Bob Dylan – Page 3 – The Celestial Monochord

Hollis Brown’s South Dakota

Hollissmall

When Bob Dylan was 13 years old, one of the century’s worst epidemics of black stem rust struck the upper midwest — particularly North and South Dakota and Minnesota. Up to 75% of the wheat harvest was lost to the disease, which blackens the crop with a powdery, sooty fungus. The economic consequences were severe, and the incident became legendary within the science of plant pathology. There’s no way young Bob Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota wouldn’t have heard about it.

But there were plenty of other diseases to blacken your crops, or kill your animals or you. I’m not an expert in any of them. Ergot can blacken wheat, barley, and other cereals and causes “bad blood” in cattle and humans — convulsions, gangrene, derangement. An invisible fungus in a common grass leads to tall fescue toxicosis, with grotesque symptoms like “fescue foot” and nasty birthing problems. Maybe Bob had heard of such diseases as well.

Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is an exercise in empathy — its power is in the vividness of its vantage point within the head of a desperately bad-luck South Dakota farmer, and in the way the song dares you to turn away. Having lived in Minnesota for almost 20 years, or about as long as Dylan did before he moved to New York, and I can almost see how the young songwriter might have found the empathy to write such a convincing song.

Even in fairly cosmopolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul, farming is always a presence — to this day, grain mills and breweries (or their ruins) are lined up along the Mississippi River. They’re a constant reminder that the cold climate used to limit the viable crops to stuff you could grind or brew, plus animal feed — wheat, barley, oats, alfalfa, sorghum, various kinds of hay. When you fill your gas tank in Minnesota, you have a good chance of being reminded that farmers have more options today, such as President Bush’s switchgrass. Fully 200 of the nation’s 600 ethanol (“E-85”) gas pumps are in Minnesota.

A few years ago, a friend of mine moved from the University of Minnesota to New York — just like Dylan, you might say, only forty years later. On her first day in Manhattan, a shopkeeper mentioned the lack of rain, and my friend, forgetting herself, asked if the farmers upstate were suffering. The shopkeeper gave her a look as if she’d just evidenced a severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome.

But that awareness and empathy, which so animated Dylan’s “Hollis Brown” in 1964, has its limits. In fact, “Hollis Brown” is primarily about those limits. For that reason, it’s convenient for Minnesotans that the song is set next door, in South Dakota.

South Dakota’s leaders have worked to make the state’s economy, and perhaps its conscience, better insulated from the booms and busts of farm life. In 1980, South Dakota was in desperate financial straits and took action by eliminating all laws against usury. Citibank, among other credit card companies, moved operations to the state almost immediately, leading to an explosion of growth in Sioux Falls and, some say, to a lot of South Dakota farmers declaring bankruptcy.

I happened to hear “Hollis Brown” on the same day the South Dakota governor (born the very year of the black stem rust epidemic) signed the bill designed to ban almost all abortions in the state, and ultimately, to overturn Roe v. Wade nationwide. That’s what got me thinking about the song again. It seemed like yet another example of Dylan’s uncanny foresight that he set the song in South Dakota even though, in 1964, Mississippi played the role in folksong that South Dakota now seems eager to play.

Dylan got the melody of Hollis Brown from “Pretty Polly,” as Greil Marcus has pointed out. “Pretty Polly” is about a young man named Willie who murders his girlfriend for reasons which the song leaves completely unaddressed and which therefore seem to take on a menacing profundity. But as Rennie Sparks points out, at least one of Pretty Polly’s 16th-century sources explains the motive simply and without ambiguity: She was pregnant and Willie doesn’t want the birth to take place. At least partly, this is the origin of “Hollis Brown” — a story about the murder of a woman as a de facto abortion.

The best-known version of “Pretty Polly” (the version Rennie Sparks calls “cold as a cockroach”) was recorded by Dock Boggs in 1927. In 1963, Boggs was rediscovered by Mike Seeger who then recorded and traveled extensively with him. In 1993, Bob Dylan made a studio recording of “Hollis Brown” accompanied by Mike Seeger playing banjo in Dock Boggs’ very singular style. Really, the banjo part on the recording is basically just a sped-up version of Boggs’ “Pretty Polly.” The effect of the recording is to return “Hollis Brown” to its family tree, to explicitly situate it within its lineage.

In writing “Hollis Brown,” then, Dylan surely wasn’t looking ahead to 2006. He was looking back to the old Appalachian murder ballads, which the song so convincingly resembles. Marcus seems to claim the song was also inspired by a newspaper report of a mass murder in South Dakota, but I haven’t been able to track that down (Charles Starkweather?). Perhaps the more inspiring history took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota’s most notorious mass murder and part of the Indian Wars in which Minnesota also played an unfortunate role. Given the history of this South Dakota farm — where the buffalo no longer roam — I wonder if Hollis Brown and his family aren’t merely the most recent seven people to have died there.

It makes little sense to try to enlist “Hollis Brown” in a contemporary political fight. Or anyway, that’s simply not The Celestial Monochord’s schtick. Besides, the song is striking as an early hint of the full-blown poetic strategies Dylan was about to unleash — strategies that revolve around undecided meaning, meaning as an unfinished art for the listener to complete, meaning not as autocratic rule but as democratic process. To claim that “Hollis Brown” is somehow against South Dakota’s new abortion law is to pretty much miss the song entirely.

Still, it’s in the character of Dylan’s art to keep coming around, over and over, asserting itself in new contexts. I think this uncanny relevence comes from reaching as deep into empathy as he can, and from his willingness to share with us the work of meaning. Or, maybe the more you’re able to encounter the world with the past very much alive in you, the more you’re able to anticipate the future. Maybe this is why Dylan continues to mystify, particularly in America where memory is notoriously short and empathy often runs thin.

Editor’s Notes: The following is transcribed from the 1993 recording with Mike Seeger. Also, the coyote is the official state animal of South Dakota.

THE BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN

Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children and his cabin breaking down

You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
Your children are so hungry, man, that they don’t know how to smile

Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
You walk the floor and wonder why with every breath you breathe

The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
Is there anyone that knows, is there anyone that cares?

You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
Your empty pockets tell you that you ain’t a-got no friend

Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your wife’s screams are stabbin’ you like the dirty drivin’ rain

Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells

Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that’s hangin’ on the wall

Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that you’re holdin’ in your hand

There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven shots ring out like the ocean’s pounding roar

There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Somewheres in the distance there’s seven new people born

Beyond The Anthology

Banjo_camp_rancher

A reader has asked:

I only recently discovered the Harry Smith Anthology but I’m already obsessed. Any further recomendations?

What a question! For the past eight years or so, my musical and intellectual life has revolved around my own discovery of the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music compiled and designed by Harry Smith. You could say The Celestial Monochord’s own reason for being is to provide such “further recommendations.”

But I also hesitate to answer. Much of the energy and diversity in a Folk Revival (which is what’s happening today) seems to come from everybody struggling to find their own way. When I ask like-minded people how they found the old folk and blues music — and where they went from there — the answers almost always surprise me.

