Times change as Dylan honoured

Published on Tuesday 8 April 2008 22:42

HE FAMOUSLY outraged folk fans when he picked up an electric guitar during the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and embraced rock music.

Now Bob Dylan, the musical legend whose career spans five decades, has succeeded where every other songwriter has failed, in getting Pulitzer Prize judges to acknowledge the musical style once dismissed as barbaric.

Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half-century, has received an honorary Pulitzer Prize, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power".

It is the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favoured classical music and, more recently, jazz, have rewarded the art form.

Most often associated with journalism, the Pulitzer also makes one award for music. In 1997, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz musician to win the prize, for his composition Blood on the Fields.

In 1998, judges posthumously honoured the jazz giant Duke Ellington, and in 2006 a special citation was given to the pianist Thelonious Monk, also posthumously.

Long dominated by classical compositions, the watershed came in 2004 when the Pulitzer board revised its guidelines to encourage more entrants from other musical fields. The key change allowed entries from compositions that had made their debut that year as recordings, instead of actual performances, to be considered.

The submission of a musical score was no longer required, and the judging panel of four composers and a music critic was changed to three composers and a variety of other musical experts, including conductors and musicians.

Long after most of his contemporaries have either died, left the business, or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and release highly regarded albums, most recently Modern Times.

Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics – even digging through his rubbish for clues – since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as Blowing in the Wind made Dylan a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation. His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences.

His memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature.

Pulitzer pizes were created under the terms of the will of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who died in 1911.

"It was a very, very positive move expanding the parameters of the requirements," said David Baker, a former music juror for the Pulitzers, a jazz composer and a professor of music at Indiana University.

The Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes – the most in its history – including awards for its coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and a series exposing poor treatment of war wounded at Walter Reed hospital.

The New York Times received two prizes: one for investigative reporting, for stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other products from China, and one for explanatory reporting, for examining the ethical issues surrounding DNA testing.

WORDS OF WISDOM

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?

People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall'

You thought they were all kiddin' you

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hangin' out

Now you don't talk so loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging for your next meal

Like A Rolling Stone

Johnny's in the basement

Mixing up the medicine

I'm on the pavement

Thinking about the government

The man in the trench coat

Badge out, laid off

Says he's got a bad cough

Wants to get it paid off

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship,

My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip,

My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels

To be wanderin'

Mr Tambourine Man

Come writers and critics

Who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide

The chance won't come again

And don't speak too soon

For the wheel's still in spin

And there's no tellin' who

That it's namin'

The Times They Are A'Changin'

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail

Before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly

Before they're forever banned?

Blowin' In The Wind

There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief,

There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

All Along The Watchtower

OTHER FAMOUS WINNERS

&#149 Ernest Hemingway, pictured, won a Pulitzer In 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He once said: "It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."

&#149 Eugene O'Neill won four times between 1920 and 1957. Good friends with Chekhov and Ibsen, he died in 1953, receiving his final prize posthumously.

&#149 Robert Frost, the American poet, scooped four Pulitzer prizes between 1924 and 1943. He said: "A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

&#149 Arthur Miller won the 1949 prize for Death of a Salesman. The play, featuring salesman Willy Loman, ran on Broadway for 742 performances.

&#149 Tennessee Williams won the 1948 prize for A Streetcar Named Desire and repeated the feat in 1955 with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it."

&#149 Rodgers and Hammerstein won with South Pacific in 1950. The pair who created the likes of Oklahoma! and The King and I were credited with reworking the musical theatre genre.