Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan wrote terrific Christian songs, too

Like many people, I was surprised when Bob Dylan won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.

Normally, the literary world’s most prestigious honor is awarded to traditional and often to obscure literati — novelists and poets — not to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame musicians.

I read heartfelt tributes to Dylan in the national press and on social media after the Nobel committee’s decision was announced.

From what I saw, his choice stirred up a bit of puzzlement and tongue-clucking from fogies, but mainly people waxed ecstatic about the impact Dylan’s music has had on their lives and on society. Especially people of a certain age.

I’m of a certain age myself, but I confess I’ve never been a serious Dylan fan.

It’s not that I dislike his work. I’ve owned several of his albums and CDs, and I’ve even seen him in concert at least once, maybe twice, I’m not sure. (Some of my early concert experiences are obscured in a misty purple haze, if you know what I mean.)

Dylan is regarded by his admirers as the finest lyricist ever, a true poet whose rhymes happen to be set to music.

But I’ve rarely been able to make out what he’s singing about, because of his equally legendary mumbling, which has always struck me as an affectation.

I don’t mean to criticize someone whose talents have changed the face of modern culture.

I’m just saying that music idolatry is idiosyncratic. The soul illumination that others find in Dylan, I, for whatever reasons, mostly haven’t felt myself.

Some people are Beatles fans; some are Rolling Stones fans. There’s no right or wrong answer on such matters. If an artist exhilarates or illuminates you, he exhilarates or illuminates you. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. It’s not a choice; it’s a fate.

My real point here, though, isn’t to bury Dylan but to, in my own roundabout way, praise him.

I’ll give him this: To me, he is, hands down, the best composer of Christian songs in my lifetime.

I’m not a big fan of Christian music, either, frankly. Again, that’s not a putdown of others’ tastes. For whatever reasons, overtly religious music rarely appeals to me.

Dylan’s is an exception.

In the late 1970s, Dylan, a Jew by birth, converted to Christianity. In the wake of his conversion, he produced several explicitly Christian albums.

Critics and diehard fans consider this period of his career a personal and artistic embarrassment.

I beg to differ. I’d rank a couple of his songs from that era among my favorite religious songs ever, and definitely among my favorite Dylan songs.

The first is “Gotta Serve Somebody,” from the album “Slow Train Coming.” The second is “Saved,” from an album of the same name.

Dylan sings both tunes with clarity. You can understand the words — and the words are terrific. I think he means to be understood.

As its title implies, the slow, almost methodical “Gotta Serve Somebody” declares that everyone, great or small, serves a master. No one is independent. The only question is whose servant we’ll be:

You may be a construction worker working on a home

You might live in a mansion or might live in a dome

You might own guns and you might even own tanks

You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed

You’re gonna have to serve somebody

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

“Saved” is an exuberant, rollicking song of praise set to a black-gospel beat. It’s deceptively simple, because in just a few stanzas Dylan offers up enough solid evangelical theology to inform a seminary master’s degree thesis.

I’ve got both songs on my cellphone right now, and I listen to them regularly on my car stereo, just as loud as I can play them.

In the 1980s, rumors spread that Dylan had renounced his conversion. However, recent reports suggest this wasn’t true, and that he remains a practicing Christian.

Also, last year he reminisced in a profile in AARP The Magazine about the early influence that evangelist Billy Graham had on him.

“He was the greatest preacher and evangelist of my time — that guy could save souls and did. I went to two or three of his rallies in the ’50s or ’60s,” Dylan said. “This guy was like rock ’n’ roll personified — volatile, explosive. He had the hair, the tone, the elocution — when he spoke, he brought the storm down. Clouds parted. Souls got saved, sometimes 30- or 40,000 of them. If you ever went to a Billy Graham rally back then, you were changed forever.”

Whatever Dylan’s faith now, the timing of his public conversion in the late ’70s more or less coincided with my own conversion.

Maybe that’s why his Christian songs stirred me so. We’re moved most by artists whose visions and truths align with our own, and who reach us at some crucial juncture.

In the 1960s, Dylan sang for civil rights and against war, and millions of young people, feeling these same awakenings, heard in him a kindred soul, a prophet with a guitar.

I was too young for all that.

But a decade later, I was primed to hear him affirm the gospel I’d recently embraced myself. When he sang about Jesus, brother, I was all in.

Thirty-five years later, I’m still in.

This story was originally published October 21, 2016 at 11:52 AM with the headline "Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan wrote terrific Christian songs, too."