Soon after I first listened to Bob Dylan’s intense new album, Tempest, a friend who’d also heard it wanted to know what a historian made of its line, early on, about the British burning down the White House. I replied that I had no idea. And many listenings later, I still don’t. I did say that it felt as if there were more corpses scattered around at the end of the album than in all the productions of Hamlet ever mounted: sixteen hundred floating frozen in a single song, an epic waltz about the Titanic.



Many—if not most—of Americans’ favorite ballads deal with themes of twisted passion, heartbreak, and death. Look at “Barbara Allen”—the most widely sung ballad in the English language, and maybe the saddest—through “Omie Wise,” “Pretty Polly,” and “The Wreck of Old 97,” to Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel,” Dolly Parton’s “Down from Dover” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska”: all macabre ballads, fixed on death. Much of Tempest is too.

Several years ago, while editing our book on American ballads, The Rose and the Briar, Greil Marcus and I puzzled over all the graphic and brutal imagery. The traditional ballad format involves scenes and even entire stories heaped one atop the other, sometimes running for dozens of verses, and the turn to something gruesome and tragic amplifies the drama and builds tension. But American murder ballads, in particular, often feature a bloodthirstiness and a darkness of motive—think of “Banks of the Ohio,” think of “Nebraska”—that look like the grotesque flipside of the pursuit of happiness. Whether in a song of homicide or accident, specific grisly details intensify the sadness and the fright. Now Tempest enriches and complicates the ballad tradition—but also it looks inside that tradition, depicting if not completely explaining its torments and mysteries.

The album begins, a bit deceptively, with a jaunty train song. Most American songs about trains fall into one of three basic categories. Disaster songs like “The Wreck of Old 97” describe the bravery and profane folly of men who tempt nature and providence with their fiery engines of iron and steam. (Tempest’s tale of the Titanic is an ocean-bounding version of the same theme.) Other songs celebrate a particular train, like “The Wabash Cannonball,” much as pre-railroad folk songs celebrated race horses. Still other train songs offer a sentimental lament for a departed home or bygone America, like “The City of New Orleans.”

“Duquesne Whistle,” with its bright melody, mostly sounds like the second variety, with a retro tinge of the third—the train whistle is “blowin’ like it gonna blow my blues away,” “blowin’ like my woman’s on board.” Still, if there’s no train wreck, there are ominous rumblings. The singer denies accusations that he is a gambler or a pimp, and then hears the whistle sounding as if it might be on its final run.