Patti Smith Covers Bob Dylan At Nobel Ceremony

The Nobel Prize ceremony was held today in Stockholm, Sweden and featured Patti Smith performing a song by Bob Dylan. The ceremony saw Dylan, who was not in attendance, honored with the Nobel Prize In Literature.

The first American to be awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize In Literature since Toni Morrison in 1993, the Nobel Prize committee praised the 75-year-old Dylan as having given “back to the language of poetry its elevated style lost since the Romantics. Not to sing of eternities, but to speak of what was happening around us as if the oracle of Delphi were reading the evening news.” Accompanied by an orchestra, Smith chose to cover Dylan’s well-known composition “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” She stumbled on the a portion of the lyrics and was forced to restart part of the song while admitting she was “nervous.”

The entire ceremony is available via this link. Smith’s performance begins around the 1:03:00 mark.