain’t me” and the word “babe” were quite common in the demotic speech of young Americans in the early 60s – you know, hence them appearing in Carla’s song and Bob’s song.
I’m reminded of the judge who told the criminal in the dock that if he’d put the ingenuity, patience and hard work he’d put into his crimes into a legitimate business he would have by now been a very rich man. And if only Bob had not been like Frankenstein and nailed all his songs together phrase by phrase from five or six obscurities then, you know, he’s have probably been able to write some really good stuff.
There is a big study still to be written about all this because it is a real issue, underneath all the fun and games, but fans will have to wait. This little book’s heart is in the right place but possibly not its ears.
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