At the 2004 American Banjo Camp in Washington State, I met the guy pictured above (I can’t recall his name). He was a rancher from arid eastern Washington near the Idaho pan handle. Several campers listened as he told about the time he traded his much sought-after banjo — an old Gibson Mastertone — for seventeen tons of hay. We all laughed and told him he’d been bamboozled. When the laughing died down, he said, “Do you know what seventeen tons of hay cost?” We all conceded that indeed we did not.

Anyway, point is, this guy seemed like a truly authentic folk character — The Genuine Article. So I asked him how he got into playing the banjo, hoping he’d say it was a family tradition going back centuries. Instead, he said “Well, when I was a kid, I was very heavily into the Rolling Stones. And their liner notes said they owed it all to Muddy Waters. So I got some Muddy Waters albums, and that got me into Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton records, and that got me to Harry Smith and Dock Boggs, which got me into bluegrass and … well, twenty years later, here I am at Banjo Camp.”

You just never know.

I’m happy to list some of the places I’ve been, but I wouldn’t think of it as a road map. It’s mind-boggling how much stuff is out there today, and how many paths there are into and out of The Anthology.

THE ANTHOLOGY

Harry_smith

Once you’ve memorized The Anthology and scoured its liner notes, you may want even more supporting material.

Anthology of American Folk Music is an invaluable but out-of-print book from Oak Publications. I found a hard copy from an online bookseller, but this electronic version at Tower of Babel will also do nicely.

Volume 4 was released in 2000 by Revenant, where it promptly went out of print (which is why I wish Folkways had done this, as nothing goes out of print there). Smith had long planned this fourth volume, but his attention span expired. It’s wonderful — maybe you can find it used somewhere.

Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus. In a way, it’s a book-length argument that the spirit of The Anthology deeply animates Dylan’s vision — even more so AFTER he “went electric.” I think you need to know this book to go any further. It’s been renamed and revised, but I only know this first version.

When We Were Good: The Folk Revival by Robert Cantwell — especially Chapter Six, “Smith’s Memory Theater.” Cantwell’s writing is often dense and difficult (in a postmodern cultural studies kind of way) but if you can figure out what he’s saying, he’ll change your life. I’ve returned to this beautiful chapter again and again over the years.

Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith — Selected Interviews is for the serious Smith-head. It’s easy to forget that the highly honored and influential Anthology was put together by a border-line homeless weirdo whose main source of income was often small-time dope peddling. This collection of interviews is frustrating, hilarious, tedious, inspiring, illuminating. Mostly, it’s a sad reminder that Allen Ginsberg was right about what becomes of the best minds of his (and your) generation.

THOSE ANTHOLOGIZED

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Find out what ELSE the people on The Anthology recorded — that is, find out what Smith chose from to arrive at The Anthology. Here are my favorites so far.

The Carter Family: In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain. The fact that I laid out the cash for this Bear Family box set suggests how important I think the Carter Family is (it sure as hell doesn’t mean I’ve got the money to spend — you might want to go for some of the box sets put out by JSP instead). You know … sometimes I walk down a crowded street and am suddenly saddened, thinking “Most of these people don’t know about the Carter Family.”

The Complete Blind Willie Johnson and its liner notes. Johnson is a gospel musician, so the central themes of his work go back to African American slavery, and back through all of Western literature, and ultimately to Jewish slavery and the Torah. This may be why his artistry can seem to take on layer upon layer upon layer. It’s DEEP. Don’t screw around with any “selected” collection — go for the Complete.

The Complete Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas. Despite their wild differences, Thomas is like Willie Johnson in that a Great Theme gives his art a depth that opens up beneath you and swallows you up. Born less than a decade after the abolition of slavery, his theme is travel — the road’s promises of freedom and its ever-present threats of sudden terror.

Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years, 1963-1968. Boggs is like the greatest old Irish storyteller you’ll ever meet — you never know whether to laugh or cry. These years that Dock Boggs and Mike Seeger spent together have a mythic status in my mind — like Dylan and Guthrie at Greystone Hospital, or like Johannes Kepler at Tycho Brahe’s bedside. The difference is that Seeger made recordings.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford: Ballads, Banjo Tunes and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina. After many weeks of listening exclusively to this, I stood on the shore of Lake Superior and tried an impersonation of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. To my surprise, what came out was a terrible Lunsford, but a great Bob Dylan. I think not only Dylan’s voice, but his approach to imagery and meaning owes a large, mostly unrecognized debt to Lunsford.

Original Folkways Recordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, 1960-1962 documents one of the great moments of American music — Ralph Rinzler’s simultaneous rediscovery of The Anthology’s Clarence (Tom) Ashley, and his discovery of the young Doc Watson. The collection has the sound of music being reborn.

THE NEW LOST CITY RAMBLERS + ALAN LOMAX

Black_texicans

Reading a song as sheet music is like looking at a roadmap of a city, while hearing an actual recorded performance of a song is like visiting that city and eating its gumbo. That’s the big shift in which Harry Smith’s Anthology participated. Technology and imagination allowed The Anthology, The New Lost City Ramblers, and Alan Lomax to put the true sound of real folk music right into people’s ears — and it literally remade the world.

New Lost City Ramblers, 40 Years of Concert Performances. A great introduction to the Ramblers, with many stories told between songs, plenty of laughs, and brilliant musicianship. You can hear the guys grow to a venerable age right before your ears. Tracy Schwarz’s introductory comments about “I’ve Always Been a Rambler” are alone worth the price.

New Lost City Ramblers: The Early Years, 1958-1962. Selections from the Folkways albums before Tom Paley left the group. Particularly surprising for these Patron Saints of Oldtime is all the bluegrass they played so capably. Particularly amusing are all the bawdy and politically questionable songs such as “Sales Tax on the Women” and “Sal’s Got a Meatskin.”

Out Standing in Their Field: The New Lost City Ramblers Volume II, 1963-1973. Selections from the albums recorded with Tracy Schartz in the line-up. I love the ever-timely Roger Miller song “Private John Q,” the hilariously bad-news “Dear Okie,” John Cohen’s insanely shaggy shaggy-dog story “Automobile Trip Through Alabama,” and the worryingly moving Freudian parable “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.” For more on the Ramblers see The New Lost Times.

Southern Banjo Sounds
Solo Oldtime Country Music
Third Annual Fairwell Reunion. I carry around these CDs by founding Rambler Mike Seeger like the American President’s nuclear football — they’re never far from my side. Mike has done more than any other living person to make the music of The Anthology a living reality in the hearts and hands of people like us. Like the Ramblers themselves, Mike is not a nostalgic impersonator of old records — he’s very much a new thing, a creature of today and tomorrow.

The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler. A brilliant way to get a sense of what Alan Lomax preserved in his journeys through America, and during his McCarthy-era exile in Europe. A good third of these performances by longshoremen, patrons of taverns, and prisoners in work crews just don’t seem possible — they’re too beautiful and strange.

