Overview

Full Product Details

Author:   Steven Rings
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.653kg
ISBN:  

9780226842653

ISBN 10:   0226842657
Pages:   360
Publication Date:   28 October 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock  
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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

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 sound—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”

“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 others 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” “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” “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”

Author Information

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.

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