The 1970s File Feature
Wigwam
Wigwam — Bob Dylan (1970) Note: This entry concerns "Wigwam" by Bob Dylan from the 1970 double album Self Portrait on Columbia Records. Dylan appeared on the…
01 The Story
Wigwam — Bob Dylan (1970)
Note: This entry concerns "Wigwam" by Bob Dylan from the 1970 double album Self Portrait on Columbia Records. Dylan appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 twice in distinct periods covered in this collection; "Wigwam" belongs to the controversial Self Portrait era of 1970, while "Mozambique" belongs to the celebrated Desire period of 1976.
"Wigwam" is one of the most unusual recordings in Bob Dylan's discography, a fully instrumental piece with hummed and wordless vocal melody carrying the entire front of the recording. Released on the double album Self Portrait in June 1970 on Columbia Records, the song was issued as a single and performed surprisingly well commercially, reaching number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spending several weeks on the chart. For a wordless hummed melody from one of the most celebrated lyricists in popular music history, this chart performance was a striking anomaly.
The Self Portrait album itself was among the most controversial releases of Dylan's career, arriving with enormous critical expectations following the widely celebrated John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline albums and then confounding virtually every expectation. The double album contained covers of other artists' songs, live recordings from the Isle of Wight festival, and studio pieces of varying character, including "Wigwam." Critics responded with bewilderment and often hostility; the famously dismissive review by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone magazine opened with the question "What is this shit?" and established a critical consensus of disappointment that has never entirely been revised.
The production of Self Portrait was handled by Bob Johnston, who had worked with Dylan on several previous albums including Blonde on Blonde and Nashville Skyline. The sessions for the album were spread across different locations and time periods, and the material was assembled with what critics characterized as unusual casualness. "Wigwam" was one of the studio-recorded originals that gave the album some claim to freshness, though its wordless character was itself read by some critics as Dylan declining the responsibilities of the lyricist role that had made him famous.
The song opens with a brass arrangement that evokes the marching band tradition, giving the piece a festive and slightly absurdist quality that contrasted sharply with the serious moral and poetic weight of most of Dylan's celebrated work. Dylan's hummed vocal melody sits above an ensemble arrangement that includes strings and horns, with the overall effect suggesting a holiday or parade, something public and collective rather than intimate and personal. The emotional register is cheerful in a way that Dylan's work rarely allowed itself to be.
Despite the critical drubbing received by Self Portrait as a whole, "Wigwam" managed to find a commercial audience as a single. The chart performance can be attributed partly to the commercial goodwill and curiosity that surrounded anything bearing Dylan's name in 1970, a year when his cultural stature remained enormous even as his artistic direction was becoming harder to read. Radio programmers and record buyers who purchased "Wigwam" as a single were making a different kind of commercial choice than those who bought a Dylan album expecting lyrical revelation, purchasing instead a piece of pleasant, lightly eccentric pop music.
The 45 rpm single as a format served "Wigwam" better than the album context, where it sat within the sprawling and inconsistent double album and could easily be lost among material of varying quality. As a standalone single, the song's cheerful melody and its novelty value as a wordless performance by the era's most celebrated lyricist gave it a distinct identity. Jukebox and radio plays exposed it to audiences who might not have sought out the album, and its relative accessibility compared to Dylan's more demanding work made it an easy commercial proposition.
Self Portrait has undergone some reassessment in subsequent decades, with the 2013 release of Another Self Portrait as part of the Bootleg Series providing alternate takes and unreleased material that suggested the album sessions contained more fully realized work than the official release had represented. This reassessment has not transformed critical consensus about Self Portrait itself, but it has given listeners more context for understanding what Dylan and his collaborators were attempting. "Wigwam," in this revisionist light, reads as a piece of deliberate whimsy from an artist exercising his right to refuse the expectations placed upon him, a point that has become more sympathetically received with historical distance from the moment of original disappointment.
02 Song Meaning
Meaning and Interpretation of "Wigwam"
"Wigwam" presents an interpretive challenge unlike almost anything else in the Dylan catalog. Where Dylan's celebrated compositions offer dense lyrical texture for critics and listeners to unpack, "Wigwam" offers a wordless hummed melody above an arrangement that evokes marching bands, holiday parades, and communal festivity. The absence of words is not an absence of meaning, but it does shift the interpretive burden entirely onto tone, musical association, and context rather than language.
The most immediate meaning of "Wigwam" within its release context was probably strategic rather than purely artistic. By 1970, Bob Dylan had spent the better part of a decade under the pressure of being regarded as the voice of a generation, the most important lyricist in popular music, the prophet whose every verbal utterance carried social and cultural significance. This pressure was exhausting and distorting, and Dylan had been visibly resisting it since his retreat from touring following his 1966 motorcycle accident. A wordless song released at the height of critical anticipation was, on one level, a direct refusal of the lyrical expectation, a demonstration that Dylan could choose not to say anything and still release commercial recordings.
The musical content itself communicates something, regardless of the absence of verbal content. The brass-heavy arrangement and the marching quality of the rhythm evoke public celebration, collective festivity, the town square rather than the bedroom or the coffee shop where most of Dylan's important work had originated emotionally. The hummed melody is warm rather than melancholic, social rather than private. If Dylan was refusing the role of prophet and sage, "Wigwam" proposed instead the role of the jester or the parade participant, someone whose relationship to the public was celebratory rather than oracular.
The title "Wigwam" adds a layer of gentle playfulness that reinforces this interpretation. The word carries associations with childhood, with games and imaginary spaces, with a pre-adult sense of play that the serious critical culture surrounding Dylan in 1970 had no framework for taking seriously. Dylan's use of such a title for a pop single released at the peak of his cultural prestige could be read as a joke at the expense of the critical apparatus that had been erected around him, an invitation to notice how absurd it was to expect spiritual significance from a man who might simply want to hum a melody and play with his band.
The relationship between "Wigwam" and the broader Self Portrait project is essential to its meaning. The album was widely understood as a deliberate act of artistic self-sabotage or self-redirection, an attempt to shed the accumulated weight of Dylan's cultural identity and exist more simply as a musician who enjoyed singing other people's songs and making unpretentious recordings. "Wigwam" within this context is the album's most extreme gesture in that direction: not just a cover of someone else's work, not just a casual recording of a lesser original, but a complete abdication of the verbal identity that had made Dylan who he was in the cultural imagination.
Whether "Wigwam" succeeds as music is a question that listeners continue to answer differently. It is charming, light, and deliberately modest in a way that suits its emotional purpose. Its commercial chart performance demonstrated that Dylan's audience was large and loyal enough to follow him even into this territory, or at least curious enough about what he was doing there to purchase the single and find out. The song remains one of the more puzzling and interesting footnotes in a catalog full of moments that resist simple classification.
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