Deep River of Song: Black Texicans. The reason I choose these recordings of black Texans over all the other Lomax recordings I own is that they just happen to blow my mind so consistently. Lomax recordings have a startling immediacy — you feel like you’re there watching the thing get recorded, every time you hear it. If I could sit down with you and spin some disks, I might just start you off with Butter Boy’s freaky “Old Aunt Dinah.”

INHERITORS OF THE ANTHOLOGY

Aereoplain

It’s silly to list performers influenced by The Anthology, since just about everybody’s world has been transformed by it, whether they know it or not. But here’s a few people I happen to like, and who just seem to smell like Harry Smith — they have The Anthology and/or Lomax and/or the Ramblers written all over them.

There’s a vast universe of incredible musicians who perform in old folk styles. They are world-class masters of their instruments, but when you see them in concert, you might be one of only a dozen people in the audience. It’s insane, but … hey, at least they do requests. I once told Ken Perlman that I’ve given his brilliant “Northern Banjo” CD to friends as gifts a few times. He gave me a puzzled look and said, “Where do you get them?” Lord help us all. I’m also crazy about Tom, Brad, and Alice, Mac Benford, and local boys Spider John Koerner, Charlie Parr, and Lonesome Dan Kase. (These last three are all fine songwriters, but I think of them as oldtime bluesmen.)

Then there’s all the more popular (for better or worse) singer-songwriter acts who Smith-ites might like. Recordings I really like and tend to associate with the Anthology are Jolie Holland’s Escondida, Gillian Welch’s Time the Revelator and Revival, John Prine’s John Prine and Diamonds in the Rough, John Hartford’s albums, the great and unavailable Aereo-Plain and the very strange Mark Twang, Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, and The Handsome Family’s Through the Trees.

Also, for all that can be said about Bob Dylan’s debt to The Anthology, Alan Lomax, and The New Lost City Ramblers, I think Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong are the Dylan albums that make the point most clearly. They’re also among Dylan’s best, it seems to me, and like his first album, they’re heard far too rarely.

Careless Love

The first version of Careless Love I knew was the one Dock Boggs did, recorded by Mike Seeger thirty-eight years ago today, just in time for Valentine’s Day 1968.

This was near the end of Dock’s life, and so near the end of his second music career — his “Revival” career. As I’ve discussed at length before, Mike Seeger writes that Dock loved this second career but also found it unsettling in some ways. It apparently brought back memories of his misspent youth and its moonshine-fueled violence. Everything Boggs played in this second career could be heard as confronting this past, and as exorcising his decades working the infernal coal mines.

Careless Love is a fine example. To match Dock’s high, raspy, pinched voice, you’d have to sing and sob at the same time. Though the tempo is so fast — and accelerating — that Dock can barely get some of the lines sung clearly, he delivers every word as if speaking spontaneously. Like all great singers, his song feels immediate and new:

Oh when my money you could blow
Oh when my money you could blow, Lord Lord
When my money you could blow
You was always hanging around my door

I wish to the Lord this train would run
I wish to the Lord this train would run, Lord Lord
I wish to the Lord this train would run
To carry me back where I come from

Oh now my money’s all spent and gone
Oh now my money’s all spent and gone, Lord Lord
Oh now my money’s all spent and gone
You pass my door and sing a song

But it’s not one of Dock’s graveyard songs — it’s a party blues tune in good old open-G banjo tuning. In Boggs, I see the cliche of the theater’s masks of tragedy and comedy taking on a new life — his music projects so many intense facial expressions.

Into this mix, add the fact that Dock apparently learned this song — and many others — from recordings of female blues singers of the 1920’s. Oddly and movingly, Dock retains the original gender of the narrator:

Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes
Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes, Lord Lord
Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes
With a banded hat and a suit of clothes

Oh place this ring upon his hand
Oh place this ring upon his hand, Lord Lord
Oh place this ring upon his hand
To show the world he’s a married man

Oh take this ring and put it on
Oh take this ring and put it on, Lord Lord
Oh take this ring and put it on
And think of me when I’m gone

If I had listened to what momma said
If I had listened to what momma said, Lord Lord
If I had listened to what momma said
I’d been at home in momma’s bed

Given Careless Love’s subject — people gathering around when you’re doing well, dumping you when you’re down — there’s no wonder the song has drawn the attention of a lot of professional musicians, from Elvis and Janis Joplin to Pete Seeger and Dave Van Ronk. Since discovering the song through Boggs in 1999, at least two other versions have crept into my CD collection. Both are unbelievable in entirely separate ways — like Boggs’ version, they make me want to sit you down and say “Listen to THIS!”

One is on the first bluegrass LP every released, also recorded by Mike Seeger. It’s by Snuffy Jenkins, who inspired several generations of three-finger banjo players, including Earl Scruggs. His version is outlandishly cheerful and skilled, a virtuoso piece that Seeger describes as “much influenced by jazz, as if he were playing a trumpet or jazz guitar.” Follow the links above to get the Smithsonian CDs that the Jenkins and Boggs versions come from (I highly recommend them) or get the individual tracks from Smithsonian Global Sound.

The other version in my CD collection is a duet between Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, who probably know a thing or two about careless love. The track is available only as a bootleg. In this version, Cash and Dylan are mostly screwing around. Dylan seems initially lost until Cash comes to the rescue by feeding Dylan a verse he can sink his teeth into as a tool for improvisation — a reason for the recording to exist:

Cash: Love, oh love, oh careless love
Gimme some love, oh love, oh careless love
Love, oh love, oh careless love
Won’t you see what your love has done to me

Cash: Sing one now, Bob.

Dylan: Hmmm. Give me a verse.

Cash: I pass my window. [pause] Pass your window. [pause] Pass your window.

Dylan: Pass your window by.
I pass your door and your window too.
I pass your door and your window too.
Yes, I’m still very much in love with you.

Cash: Well, I pass your window, pass your door
You pass my window, pass my door
Woman, man, you pass by my window and you pass my door
But you’ll never get by my forty-four

Cash: Sing one now, Bob.

Dylan: Well, I pass your door, I pass your gate.
Well, you pass my door and you pass my gate
Yes, you pass my door and you pass my gate
But you won’t pass by my thirty-eight.

And so on. Louis Black describes the recording fairly well:

They do an overly long version of “Careless Love” … One of the lines refers to a gun that Cash identifies first as a .44 caliber, then Dylan labels it a .38, and then a .45. By the end of the song, Cash has identified it as a .30-ought-6 (a rifle rather than a pistol). At one point, however, in order to hit a rhyme, Cash calls it a .41 (which doesn’t exist). He’s so pleased with this that, just a bit later, he again refers to a .41, and you can hear the absolute delight at this silliness in his voice. Especially noticeable throughout the recordings is just how sweet and lovely Dylan’s singing and harmonies with Cash are.

