Walking the Road A Million Times -- Reflections on Bob Dylan's MusiCares Person of the Year Speech

Reflections on Bob Dylan’s MusiCares Person of the Year Speech

Victoria Gordon

In Bob Dylan’s 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year acceptance speech, the legendary singer songwriter accredits his musical authenticity to having emerged through the DNA of traditional music.  

Dylan humbly asserts that through learning, listening to and singing the traditional folk songs, his unique voice (which define him as an artist), emerged.  While his songs are unarguably authentic, they were passed to him through a lineage of composers.  The fabric of his music was woven with the thread of his predecessors. 

 “These songs didn’t come out of thin air.  I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth….these folk songs…gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.”  

Dylan underscores the importance of practice.  Incessant practice.  One has to “walk down the roads a million times” before paving a new one.  He infers through that in order to transcend the boundaries and crack the code of finding your authenticity as an artist, one must first know the boundaries (or in this case, the rubric of traditional music).   Dylan’s “new” songs emerged from old, and took their own authentic shape with a process of which he claims he had little control:

After singing “all these ‘come al’ ye’ songs all the time, you’d be writing, ‘come gather ‘round people wherever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown…The times they are a-changing.’…There’s nothing secret about it…They were the only kinds of songs that made sense.” 

In a similar light, yoga and its eight limbs, is a practice.  Not only has yoga been bequeathed from a lineage of an (arguably) 5,000 year old tradition in the board sense, yoga is a practice we can had down to ourselves each time we arrive at our mat, in an individual sense.  Through learning the alignment and intelligence behind the asanas, pranayama, yamas and niyamas, the “secret” is revealed.  As Dylan offers about his musical process, “there is really no secret about it.  You just do it unconsciously because that it enough."  

We can hear Dylan’s words resonate with ashtanga guru Sri. K. Pattabhi Jois’ discovery “practice and all is coming” — walk the road a million times, keep showing up, keep editing, and we might just get closer to discovering our own authenticity.   It will be enough.