All the Tired Horses

Bob Dylan creates meaning through repetition.

Bob Dylan with his chickens. Photograph by John Cohen.

It’s perverse, I know. Of all the Bob Dylan songs I could have chosen, I picked this one: a song that has fewer than twenty words in total, none of which are actually sung by Bob Dylan.

If I were picking favourites, this one wouldn’t make it. But there’s something about it, something mysterious and alluring. It seems to dangle, like much of Dylan’s work, the promise of revelation. When I heard a snippet on the radio last year – it was selected by the artist Peter Doig on an episode of Desert Island Discs – I couldn’t get it out of my head for weeks. Months, even.

It’s a peculiar song, certainly, and it’s the first track on a peculiar album. When Self Portrait was released in 1970, the critic Greil Marcus began his famous review in Rolling Stone by asking “What is this shit?” And though the appraisal these days tends to be more generous, the album is undoubtedly mixed. But this song, well, this one is worth hearing.

Let’s leave the few words aside for a moment, and focus on the music. It’s lovely, right? The trio of singers – Hilda Harris, Albertine Robinson, and Maeretha Stewart – begin a cappella. They sing two lines, then repeat them. At that point, they’re joined by a simply-strummed acoustic guitar, then a chorus of strings, and finally an organ.

The music rises. The strings are lush and shimmering. They drift in, then out; the organ soars above them, then falls back. The sound keeps evolving. That’s the work of the strings, principally: they develop and change as the song goes on, contrasting with the endless repetition of the vocals.

By filling the space between each iteration of the song’s two lines – a space in which the singers merely hum – the strings also create a sense of balance. They stop the song from limping, allowing all of the musical drama to happen between the lines, as it were.

And those lines?

All the tired horses in the sun
How'm I supposed to get any riding done? Hmm

That’s all.

So, what on earth is happening here? What is a listener meant to glean from these sixteen-odd words? I’m not certain, but I’ll give it a go.

The first thing you could say, I suppose, is that the two lines are quite different in tone. That’s how they seem to me, anyway. The first is a bucolic image: tired horses, perhaps lying down in the sunshine. That seems like a good thing, right? But the second line is framed as a complaint: how can I go riding if the horses are tired?

Now, I don’t know much about horse riding, but to me that sounds a little unconvincing. Surely if a horse is tired or even lying down you can just encourage it to get up. Horses are famous for their stamina, right? And these ones are just resting on a warm day, so far as we can tell. They’re not on their last legs. So is this more of an excuse than a genuine complaint? Is the rider looking for a reason not to ride?

Or is it neither of these things? Could the lines be more lighthearted altogether, like: How am I supposed to get my paperwork done on such a beautiful day? The horses are resting in the sunshine and the singer (or singers) can’t bring themselves to disturb them.

Maybe.

But all of this is making the assumption that the lines are literal rather than metaphorical, that the horses are actually horses and that riding means riding. That’s a big assumption. A less literal reading might suggest something like this: How am I supposed to do something productive with my time when everyone else is just lazing around enjoying themselves?

That’s possible too.

As so often with a Bob Dylan line, the words point in various directions. And since these lines are repeated over and over throughout the song – fourteen times in total – it’s hard not to get tangled up in all the possibilities.

Here’s another one:

When you hear the song, rather than read it, one of the words is ambiguous. Is it riding or is it, in fact, writing? Have another listen. To me, it definitely sounds like ‘writing’ the first time, then it sounds more like ‘riding’ the second.

So what would it suggest if that were true? And does it have any connection to the fact that ‘All the Tired Horses’ opens an album consisting mostly of other people’s songs – i.e. ones he hasn’t written? Is this, really, just a big joke?

Frankly, I haven’t the faintest idea. But this is what a Dylan song does if you allow it to: It nudges you one way then the other, and leaves you, often, uncertain.

What I do know is that this an incantatory song, and that what meaning it has emerges from its repetition. The bucolic, restful image of horses in summer; then stagnation, failure, and complaint. Round and round it goes, even beyond the confines of the song, which fades both out and in. It exists beyond that part the listener hears. It’s possible to imagine it going on and on, unceasing.

Is that a comforting thought or a horrifying one? Or must it, necessarily, be both?

The first line of this song has been used by other artists at least twice. Once, by the Native American painter T.C. Cannon, whose painting of that title dates from a year or two after Dylan’s song was released.

More recently, the former US poet laureate Joy Harjo wrote a poem that took Cannon’s painting (and Dylan’s song, implicitly) as inspiration. It’s a poem about the experience of indigenous people in the United States, and specifically about monotony and fatigue. It’s about waiting for things to get better, and being always disappointed.

The poem, like the song, relies on repetition; more than half the lines consist of some variation on ‘ever’ and ‘forever’. There is a great weariness to it, a sense of something that cannot be escaped, a hopelessness. ‘Waiting and tired,’ she writes. ‘Tired of waiting.’

In 2022, Joy Harjo was made the first ever artist-in-residence at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.