Don’t Plug In — Bluegrass and the Folk Revival

(Gibson ETB-150 Model Electric Tenor Banjo, 1940)

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970’s and 80’s, I knew some lovers and practitioners of bluegrass music. They all loved rock n’ roll too, and seemed a lot more worried about electricity running microwave ovens than musical instruments. I remember laughter at the thought that folkies had turned on Bob Dylan for “going electric.”

Still, I also remember sharing with bluegrassers a special affection, even reverence, for the acoustic quality of bluegrass instruments. I’m reminded of John Hartford’s drawn-out, playfully grandiose introduction to his tongue-twister “Tater Tate and Allen Mundy”:

Bluegrass music a-playin’ in the park
Bluegrass music picking way past dark
Bluegrass music, it don’t butt in
Don’t need an amp and don’t plug in

I thought of all this last night while reading the introduction to Neil Rosenberg’s “Bluegrass: A History.” In a section entitled “Bluegrass — What Is It?”, Rosenberg insists on a paradox. Bluegrass has always been a commercial and professional form designed for radio and records, and its sound was shaped by a 20th-century electric invention: the microphone. Nevertheless, the non-electric stringed instruments of bluegrass are usually the first thing mentioned by its followers when trying to describe the genre:

… [as] can be seen from a joke told by Ricky Skaggs … “How many bluegrass musicians does it take to change a light bulb? One, and three to complain because it’s electric!” [taken from Rosenberg’s book]

I’ve finally begun reading Rosenberg’s history of bluegrass because, over the past year or so, I’ve become aware of a lot of such paradoxes and surprises. That’s what good histories are always for — “the past” always turns out to be nothing like the way our presumptions lead us to believe.

For example, I’ve recently realized how important the Folk Revival of the 1950’s and 60’s was to the survival of bluegrass. The first-ever bluegrass LP was released in 1957 by Folkways Records. It was recorded and compiled by Folk Revival future-heavyweight Mike Seeger, and its liner notes mark the first use in print of the word “bluegrass” to refer to a genre of music.

The author of these liner notes, Ralph Rinzler, would eventually found the Smithsonian’s annual Festival of American Folklife in Washington D.C. — but first, he helped revive Bill Monroe’s stalled career by becoming his manager. Some of Monroe’s new band members were soon to be Northern “citybillies” who first encountered bluegrass in Greenwich Village coffee shops or at folk music concerts on college campuses.

This surprises me, both comin’ and goin’. On the one hand, today’s officianados of “Old Time” music think of Mike Seeger and his New Lost City Ramblers as champions of authentic folk alternatives to post-WWII commercial inventions like rock n’ roll and bluegrass. It is definitely not widely known in the Old Time community that Seeger, Rinzler, and Alan Lomax helped rescue bluegrass from obscurity (if not oblivion) by forcefully asserting its legitimacy as an authentic American folk genre.

On the other hand, it’s surprising coming from the other direction, too. An acquaintance from West Virginia once expressed suspicion about the fact that I, a Chicago native, have an intense interest in “her” music. From what I gathered, she might have been surprised to learn that Monroe’s invention only dates from the mid-1940’s, and that its commercial prospects nearly died a decade after they were born. Not only the finances, but the very values and identity of bluegrass were shaped by us Northern revivalists. Rosenberg writes:

Until the mid-fifties the acoustic aspect of bluegrass was not unique within country music, and in that sense the use of acoustic instruments in bluegrass is a historical accident. But because it was performed on such instruments, particularly the antique five-string banjo, it was virtually the only form of contemporary country music acceptable to the folk boom of the late fifties and early sixties, where electric instruments were considered inauthentic and symbols of the alienation of mass culture. Through the folk boom bluegrass gained new audiences and recognition as a distinct musical form [that is, became thought of as “bluegrass”]. Today the insistence upon acoustic instruments has become a philosophical position.

By the way; thinking about bluegrass and the folk revival, it’s interesting that other branches of country music in the post-War years dealt directly with social problems facing southern expatriate “urban hillbillies,” such as adultery, divorce, depression, and alcoholism. But bluegrass chose to deal with these same pressures by evoking feelings of an alternative — and idealized — place and time. Rosenberg:

Because the content of the bluegrass repertoire is so often clearly symbolic (rather than directly oriented toward current concerns), it is more accessible to people from very different cultural milieux who relate to the music as an art form, enjoying it as many enjoy opera sung in languages they do not comprehend.

I may report more about these and other matters as I get further into “Bluegrass: A History”.

U.S. Government Names Garbanzo “Dylan”

This morning, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service sent out a press release announcing that it has developed a new variety of chickpea. Like your ex-girlfriend’s clubby little brother, the pea will be named “Dylan.” I think they should name the chickpea “Zimmerman” and let the chickpea name itself Dylan.

In any case, the press release says:

Dylan grows to about 15 inches high, forms fern-like leaves, and reaches maturity around 106 days after planting, depending on climactic conditions.

I never thought of it that way before, but now that you mention it …

Billy The Bum

Child_with_crutches

About 15 years ago, a friend of mine wanted to cite an example of a bad John Prine song, so he chose Billy The Bum, calling it “a shambles of a song.” At the time, it seemed like a good example to me, mostly because the song’s shameless sentimentality made me cringe. But I’ve gone through a lot since then.

Around 1999, after I’d pretty much memorized the Anthology of American Folk Music, I was starving for more blues and hillbilly recordings from the 1920’s. So I sought out recordings by many of the same performers Harry Smith had put in his collection. And there, beyond the Anthology, were many astonishing surprises for which the Anthology had not really prepared me.

Chief among them, initially, was how often these performers had recorded extremely sentimental 19th century “parlor songs,” as I call them. These earnest, stiff numbers told tales full of pathos about drowning sailors, dying orphans, childhood cottages never seen again. Maybe Harry Smith had mostly ignored them because they weren’t “folk songs” in a certain sense — most were relatively new compositions from the late 1800’s, widely sold as sheet music for middle-class homes. In the late 1920’s, white folk musicians made sound recordings of them for the first time, their original copyright status long forgotten.

Initially, I was a little impatient with them — a bit embarrassed, disappointed, and amused by their commercialism and their hokiness. But after listening closely to dozens of them, researching the origins of several of them, and having a few conversion experiences with them (I guess you’d say), I’ve come to love them. There’s Charlie Poole’s “Baltimore Fire”:

It was on a silver falls by a narrow
That I heard a cry I ever will remember
The fire sent and cast its burning embers
On another faded city of our land

Fire! Fire! I heard the cry
On every breeze that passes by
All the world was one sad cry of pity
Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling loud to Heaven for aid
While the fire in ruin was laying
Fair Baltimore, our beautiful city

There’s Buell Kazee’s “If You Love Your Mother”:

In a lonely graveyard many miles away
Lies your own dear mother slumbering ‘neath the clay
Or have you forgotten all her tears and sighs
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

She is waiting for you in that happy home
Turn from sin’s dark pathway to no longer roam
Give your heart to Jesus, upward lift your eyes
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

And then there’s the Carter Family, whose influence now seems to me ubiquitous in John Prine’s music (and who provided the title song for Diamonds in the Rough). The Carters recorded these sentimental parlor songs more often and more movingly than anybody ever has. Their “Engine 143” did make it onto The Anthology:

Georgie’s mother came to him with a bucket on her arm
Saying my darling son be careful how you run
For many a man has lost his life in trying to make lost time
And if you run your engine right you’ll get there just on time

Up the road he darted, against the rocks he crushed
Upside down the engine turned and Georgie’s breast did smash
His head was against the firebox door the flames are rolling high
I’m glad I was born for an engineer to die on the C&O road

I’ve come to appreciate these songs as beautifully written and recorded, often, but also as an important part of the roots of American music. In no small part through the influence of the Carter Family, country music is heavily based on them (what do you get when you play a country record backwards?).

Billy The Bum, which I’ve known for over 30 years, is today a completely new song to me. I hear it within a tradition that’s well over a hundred years old and that I’ve taken deeply, if cautiously, into my emotional, intellectual, and maybe spiritual life.

——————

Billy The Bum is another of Diamonds In The Rough’s country waltzes. The first verse again establishes John Prine’s firm flat-picking, accompanied by David Bromberg on a second acoustic guitar. Bromberg plays mostly bass runs, but strums often to help keep the beat. I’d say he plays “oldtime guitar” — an art that’s been essentially lost to the upright bass, on the one hand, and bluegrass guitar on the other.

With the first statement of the chorus, Bromberg begins dubbing over (I assume, unless he’s playing with his toes) the sliding dobro that gives the song much of its countrified twang. Also on each chorus Dave Prine enters, turned down very low in the mix, singing back-up vocals in a strained, high-lonesome wail, like a far-off cry in the wilderness.

As I understand the lyrics, Billy always fantasized about riding the rails as a hobo, but because his legs had been twisted by polio, he could only hop a train in his imagination:

Billy the Bum lived by the thumb
Sang of the hobo’s delight
He’d prove he could run twice as fast as the sun
By losing his shadow with night

He loved every girl in this curly-headed world
But no one will know, it seems
For two twisted legs and a childhood disease
Left Billy just a bum in his dreams

It’s interesting that even in the 20’s and 30’s — presumably the heyday of hobo culture — films and songs romanticized the lifestyle, seducing many young people into riding the rails. In other words, hobos were already a dream even back when they were still a reality. Billy was only one of millions who dreamed of riding the blinds. There’s a sad irony and richness here — his polio made him a bum in his own eyes, unable to attain his dreams, which included being a real bum on the open road:

He lived all alone in a run-down home
Near the side of the old railroad track
Where the trains used to run carrying freight by the ton
And blow the whistle as Billy waved back

It seems fairly clear to me that John Prine has always believed in Jesus Christ, that he’s a christian. But if this is right, his work presents us with a rare and fearsome portrait of a blazingly angry and disappointed, public-spirited, and wildly playful faith. Prine’s first album is all about spirituality, if you look at it just so, and is big enough to contain everything from “Eat a lotta peaches, try to find Jesus” to “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes — Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”

If Prine were an atheist like myself, it would be a different matter. But given Prine’s long and powerful history of working out his thoughts about faith in song, I don’t take lightly his portrait of the song’s townspeople, whose children “seemed to have nothing better to do than to run around his house with their tongues from their mouths.”

Now some folks’ll wait and some folks’ll pray
For Jesus to rise up again
But none of these folks in their holy cloaks
Ever took Billy on as a friend

For pity’s a crime and ain’t worth a dime
To a person who’s really in need
Just treat ’em the same as you would your own name
Next time that your heart starts to bleed

It’s easy enough, if you prefer, to hear easy platitudes and a certain self-righteousness in this indictment. But given Prine’s body of work and the religious themes he’s explored so frankly, I think we’re bound to take this portrait seriously. Trapped among such people by his physical disabilities and his shame, Billy, a real fluorescent light, cried pennies on Sunday morning.

By this point, I’ve come to decide that it’s a defense mechanism, this tendency not to really hear the lyrics of these old-style sentimental songs. If we took them literally, pictured them, read them over, took them at their word, they’d cut too close to the bone. They’d go places we’ve decided, as a culture, we don’t want to go.

It’s no wonder that generation after generation of Americans experience a recurring “Folk Revival” in which young people rediscover acts like the Carter Family. And, regardless of what else might be said about them, it’s no wonder that these Revivals are continually experienced by their participants as a burning away of some vast, heavy haze of sanitized corporate nonsense to reveal something that finally, at long last, matters.

(This is part of my song-by-song series on John Prine’s second album, Diamonds in the Rough: Everybody * The Torch Singer * Souvenirs * The Late John Garfield Blues * Sour Grapes * Billy The Bum * The Frying Pan * Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You * Take the Star Out of the Window * The Great Compromise * Clocks and Spoons * Rocky Mountain Time * Diamonds in the Rough)

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

The comments below were originally submitted to another entry — a really excellent one, I think.

I got tired of seeing that original post diluted by an unrelated question, so I created a space for these comments.

——————————-

I have been listening to Bob Dylan’s “Lay down your weary tune, lay down.” Somewhere back in my childhood (I’m 80 yrs old now) I think I sang that song, or at least the melody, as a hymn. Have you come across any info on this song? OTM

Posted by: Orville Murphy | November 13, 2005 at 10:47 PM

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Hi Orville,

Thanks for visiting The Celestial Monochord.

Sadly, I don’t have an answer for you. There is a wonderful community of people who often have answers for very difficult questions about folk music, although their site can be a little confusing and sometimes slow. Maybe you should check them out and ask around at Mudcat. They’re at:

www.mudcat.org

I’ve done you the favor of looking there for the answer, and all I’ve found is several OTHER people struggling to find the answer to the same question.

Dylan apparently has said that he heard the tune either on the BBC while visiting the UK or at Joan Baez’s house on a record. It may have been an old bagpipe tune and/or Scottish hymn. In any case, it had no words, so he wrote some and probably adapted the tune somewhat. Seeing as he only heard the tune once, he had no choice but to sort of make some of it up.

Some at Mudcat say that the melody resembles The Water is Wide. Others say it resembles How Can I keep from Singing. In any case, a lot of old hymns have the same chord structure and the same pattern of syllables, which makes them easy for a congregation to sing. It may sound like a 1000 songs.

Also, note that more than a few songs have the phrase “lay down your weary” something-or-other. For example, one version of Barbara Allen (the oldest song in the whole world) contains:

She walked over yon garden field
She heard the dead-bell knelling
And every stroke that the dead-bell gave
It cried, “Woe be to you now, Ellen.”

As she walked over the garden field
She saw his corpse a-comin’,
“Lay down, lay down your weary load
Until I get to look upon him.”

Sorry I couldn’t help more! Good luck in your search!

Kurt G.

Posted by: The Celestial Monochord | November 14, 2005 at 07:39 PM

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Regarding ‘Lay down your weary tune’: I note on the Biograph notes that he found a Scottish ballad without lyrics and used the melody.

There is some simularity to the sound you may hear when Gaelic psalms are sung (cf. Scottish tradition Vol.6 Gaelic Psalms from Lewis. GreenTrax recordings)

I note from a much earlier time in Celtic past that singing was done to sound like the cadence of the sea and of its waves rolling in.

Posted by: Mike | May 19, 2007 at 09:37 AM

The Late John Garfield Blues

Garfield before HUAC (via Citizen Screen)

John Prine is often misunderstood — I mean the guy mumbles, and so you get the lyrics wrong. Among hard-core fans, these misunderstandings can be a kind of a sport and a badge of honor. The lyrics to “The Late John Garfield Blues” are especially tough to make out, so everybody hears a slightly different song.

I used to hear a song in which “wind-blow scarves and top-down cars all share one western tree” and in which “the men on The El (Chicago’s elevated train) sit perfectly still.” Prine tells a joke in the song, but I never got it — “Two men were standing upon a bridge, one jumped and screamed yoo-hoo!”?

Each listener creates the song’s meaning anew. Everybody has a hand in writing the “The Late John Garfield Blues.”

——————

Only about seven years before “The Late John Garfield Blues” was recorded, Bob Dylan had finally figured out how to mix 20th-century Modernism with popular song.

John Prine learned this trick from Dylan more naturally and vividly than most songwriters, and was one of many whom the press called “The Next Bob Dylan.” (Today, of course, we know the next Bob Dylan always turns out to be Bob Dylan himself, and Prine has now become The First John Prine.)

With “The Late John Garfield Blues,” Prine jumps headlong into Dylan’s Modernism more completely than anywhere else in his first two albums:

The fish don’t bite but once a night
By the cold light of the moon
The horses screamed, the nightmares dreamed
And the dead men all wear shoes
Cuz everybody’s dancing
Those late John Garfield blues

As I see it, Dylan’s main insight was that making sense of a song — what’s happening, who it’s happening to, why it matters — should be a job shared with the listener. A song’s meaning shouldn’t be complete, an inanimate object lying dead inside the song. It should be a process that happens when the song and the listener sit down together and share the same space for a minute or two.

And if it’s partly our job to help make the meaning of a song, then my attitude is that we should try to do it well. Shouldn’t we bring to the job the best of what have to offer?

“The Late John Garfield Blues” certainly needs us to participate, since the lyrics don’t make make sense all by themselves. They have no real characters, very little setting, no train of thought, few hints of an “occasion.”

The lyrics are all mood. In fact, Prine claims that he mostly just wanted to capture a mood — specifically, that of a late Sunday night when there’s nothing on television but an old John Garfield movie. The song is “not so much” about the actor, Prine says, and more about a feeling — the actor is used, if anything, as a vehicle to get to the mood. Even the word “late” refers to the time of day as much as to Garfield’s being dead.

But I hear that very same mood much more clearly at the end of The Torch Singer than here. What I hear instead is John Garfield’s 1952 funeral.

Garfield had been admired by all sorts of people — he was the son of poor Urkranian-Jewish immigrants, a former boxer, a movie heart-throb, and the screen’s first rebel without a cause. When he died at age 39, his funeral was a mob scene the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Rudolph Valentino’s funeral in 1926::

Black faces pressed against the glass
Where the rain has pressed its weight
Wind-blown scarves in top-down cars
All share one western trait

Saddness leaks through tear-stained cheeks
From winos to dime-store Jews
Probly don’t know they gave me
These late John Garfield blues

Garfield was a staunch liberal and became a victim of McCarthy’s blacklist. Unable to find work in Hollywood and obsessed with a sense of betrayal by his own country, Garfield became unhinged, obsessively sifting through his personal papers for evidence of his innocence, and descending into substance abuse and some sort of clinical depression.

Two men were standing upon a bridge
One jumped and screamed “You lose.”
Just left the odd man holding
Those late John Garfield blues

Old man sleeps with his conscience at night
Young kid sleeps with his dreams
While the mentally ill sit perfectly still
And live through lives in between
[some sources say “And live through life’s in-between”]

The recording’s musical arrangement, too, makes me think more about history and the life of John Garfield than Prine would suggest.

The first two stanzas (the first 50 seconds) are again a duet between John Prine and Steve Goodman. Prine, as usual, plays acoustic guitar, emphasizing with his bass strings the first beats in the meter of this country waltz and decorating the rest with his high strings.

But during these two stanzas, Steve Goodman is just strumming on an electric guitar. His solid, slow, ringing strumming sound like church bells, like funeral bells.

This is an old trick (i.e., this has a long tradition). Bob Dylan uses it in “Queen Jane Approximately,” when nearly the identical guitar sound is used, particularly near the end of the song, to ironically emphasize the song’s marriage motif.

I’ve always felt certain that Dylan (or his band) got the idea from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1928 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” in which Jefferson brings the song to a complete stop to imitate the sound of a funeral bell with the bass string of his guitar. The song was recorded at Blind Lemon Jefferson’s last recording session and was covered by Dylan on his very first album.

In Prine’s recording, I hear the guitars being used to put the song in conversation with Dylan and Blind Lemon Jefferson, just as its lyrics borrow from that very same lineage in the way they make meaning. The song conjures up a string of old movies, and it conjures up a mood we’ve all felt late at night, and it asks us to make our own sense.

There are quite a lot of roads into and out of this song, and it’s no wonder we recognize it as a point of departure.

Harry Smith, Bob Dylan, and
“The Ramblers Step” (Part 2)

(See also Part 1)

The New Lost City Ramblers and Harry Smith

Reading a song as sheet music is like looking at a roadmap of a place. Hearing an actual recorded performance of a song is like is going to the place and eating its gumbo. Both the Ramblers and the Anthology grew out of this critical historical shift:

The locus of collecting, preserving, and disseminating folklore changed from the printed page to the electronic media. In the first half of the twentieth century, folklorists began to use disc, tape, wire, and film rather than writing to collect and preserve sung and played folk music, and a parallel documentation was carried out by the fledgling entertainment industry which inadvertently preserved some dying folkways among its … phonograph records. [John Pankake, liner notes to NLCR: The Early Years, 1958-1962]

The Ramblers and the Anthology made this transformation matter desparately after WWII, when the LP brought the actual sound of America’s folk musicians into the ears of young urban musicians.

Mike Seeger’s ears were full of these sounds long before the Anthology. His parents had been turned on to Dock Boggs, for example, by Thomas Hart Benton in the early 1930’s. They turned away from the European museum pieces that meant "folk musc" to American intellectual leftists and musicologists. Instead, Mike grew up in a house with fresh field recordings by the likes of the Lomaxes, and with lively commercial recordings. Mike’s dad even played for a time in Benton’s hillbilly-style stringband (see Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music). But it is important to remember that this was not the mainstream American view of folk music until well after Moe Asch asked Harry Smith to compile his Anthology (with the intent of changing that mainstream view, I imagine). This explains the odd fact that when the Ramblers first appeared, a great many folk purists considered them "inauthentic."

Tom Paley, too, had anticipated the Anthology’s message. In the late 1940’s, he’d already been "an admired virtuoso on guitar and banjo," according to Philip Gura:

By the early 1950s, Paley and a few others began to steer an important segment of [East coast] urban musicians away from the then popular English ballads and political songs toward country music. The shift was crucial, for it distinguished Paley and Cohen from such proponents of the "art" folksong as Richard Dryer-Bennet and John Jacob Niles, on the one hand, and politically motivated artists like Pete Seeger and the Weavers, on the other.

Although Paley and Seeger knew some of the terrain covered by the Anthology, they very much welcomed it as a guide for themselves and their audience. Tom Paley:

When Folkways issued Harry Smith’s Anthology, those three albums (six 12" LPs) hit us like thunderbolts … The impact on those of us already interested in the music was terrific. [Harry Smith Tribute]

Interestingly, Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler (a protege of Mike Seeger’s, I think it’s fair to say) found much of the Rambler’s material in Harry Smith’s record collection, which Smith had sold to the New York Public Library (see Cantwell’s book, When We Were Good).

The influence of the Anthology on John Cohen is even more clear-cut:

Raised in the suburbs where the Hit Parade (the top forty) dominated musical taste, I first became aware of a world outside my musical milieu when I heard the old commercial records on Harry Smith’s Anthology, issued by Folkways in 1953. The Anthology, along with Alan Lomax’s "Listen Tour Our Story, Mountain Frolic & Smoky Mountain Ballads," made me more receptive to the sounds that spawned bluegrass, Cajun, and rhythm & blues. It was very different from what filled the folk song marketplace of the 60s.

Over the years, Cohen has been a significant force in keeping the Anthology in the public imagination. For three decades, Cohen’s 1969 interview with Harry Smith was just about the sole source of information about Smith that folk enthusiasts had available to them. Moe Asch reports that Cohen had been among those who had tried and failed to get the final "missing" volume of the Anthology released (see the 1997 notes to the Anthology).

In a certain sense, the Ramblers influenced the Anthology as much as the other way around by embodying its spirit, asserting its definitions of folk music, and putting it "in currency" among folk music enthusiasts. The Ramblers and the Anthology shared the same project of not only exhuming the old recordings, but resurrecting them — giving them new life in new contexts with new meanings and functions.

"Anthologizing" Dylan: The Ramblers Step

Bob Dylan didn’t need the Anthology — he had the Ramblers. More importantly, before Dylan even showed up, the Folk Revival itself had already been crafted by the Anthology and the powerfully reenforcing efforts of the Ramblers. Let’s go back to a quote from Dylan we saw earlier, in which he denies being strongly influenced by the Anthology:

… those recordings were around — that Harry Smith anthology — but that’s not what everybody was listening to … mostly you heard other performers. All those people [Griel Marcus is] talking about, you could hear the actual people singing those ballads. You could hear Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, the Memphis Jug Band, Furry Lewis. You could see those people live and in person. They were around.

But Dylan could sit at the feet of these musicians only because, in the years immediately before Dylan showed up in New York, devotees of the Anthology had gone south in search of the musicians it featured. At Mike Seeger’s strong urging, Ralph Rinzler traveled in 1960 to the Union Grove, NC Fiddler’s Convention where Rinzler’s research into the Anthology enabled him to recognize a musician prominently featured on the Anthology, Clarence Ashley. Rinzler soon returned to record Ashley, at which point Ashley introduced Rinzler to a young, blind guitarist named Arthel Watson, who everyone called "Doc":

I had brought the six-record collection [the Anthology] with me to give to Ashley as a way of making clear to him why I understood his importance. Doc Watson and I reviewed the list of performers and songs on the album covers. To my astonisment, he was familiar with many of them, having heard the recordings and some of the performers themselves in his childhood and having known others as neighbors. [from Rinzler’s liner notes to "Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley: The Original Folkways Recordings, 1960-1962"]

Thanks to Rinzler’s apprenticeship to the necessary combination of Mike Seeger and the Anthology, Clarence Ashley and Dock Watson made their first appearance in Greenwich Village only a couple of months before Dylan arrived from Minneapolis.

The Ramblers were, according to Philip Gura, "among the first to bring on stage with them living exemplars of the southern folk tradition, a very significant innovation." It was Seeger, for example, who "rediscovered" Dock Boggs and brought him to New York in 1964. If I understand Gura correctly, the Ramblers spearheaded the founding of the New York Friends of Old Time Music, a major force in bringing Southern musicians to urban audiences. Gura’s essay — particularly its last section — provides a stirring summary of the enormous impact the Ramblers had on generations of traditional musicians in the United States, and Dylan was simply part of the first such generation. The streets of Dylan’s Greenwich Village were simply paved with what Greil Marcus calls "The Old Weird America."

I believe the lesson Dylan learned best of all in those early years was the startling modernism of the Anthology’s form and (most surprisingly) its contents, which were reinforced, I think, by the particular styles and personalities of the Ramblers. Cohen’s experience with the avant-garde clicked with the Anthology. The Ramblers, like Dylan, had a mischievous attitude toward their own identity, sometimes telling audiences that their music originated in a place called New Lost City and impishly calling one album "Tom Paley, John Cohen, and Mike Seeger Sing Songs of the New Lost City Ramblers." I especially recognize Dylan in John Pankake’s description of John Cohen:

John Cohen was the groups’s William Blake, a visionary role befitting his artist’s traning and talents. In retrospect, he seemed … most aware that the group was about something more than entertaining, was carving out some yet unknown place in history and inspiring many of its audience to become a new kind of musical community, and he often struggled to articulate this evovling vision both onstage and in the poetic essays he wrote for the Rambler’s albums.

The Beat movement and the Folk Revival grew up together in Greenwich Village, and developed a kind of shared culture (see Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good). Dylan, of course, explored this intersection more brilliantly than anyone. His stage was certainly set by the Anthology, with its improvisational plan, its prescient racial integration, and its flat-out weirdness. But Dylan was not alone. According to Gura, Cohen "had financed his first field trip to Kentucky in 1959 by selling Life magazine his photographs of Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others whom he had known in Greenwich Village." Somewhere, I recall a story in which the Ramblers ran across the street to a notorious Beat hangout to drag Ginsberg and others to see a concert by a Southern musician they’d brought to the city.

