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The Nightingale's Code
A poetic study of Bob Dylan
John Gibbens

Touched Press, London, 2001
384 pages, paperback
27 black and white photographs by Keith Baugh

For further exploration, the Contents pages (a 2-page pdf) indicate the scope of the book. A sample section of 18 pages can also be downloaded.

Or there’s a web page with a fairly long extract (2,700 words), illustrated with a couple of Keith Baugh’s photographs.

More about the author, John Gibbens.

A portrait of the photographer, Keith Baugh (click for the full-size version). See more of his work – paintings and photographs, and his book Early New York Subway Graffiti 1973–75 – at his website, www.keithbaugh.com

Below: author and artist together at Bristol’s Weapon of Choice gallery in May 2010, for a show of Keith’s graffiti photographs (note red dot).

The three kings, in the story that Bob Dylan wrote as a sleevenote for John Wesley Harding, wanted to get into his work “not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there”.

With The Nightingale’s Code you will go a bit further than that.

Paul Williams, one of America’s most celebrated writers on popular music, and author of a series of books about Bob Dylan, greeted this one generously:

“John Gibbens digs deep (below the basement) and casts new light on a body of work always worthy of fresh exploration and excavation. Even the songwriter himself might be pleased at this evidence that his early work is indeed made new once the empathetic listener has encountered and begun to absorb the Time Out of Mind songs and World Gone Wrong performances. The Nightingale’s Code is refreshing and surprising and well worth examining.”

Paula Radice, in the Dylan fanzine Freewheelin’ called it:

“The most challenging of any of the Dylan books I’ve read for a long while… a delight to read just for the neatness and eloquence of the writing…

When I was only a little way into the book I was already formulating a theory that only real poets should be allowed to write about Dylan, because they are the only ones with sufficient understanding of the power of individual words and phrases to do Dylan’s art justice on the page.

A gem amongst a lot of current fibreglass… essential reading”

In The Independent, Emma Hagestadt wrote :

“This engaging study of the old troubadour’s ditties achieves perception without pretension… studded with sharp images and insights – just like the subject’s work.”

The text is illuminated with 27 previously unpublished black-and-white performance photographs, taken by Keith Baugh at Dylan’s UK appearances between 1978 and 2000.

Buy The Nightingale’s Code
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UK: £10 (includes P&P)

Europe: £12 (includes P&P)

USA and Rest of World: £13 (includes P&P)

Other musical prose:

61 Minutes : A Second (pdf) A reading of Chronicles

Steady Rollin’ Man: a revolutionary critique of Robert Johnson A brief essay on the famous bluesman (expanded from a footnote in The Nightingale’s Code)

We Walk the Line (pdf) A rambler’s guide to the Dylans, Bob and Thomas (expanded form of a lecture originally given at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea)

Bow Down to Her on Sunday ‘To Ramona’ and the Tarot (originally published in Judas! magazine)

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