“Song for Bob Dylan” is a song written by David Bowie for his 1971 album Hunky Dory. The song parodies Bob Dylan’s 1962 homage to Woody Guthrie, “Song to Woody”. Yet while Dylan opens with “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song,” Bowie addresses Dylan by his birth name saying, “Hear this, Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you.”
In the song, Bowie also describes Bob Dylan’s voice “like sand and glue” which is similar to how Joyce Carol Oates described it upon first hearing Dylan: “When we first heard this raw, very young, and seemingly untrained voice, frankly nasal, as if sandpaper could sing, the effect was dramatic and electrifying
