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Michael Gray is brilliant on Dylan's use of nursery rhyme for under the red sky. Here's a little bit (actually a lot) of him on Handy Dandy - I've cut and pasted it from nellie.
Michael Gray
In Handy Dandy, one of the best tracks on Under the Red Sky, Dylan takes some of the inherently magical language deployed in a nursery rhyme riddle, to which the solution is merely “an egg”, and allows it freer rein on its mystical level. The riddle goes like this:
“In marble walls as white as milk / Lined with a skin as soft as silk / Within a fountain crystal clear / A golden apple doth appear. / No doors there are to this stronghold, / Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.”
Re-occupied by the lyric of Handy Dandy, the numinous charge of this language is retained and extended in Dylan’s:
“He got that clear crystal fountain / He got that soft silky skin / He got that fortress on the mountain / With no doors, no windows so no thieves can break in.”
He does a great thing here. It is the same side to Dylan’s genius that we encounter when, time and again, he takes a phrase from the Bible, cuts to its core and colloquialises it. (In fact there is a biblical connection here: the nursery rhyme itself echoes a passage from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, as Dylan would certainly have known.
In Matthew 6:19–22, Christ’s words are given as these:
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
This is reiterated more briefly in Luke 12.) Paring the nursery rhyme down from six lines to four, Dylan strips away the old Classical Greekery – the marble walls, the golden apple – and transforms what is left from florid or portentous Victorian formalism into a poetry that combinesmystic potency with the rhythms and cadence of street-talk. So the vicarishly 19th century versifying tone of “Within a fountain crystal clear” is turned around (literally, with the last three words) into the street-smart pretend-inarticulacy of “He got that clear crystal fountain”; the purring poesy of “Lined with a skin as soft as silk” is clipped to the conversational “He got that soft silky skin”; and the conclusion “No doors there are to this stronghold / Yet thieves break in and steal the gold”, with its over-supervising “Yet” and its earthbound explanation for the break-in, is doubly transformed by Dylan:
The stronghold / fortress soars into the mountains, magnifying the scale of the scene and intensifying our sense of the isolation of this unspecified “He”. At the same time - by abolishing the “gold”, by making the break-in feared instead of fact, by increasing the check-list of security provisions and by the effect of that nervy rhythm in describing them (“he got that...he got that...he got that...”, which had been streeteasy before, now echoes as nervily as “no doors, no windows...no thieves”) – by all these touches, Dylan gives his conclusion a modern sensibility, evoking the paranoia at the heart of the re-written scenario, and without one supervisory word pointing up its lonely madness:
“He got that clear crystal fountain / He got that soft silky skin / He got that fortress on the mountain / With no doors, no windows so no thieves can break in.”
While dismantling the riddle of the rhyme, Dylan has given it the mystery of art.
In the same song, he picks up “a basket of flowers” from another nursery rhyme (quoted in discussing the album’s title-song, Under The Red Sky) and he snatches a stick from another riddle, one of the nursery rhyme riddles beginning “Riddle me riddle me ree”: in this case “Riddle me, riddle me ree / A little man in a tree / A stick in his hand / A stone in his throat” / (If you read me this riddle / I’ll give you a groat).
The great nursery rhyme experts Iona and Peter Opie say that a number of riddles have been based on the imagery of “a stick in his hand, a stone in his throat”, the solution being either (as here) a cherry or the hawthorn berry. Dylan drops this in passing, as the marvellously dodgy hero Handy Dandy is chatting someone up with “a stick in his hand and a pocket full of money.” It is one of those admirable, quiet, intelligent achievements of Dylan’s: he slips in this obscure, innocuous quotation; he re-writes it in such a way as to satisfy us by its twisted echo of the original – both catalogue “a stick in his hand” and a something else, and both mention money; and he puts his quotation and his re-write in the service of inventive depiction.
Handy Dandy, an utterly authentic Dylan character, as Paris, Texas as the narrator of Clothes Line Saga, as laconic as Hoagy Carmichael, strolls through this wonderful, good-natured song both enigmatically and cinematically. As he finishes his drink, gets up from the table and says “OK boys I’ll see you tomorrow”, we realise that there’s a final parallel between the riddle-me-ree verse and what Dylan has done with it: the central figure in each demands to be explained. Dylan’s is the better riddle.
