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Bob Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"

Dylan in a Day (Pt.2)

By Annie KapurPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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This is a song that I have loved for many years in many forms. There’s the album version on “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965) and then there’s the version on “No Direction Home” which is also pretty amazing in a different key. I want to have a quick look at what I think this song means and honestly, I want to have a look at how the song sounds. I think there’s enough critical analysis on deeper meanings in Bob Dylan’s lyrics for you to check out by people who have, to Bob Dylan’s own dismay, studied him for fifty or so years. My reviews on Bob Dylan are purely for entertainment purposes. Why? The poetics are great, the lyrics are amazing and wild, the song sounds good and his singing voice is seriously underrated.

“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a testament to never-ending youth that is always driving you in different directions and ultimately, you end up settling in somewhere you’d enjoy to call home rather than going towards where the action is. It’s a welcomed criticism of 1960s New York and how it leaves one feeling completely unfulfilled so you have to leave it for somewhere new. The narrator ultimately comes back to New York, but it isn’t without a fight for his want to stay in his town of difference and obscurity. It is a melodic and often melancholy song that seeks to lift itself up through its cast of vibrantly different characters such as “Saint Annie” (no, not me, that would be offensive if it were) and “Sweet Melinda” - or as the ‘peasants’ call her, the “Goddess of Gloom”.

The introduction to this song is brilliantly melodic and its just so memorable. You’ll never forget when this song comes on just by the way it starts, even when it is in a different key. Bob Dylan makes an incredible effort to reveal the obscurities of outside living as he attempts to leave the commercialist 1960s New York for somewhere better, only to realise it isn’t actually a lot better at all, he then ends up leaving this obscure place and ‘going back to New York City’ because he ‘believe(s) (he’s) had enough’. It’s one of those lines that tells you so much about why the narrator is struggling but also seems to close the song on a note that is not very happy at all.

The song doesn’t start off very happy either. Being ‘lost in the rain in Juarez’ creates a very unfulfilling atmosphere and since the time of year is Easter, I think that Bob Dylan is trying to signify it is both atmospherically and religiously, so even for the religious it is a sad time. Not just for the normal person who didn’t believe. There are some things about this song though that try to trick us into thinking that it may pick up in emotion through the song, but it never does. He instructs the listener not to expect anything at the same time, like a hope for the best but expect the worst situation, Bob Dylan states that we shouldn’t ‘put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue’ making a damning but small reference to the story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Fortune and fame are two mutually exclusive things as well. As if the famous cannot have good fortune if they ‘select’ fame and the ones with good fortune cannot be ‘famous’ since they are good in body and soul. This is a sort of jab at the world of fame that Bob Dylan is making reference to and I don’t know, it may be a bit of a jab at fellow ‘fame’ obsessed artist - Andy Warhol as well.

All in all, the song has may references to the decline of the obscure world and the grasp upon commercialism that the normal person has. Bob Dylan, playing the everyman, seems to be passing between the two, trying to get out of one to the other without any real knowledge of where he wants to be. Leaving New York for Juarez and then returning from Juarez to New York, it seems like our narrator is constantly displaced and constantly disillusioned with the current state of his country and the his decade.

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About the Creator

Annie Kapur

190K+ Reads on Vocal.

English Lecturer

🎓Literature & Writing (B.A)

🎓Film & Writing (M.A)

🎓Secondary English Education (PgDipEd)

📍Birmingham, UK

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