Bob Dylan's Voice

 So, I used to not like Bob Dylan's voice when I was a little kid. I know my mom still can't stand it when his singing sounds more like talking really loudly into the microphone, like he's not exactly sure how to hit all the notes right. I remember a girl in high school who who was going to sing in a recital and to help calm herself down she said, "Well, if Bob Dylan could do it, I guess I can too." She wasn't the best singer, but she did okay, and she was right. She pretty much sounded just as good as Bob Dylan.

After all the singing Bob Dylan's done, you'd think he'd "get better" at singing. You also have to think that he must have wanted to sound that way, it was a stylistic choice. Instead of having that clear finished tone, he wanted to maintain a rough, unpolished quality. His untrained voice does contain a sense of originality and genuineness in his songs. It's not perfect, not so commercial. Still I sometimes totter back and forth between enjoying his singing style and then getting really annoyed with it, but there are a lot of people who have picked up on that unpolished, authentic sound that I do like listening to. Examples:

David Gray

Mason Jennings

Josh Ritter

Gillian Welch

Ryan Adams

Joshua James

Donavon Frankenreiter

None of these people sound exactly like Bob Dylan, but you can definitely hear the more rough quality of their voices and even small twang-ish ways of saying the words like it's coming straight out of Dylan's pronunciation guidebook. Even though Bobby doesn't sing with a pleasant traditional-sounding quality, he definitely adds a kind of organic, soul-expressing earnestness to the music. He has certainly influenced the singing style of later folk singers and the new folk music that is still being produced. The new singers don't imitate him exactly, but it does seem like they are looking back to Dylan as the standard from which they can build their own styles.