‘I am so nervous’: Patti Smith blanks out in Nobel tribute to absent Bob Dylan

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US singer Patti Smith covers her face when performing 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' by absent 2016 Nobel literature laureate Bob Dylan during the 2016 Nobel prize award ceremony. Photo: AP

Published: 1:35pm, 11 Dec 2016Updated: 9:38pm, 11 Dec 2016

A very nervous Patti Smith initially stumbled through A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall in Stockholm on Saturday in a performance given to mark Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize for literature.

Making the award, Horace Engdahl, a Swedish literary historian and critic and member of the Swedish academy that awards the prize, responded to international criticism of the choice of a popular lyricist as recipient.

Engdahl said that when Dylan’s songs were heard first in the 1960s, “all of a sudden much of the bookish poetry in our world felt anaemic”.

The academy’s choice of Dylan, Engdahl said in Swedish, “seemed daring only beforehand and already seems obvious”.

And it was an unconventional prize-giving night in more ways than one. Dylan’s failure to attend the august gathering in Stockholm meant that Smith, the American singer most famous for her 1975 album, Horses, and the hit song Because the Night, was attending as his proxy.

The occasion proved too much for the singer, 69, who faltered after a few verses. Forgetting the lyric “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”, she apologised quietly but profusely to the jewel-bedecked audience and asked if she could start that section of the song again.