The listener’s “Who is this?” goes unanswered, but dissatisfaction is counter-balanced by the sheer pleasure offered by this pay-off line: a fourfold pleasure, coming from savouring the image evoked, the words chosen, the demands these make so gleefully upon the singer’s skill in timing their delivery and Dylan’s absolute success in meeting those demands. All these points, about the pictures you get from the song and about the pleasures of the words and of their high-wire delivery, are met also in this one confidently invented, supremely free-form line: “Sitting with a girl named Nancy in a garden feelin’ kind of lazy”.
The song’s rhythms writhe so enjoyably: the overall framework proceeds at so stately a pace, made the more ocean-linerish by the richness of sound of Dylan’s voice and Al Kooper’s organwork; yet within this Dylan moves so restlessly, so variegatedly, as he surveys his chameleonic hero: one who seems a different person in every brief encounter, so that “he”, “you”, “she” and “Nancy” seem to multiply, giving us refracted passing glimpses of people and conversation, all sunlit for a moment and then gone again, all with their own daubs of obdurate disorder, vulnerability, darkness and hope. Each fragment possesses a different rhythm of speech, to which Dylan’s singing is superbly alert.
Ray Davies or John Sebastian might have devised the line lauded earlier, the luxuriantly unfurling Handy Dandy, sitting with a girl named Nancy in a garden feeling kind of lazy” (either might be the unconscious influence behind it). No-one but Dylan could paint this onto the same canvas as so many other cadences and contrasting modes of speech.
There is the intimate, inquisitorial brevity of the conversation which begins with the nursery rhyme about what little boys and little girls are made of (slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails...sugar and spice and all things nice), adultising it into darker colloquialisms about inner being: “You’ll say “What are you made of ?” / He’ll say “Can you repeat what you say?” / You’ll say “What are you afraid of ?” / He’ll say “Nuthin’: neither ’live nor dead”.” As we “overhear” this drifting across to us on beguiling waves of music, we are not so charmed that we do not pick up the prevarication and bragging on our hero’s part.
It is, furthermore, a moment at which Dylan uses a nursery rhyme from within a fairytale – and uses it brilliantly, to paint in the right psychic backdrop against which to pick out that hollow bragging. The rhyme, the one that begins “Fee, fie, fo, fum / I smell the blood of an Englishman”, is of course spoken by the giant in the fairytale Jack And The Beanstalk. The giant’s next line is the one Dylan so niftily puts into the mouth of Handy Dandy: “Be he ’live or be he dead / I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” It too proves a hollow boast, of course: the giant loses in the fight with brave little everyman Jack. Dylan echoes that “Be he ’live or be he dead” so closely in Handy Dandy’s “Nuthin’: neither ’live nor dead” that he repeats the slight awkwardness of diction noticeable in the giant’s remark, such that in each case you cannot quite decide whether it’s an overtly foreshortened ‘’live’ or a more slippery half-swallowed “alive”.
There is a further strength and harmony in Dylan’s use of Jack And The Beanstalk, a tale Dylan alluded to in such a different way in 1964’s I Shall Be Free No.10 (and again, in passing, in the phrase “swap that cow” in Tarantula). It contributes to a main theme of the album in being another powerful parable about the need to journey towards maturity, like the fairytale The Goose Girl and the nursery rhyme My Mother Said, which Dylan draws on in his “blind horse” image on the album’s title song. Like them, Jack And The Beanstalk deals with the child’s dilemma caught between its early need for parental love and guidance (“instruction”, in the terminology of the book of Proverbs) and the eventual desirability of trusting oneself and moving towards independence: Jack plays his hunch, charged with the task of taking his cow to market to get a good price; his mother ridicules his folly in swapping the cow for a supposedly magical bean; Jack faces the consequences, and in the end beats the giant. (“What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big”, as Dylan sings elsewhere.) Jack proves wiser than his mother, arguably through faith, centred upon faith in himself. It is a fairytale Bruno Bettelheim scrutinises in detail along these lines in his pioneering book The Uses Of Enchantment, and a classic example of the humane inner importance of the genre.
To return to Dylan’s distinctive dexterity with rhythms and modes of speech, there’s the switch from the calm and patience with which he spreads the child’s comfort-food over the 11 syllables of “Handy Dandy, just like sugar and candy” to the apparent clipped brevity of the line that follows – apparent because this line too is 11 syllables – in which the grown-up’s comfort-food is cynically provided instead: “Handy Dandy: pour ’im another brandy”.
And there is the joyous, acrobatic horde of syllables that comes streaming past us at some point in every verse. As well as lazing around with Nancy (a 24-syllable line, since Dylan makes the word “la-zy” into a lazy “la-za-a-ay”), there is also the technical wizardry of the line in which we get a quick-fire narrative list of what the hero does, ending with the slow drawl of his remark: “He finishes his drink, he gets up from the table, he says “OK boys, I’ll see ya tamarro-o-ow”.” (26 syllables as Dylan delivers it). Best of all, there is the playful self-reflexive joke of the singer having to hurry to fit in the preposterously long “He’ll say “Darlin’ tell me the truth: how much time I got?” She’ll say “You got all the time in the world, honey”.” Imagine anyone but Dylan achieving the necessary timing and phrasing here. Not possible.
For all this audacity, all its refreshing sunlit glimpses – for all its authenticity as a Dylan song – it is one people do not altogether embrace. The chorus is to blame. No-one likes a line such as “Handy Dandy, just like sugar and candy” (partly because of its tiresome tautology). It is there because it is part of the song’s traditional baggage, and Dylan leaves it in because he is feeling kind of lazy.
Handy Dandy is a game and a rhyme. The game is one in which a small object is juggled from hand to hand and then the rhyme is said as you are challenged to guess which hand it is in. The rhyme is one of those which, like Humpty Dumpty, has a Scandinavian equivalent and is of a type that has close equivalents all over north Europe. In some cases what seems a nonsense rhyme in one language (“Jeck og Jill” in Danish) makes sense in another.
Some may result from long oral traditions, others from direct translations. This one is so old that it was already known before the creator of Piers Plowman, William Langland, wrote of “his handidandi” in 1362. Variants include “Handy dandy, riddledy ro / Which hand will you have, high or low?”; “Handy pandy, Sugary candy / Which will you have?” and “Handy-dandy, Jack-a-dandy / Which good hand will you have?”
(There is also a rhyme, not associated with the game, that Pope and Carey alluded to when attacking the syrupy poetry of their contemporary Ambrose Philips: “Handy spandy, Jack-a-Dandy / Loves plum cake and sugar candy / He bought some at a grocer’s shop / And out he came, hop, hop, hop, hop.” A variant begins “Namby pamby Jack-a-Dandy”, and “Namby pamby” was Pope and Carey’s nickname for Philips. Not that these antecedents improve Dylan’s chorus one jot, jot, jot.)
The same rhyme was quoted by George Chapman (now best known for his great translation of Homer) in his play The Blinde Begger of Alexandria in 1598: “handy dandy prickly prandy, which hand will you haue?”, and is referred to in this crucial speech in King Lear, by Lear himself: “Handy dandy, prickly prandy...What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes without eyes” – or, as someone once put it, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” – “Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief ?” (Another Dylanesque question, this.)
Lear’s speech here is part of the scene described by Hugh Haughton in The Chatto Book Of Nonsense Poetry as having:
“as vivid a place in the history of nonsense as in that of madness. The dialogue is shot through with queer, garbled, oracular language, and shifts back and forth between reason and madness, pathos and absurdity. It’s not only the most vivid representation of the fool in literature, but in its vision of violent social upheaval and broken authority suggests that through the language of madness and adopted madness the characters make touch with truths and feelings outside the pale of their normal language. What they say in their terrible crisis makes sense...but it takes a route that zigzags giddily across the border with nonsense.”
Stripped of the Shakespearean tragedy’s pain, more Edward Lear than King Lear, Dylan’s Handy Dandy too gives us broken sound-bites that make no sense yet make perfect sense, and glimpses of characters who challenge each other with crazy truths, as it takes us on a route that zigzags giddily across the border with nonsense. The discomforting banality of its chorus aside, it is a sustained, successful work in which well-hewn writing interlocks with a bravura vocal performance, making for a warm, humourous – often black-humourous – hymn of celebration to human quirkiness and flexibility.
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title song with it's lovely guitar licks, handy dandy got nice bridge, 2x2 got great crosby backing and tv talkin' song is catchy, in itself.
