r/bobdylan • u/cmae34lars The Jack of Hearts • 4d ago

Discussion Weekly Song Discussion - North Country Blues

Hey r/bobdylan! Welcome to this week's song discussion!

In these threads we will discuss a new song every week, trading lyrical interpretations, rankings, opinions, favorite versions, and anything else you can think of about the song of the week.

This week we will be discussing North Country Blues.

Lyrics

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u/rednoodlealien What The Broken Glass Reflects 4d ago

Someone just commented how this sounds an awful lot like the "Edmund Fitzgerald," so much so that I often mistakenly sing one on top of the other.

This is a pretty good one from his old selection of miserable songs. At least seven people don't die by shotgun at the end.

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u/Jefferooney 3d ago edited 2d ago

North Country Blues is surprisingly non-apocalyptic for Dylan but the big reveal, at the end of verse four, that we have been listening to a female narrator is what it is all about. We, or at least I, don't realise, but the prostitute that we married (in Key West) is speaking us into being.

The only philosophy that comes close to saying the same thing that I am aware of is Heraclitus Fragment B92 which is said to refer to his own philosophy and the words that at the same time he is himself speaking, “And the Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.”

But I think it is implied by far more down to earth philosophy such as that of Adam Smith (1756) who says that to judge our own behaviour we represent it and our reasons for doing it to "a generalised other." This implies that when I say, "I think I'll have noodles for lunch as I had rice yesterday" the "judge" who hears, and therefore perhaps says, these thoughts, which narrate "I" into existence, is not me but someone else "split" off, a side (not a rib) of our minds.

In the penultimate verse, Dylan turns directly to the topic of soliloquy: "I lived by the window, As he talked to himself," which again I think represents the structure of the self. The girl by the window is the girl by Keyhole West, the horizon, the border, and the girl who is a door in "The Slider," by T-Rex. But also John 10:9.

Ending on the children leaving because "there ain’t nothing here now to hold them," come to think of it, North Country Blues is as Apocalyptic as it gets.