Finally, I simply hear the Ramblers in Dylan, most clearly in his first album, which I think remains shamefully underrated and too rarely heard. Although the Ramblers are often mistaken for simply imitating the old records, they instead deeply absorbed their spirit and idiom and then fearlessly created a new, vibrant art in response. Dylan’s first album does nothing less. It comes off as pure Dylan in both its profound respect for tradition and (already) its almost reckless thrusting beyond tradition. It brings vividly to mind something John Cohen wrote in Sing Out! a full year before the album’s release:

There are certain qualities we demand from the music. A sense of immediacy, of personal involvement, a sense of tradition as well as appreciation for that which carries things to a point where they can go no further … a rejection of compromise … an obsession … with the song material and a sense of an event with every performance.

Harry Smith, Bob Dylan, and
“The Ramblers Step” (Part 1)

(See also Part 2)

Greil Marcus did a fine and important thing with "Invisible Republic," a book which has overturned the way a lot of Bob Dylan’s fans think of Dylan’s career and music.

Rarely do Dylan fans still think of him as starting out as a folkie and then "going electric," leaving folk music behind in the transition. Marcus showed (very convincingly and much to our surprise) that the true influence of folk music on Dylan’s imagination deepened, intensified, and reached a kind of maturity during and after Dylan’s turn to rock and roll — instead of before.

However, at the center of his argument, Marcus places the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music edited by Harry Smith.

After about seven years trying to retrace and "fill in" this picture, I’ve decide that Marcus is right about folk music and Dylan’s imagination, but he’s only half right about Harry Smith and Dylan. Dylan did not learn Harry Smith’s lessons directly from the Smith Anthology. He got them mostly second-hand — that is, he learned them, but mostly in translation. I’m now convinced that the single most important vehicle delivering Harry Smith’s peculiar message to Dylan in those early days — the widest pipeline between Harry and Bob — was The New Lost City Ramblers. I’m also convinced that it matters, this missing what I think of as "The Ramblers Step."

Bob Dylan and Harry Smith

Like Harry Smith himself, the Anthology of American Folk Music was peculiar — perhaps even a bit insane. It was not a neutral, representative overview of folk music in America, but rather an idiosyncratic work of kaleidoscopic art that had little to do with folk music as it had previously been understood. Released in 1952, the Anthology was a collection of scarcely 20-year-old commercial recordings that few folklorists saw as folk music at all — one cut is even from a Hollywood singing-cowboy movie. But the music sounded (and still sounds) strange, wild and wooly, intensely immediate, and was presented with a modernist, mystic sense of collage that, today, is hard not to see as "Dylanesque."

Marcus’ Invisible Republic established the Smith-Dylan connection, and the consequences are vast —but the details are fuzzy and shifting. Momentous but uncertain … you can understand what made me want to confirm and describe the connection, sort of as a historian might. After years of trying, I’m come to feel that Marcus seems more persuasive the "bigger" he thinks — that is, he is a master of teasing out what matters, what has significance, what is at stake. Writing in this mode, he still has me entirely conviced of why the Anthology matters to Dylan, and why both should matter to you. But like a painting by Georges Seurat, the closer you get to the details, the more the picture breaks apart.

Really specific historical evidence that Dylan knew the Anthology well in the 1960’s — that is, that it "was Bob Dylan’s first true map" — is measly. Dylan did rewrite "Down on Penny’s Farm" twice, and he recycled a line from "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" for "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." But both these Anthology songs were "covered" often by Greenwich Village street and coffeehouse singers. Admittedly, "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" does sound suspiciously like "Moonshiner’s Dance" (except played as a march), but this would never stand up in court.

I’m sincerely sorry to admit it, but I think we have an intellectual obligation to take Dylan seriously when he told Rolling Stone (November 22, 2001):

[Marcus] makes way too much of that … those recordings were around — that Harry Smith anthology — but that’s not what everybody was listening to. Sure, there were all those songs. You could hear them at people’s houses. In know in my case, I think Dave Van Ronk had that record … but mostly you heard other performers. All those people he’s talking about, you could hear the actual people singing those ballads. You could hear Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, the Memphis Jug Band, Furry Lewis. You could see those people live and in person. They were around.

But Dylan was deeply and directly affected by the New Lost City Ramblers, and the NLCR, in turn, were powerfully infuenced by Harry Smith’s Anthology. Just as importantly, in the years between the release of the Anthology and Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village, the Ramblers were a major force in spreading, far and wide, the same kind of lessons taught by the Anthology, so that by the time Dylan showed up on the scene, the Folk Revival that shaped Dylan had itself been thoroughly "Anthologized." Happily, the historical evidence for these claims is hard, over-lapping, deep, and dense.

Bob Dylan and the New Lost City Ramblers

Clearly, the New Lost City Ramblers were crucial to the early development of Dylan’s self-image as a performer. Among the earliest photos ever taken of Dylan as a young musician is a fine photo set by a member of the NLCR, John Cohen. In them, you see the young Dylan adopting various poses and personas, experimenting with his image, trying to please the eye of the Rambler’s camera. Cohen was a student of the fine arts and a sophisticated image-maker — it had been John Cohen who had come up with the name "New Lost City Ramblers," and he was thus the first person among many to admire the ambiguous, ambivalent, self-referential irony in the band’s name. A few years later, Dylan addressed Cohen directly in the liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited (referring to, among other things, Cohen’s apartment which had just been demolished to make room for the World Trade Center):

you are right john cohen — quazimodo was right — mozart was right … I cannot say the word eye any more … when I speak this word eye, it is as if I am speaking of somebody’s eye that I faintly remember … there is no eye — there is only a series of mouths — long live the mouths — your rooftop — if you don’t already know — has been demolished … eye is plasma & you are right about that too — you are lucky — you don’t have to think about such things as eye & rooftops & quazimodo. [punctuation and capitalization are Dylan’s]

As I mentioned in a previous post, Dylan dedicates a lenghty passage of his recent autobiography to the importance of Rambler Mike Seeger to Dylan’s sense of himself as an artist:

He was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling. Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart … It’s not as if he just played everyting well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them … it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns … the thought occurred to me that maybe I’d have to write my own songs, ones that Mike didn’t know. That was a startling thought.

Perhaps to partly repay this debt, Dylan later recorded a banjo-guitar duet with Seeger for one of Seeger’s albums.

Invisible Republic points to "Henry Lee" as opening both the Anthology and World Gone Wrong, one of two great albums of old folksongs Dylan recorded in the early 1990’s. But in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, Dylan again points to a Rambler, Tom Paley, as the song’s source instead of the Anthology. Indeed, World Gone Wrong’s version bares very little resemblance to that on the Anthology, either lyrically, melodically, or emotionally. The two songs share the same subject matter, but they are different songs entirely — Dylan’s version is Paley’s. (Actually, the song appeared on a 1965 album by Tom Paley and Peggy Seeger, Mike’s sister.) In confusing the Anthology’s version with Paley’s, Marcus has erased the Ramblers from the trail of evidence. Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that Dylan, at least based on his word, wants to be associated with the Ramblers and is at best indifferent to his association with the Anthology.

See also Part 2