David Yaffe says Dylan recycled “a motif from a Memphis Minnie blues” with “The Levee’s Gonna Break.” Recycling is a relevant word when it comes to the constant identical rhyming found in the song. Each verse begins with a duplicate rhyme, “break”/”break”, “day”/”day”, “new”/”new” etc. The word “head” following “bed”/”bed” in the third to last verse offers an example:
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I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I ain’t got enough room to even raise my head
I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I ain’t got enough room to even raise my head
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Dylan loves to thieve. We all know that. But Shakespeare did, too. Most of his plays are created out of other sources. He may very well have plundered a contemporary’s The Taming of a Shrew to write his own The Taming of the Shrew. But it’s what he did with previous sources that matters. Theft, of the kind that involves lifting and then rewriting material from sources, is duplicating followed by invention. Dylan mirrors this in “Crash On The Levee” with duplicating rhymes followed by full rhyming words. “If I keep on writing the duplicate rhyme is gonna break, if I keep on writing the duplicate rhyme is gonna break . . .”
Here’s an outtake live performance audio version of the song with Dylan and The Band: