Bob Dylan Read online

  I walked down there and ended up

  On one of them coffee-houses on the block

  Got on the stage to sing and play

  Man there said ‘Come back some other day,

  You sound like a Hillbilly,

  We want folk singers here’.

  (‘Talkin’ New York’)

  This ambivalence inhabits the entirety of Dylan’s relationship with the folk movement. Although he became elevated as the figurehead of the movement, he was never totally integrated into it. Many participants in the folk revival were cynical of Dylan’s motives. Dylan was certainly sceptical of many in the movement and repeatedly tried to distance himself from the folk revival: ‘They call anybody a folk singer [when] they don’t know what to call him. I sing some blues, some country music, some songs I write myself’ (Edwin Miller interview, June or July 1962).

  Hampton describes Dylan as the first anti-hero of the folk movement.14 One of the reasons for such mutual distrust was the eclecticism that Dylan describes in the above quote, but the ideological underpinnings of folk music meant that such stylistic differences also reflected different political outlooks. These differences, and Dylan’s subsequent lack of engagement in direct political action, led to suspicions that he was merely using the popularity of the folk revival to become famous. His irreverence and eclecticism towards folk music could therefore be taken as evidence of his lack of commitment. Dylan’s attitude to folk music, however, needs to be contextualised both within the history of folk music generally and in the specific context of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

  An interest in folk culture, including folk songs, was a feature of the Romantic movement. Concerned at the effect of industrialisation and the rationalisation of daily life, artists looked to folk culture for examples of a more organic humanity that existed before the encroachment of dark satanic mills. ‘Folk culture’, therefore, is a product of modernity (in pre-modernity, it didn’t have a special label) and has always been presented and packaged from a particular social perspective – one that looks down from a loftier social or cultural position. This does not necessarily mean ‘looking down’ in a dismissive or critical way; it is actually the reverse, with the view of folk culture characteristic of a particular kind of nineteenth-century middle-class paternalism towards the uneducated (although in America it was actually more of a maternalism).15 This has ramifications for how ‘folk music’ becomes understood, however. For example, around 1900 there was a folk song revival in the UK, led by Cecil Sharp, a Cambridge graduate concerned that folk culture was dying out because of the migratory shift from the country to cities. Sharp undertook the task of documenting folk song before it disappeared. Rather than discovering what ‘the folk’ were singing, however, Sharp took to the project a clear definition of what could be considered a ‘folk song’: no songs from towns of any size, no songs from factory workers and no songs from music halls were permitted.16 This obviously covered only a fraction of what people were actually singing but, more significantly, Sharp’s rigid rules resulted in a ‘fetishisation’ (objectification) of the ‘folk song’, which became an artefact, cast in stone. The folk song ceased to be a living thing, part of an ongoing dynamic culture, and became a museum piece. A similar process occurred in America, as those from a high cultural background sought to elevate ordinary culture to a level comparable to traditional high culture. This reached its apex in 1938 with John Hammond’s ‘Spirituals to Swing’ concerts held at the high cultural temple, Carnegie Hall in New York. While the motives of those, like Hammond and Alan Lomax, who sought to make a claim for folk culture were noble (and politically radical) one of the unfortunate by-products of their efforts was a ‘freezing’ of the folk process into ‘culture’. Even when folk song revivalists made great efforts to ‘reclaim’ folk music’s working-class origins (such as the British folk song revival in the 1950s, led by Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl), the rigid definition of what could be considered a ‘folk song’ remained in place.

  It does not take too much awareness of Dylan’s work to imagine why this attitude would not appeal to Bob Dylan, nor why Bob Dylan would not appeal to someone who holds these ideals dear (MacColl in particular was dismissive of Dylan, describing him as ‘a youth of mediocre talent’). Dylan has never treated folk songs as too precious to touch. For example, he subverts the stately Scottish ballad ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ on his first album by exclaiming ‘I bin round this whole country, but I never yet found Fennario’17 while, in ‘Talkin’ Hava Nageilah Blues’, he parodies the folk world by saying ‘here’s a foreign song I learned in Utah’. Dylan’s irreverence and eclecticism are not merely a clash of styles, nor are they evidence of his lack of commitment to folk music. Rather, they reflect a different ideological attitude that makes Dylan’s work consistent with the sensibilities of the new generation of folk aficionados, particularly with regard to the relationship between individuals and collectivities.

  An interest in folk culture has always contained an element of political criticism. The Romantics, critical of the destruction of avarice caused by industrial capitalism, sought lost times and places where humans could exist with each other and nature unaware of the needs of profit and instrumentalism. Folk culture was used as an emblem for everything capitalism was not – honest, pure, community-minded, natural, organic, human. Even contemporary interest in folk culture retains some of this ideology. Folk music is assumed to be inherently good because it is produced by ‘the people’, for themselves, to keep themselves entertained rather than for profit. However, just as the folk song became a frozen object, this approach to ‘the folk’ produces a similar fetishisation. ‘The folk’ are not real people but symbols, an idealisation of a certain way of life, an innocent at-one-with-nature way of life that never existed. We can see at this point how the objectification of the folk song actually reflected a similarly frozen idea of ‘the folk’. As Boyes claims, ‘thanks to folksong collectors’ preconceptions and judicious selectivity, artwork and life were found to be identical’.18 Folk songs were understood as a distillation of the lives of ordinary people but what results is a breakdown of the relationship between art and life; rather than folk music being a form of popular art, a certain kind of life becomes art: ‘the poor are art because they sing their lives without mediation and without reflection, without the false consciousness of capitalism and the false desires of advertising’.19 There was thus a parallel objectification of the rural and the working classes. Great classes of people were put on a pedestal, assumed to be inherently good and noble merely because of their place in the social structure. Marcus characterises the values of such an understanding as ‘the country over the city, labour over capital, sincerity over education, the unspoiled nobility of the common man and woman over the businessman and the politician’.20 The fetishised (authentic) folk song thus represented a fetishised people.

  One outcome of this is an emphasis upon the collectivity rather than the individual, and there is little room for individual subjectivity within this conception of the folk song. While named characters clearly exist within folk songs, they often serve as representative characters, intended to reflect a particular social type (the errant daughter, the evil judge) rather than being treated as individual human beings. Continuing his critique, Marcus states: ‘whether one hears them ringing true or false, they were pageants of righteousness, and while within these pageants there were armies and generations, heroes and villains, nightmares and dreams, there were almost no individuals’.21 The folk movement was founded upon the importance of a particular kind of people – the ‘folk’, the ‘people’ – rather than the individual. If a certain type of life replaced art in the folk movement, then that life was understood only structurally, as poverty, as oppression. The individual experiences of those in poverty, or those suffering racial discrimination, were not the most important thing. Instead, it was their representative role that mattered.

  In his early career Dylan buys into at least some of this ideology,
locating goodness in the wild West and corruption in the urban East (for example, in ‘Let Me Die In My Footsteps’ the glory of America is to be found in ‘Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho’). In general, however, Dylan’s work sits uneasily with this representation of folk and folk music because of the emphasis given to individual experience, feelings and subjectivity. In Dylan’s work individual experiences have always been the most important thing; the first songs that he wrote were not ‘pageants of righteousness’ but were, rather, stories of individual people caught in the machinations of everyday life – songs such as ‘Man On The Street’, ‘Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues’ or ‘Ballad Of Donald White’. These early considerations of social justice occur through an evocation of individual experience. In this way, Dylan reflected the changing sensibilities of the folk revival, although they would only become apparent as the sixties developed.

  THE BABY-BOOMERS, FOLK MUSIC AND INDIVIDUALISM

  It is commonly overlooked that Dylan is actually a child of the 1950s and not the 1960s. Whatever his influence on the latter decade, he was a couple of years older than his musical contemporaries and his formative development occurred in the earlier one. This has significant repercussions:

  if you were born between roughly 1941 and 1948 or 1950 – born, that is, into the new postwar middle class but on the upward slope, not the crest, of the baby boom – you grew up in a reality perplexingly divided by the intermingling of an emerging mass society and a decaying industrial culture . . . At the same time, you had been born soon enough to take the lingering traces of an earlier way of life into your own imagination.22

  This biological coincidence of being born on the cusp of the old and the new had implications for the folk movement and, in particular, brought about a subtle but dramatic change in ethos of the folk revivals of the 1930s–1940s and the 1950s–1960s. Two momentous breaches separated the revivals: Elvis Presley and Senator Joseph McCarthy. I will discuss the emergence of rock and roll in the next section; this section deals with McCarthyism, its effect on the folk revival, and how this can be seen in Dylan’s early work.

  Folk music’s links to political organisation is not merely coincidence but the result of its form; folk’s ‘emphasis on the words and on simple instrumentation make it both adaptable and hospitable to politics’.23 Without the need for electrical power for its instruments, folk music can move to where people are; the easily repeatable, singalong choruses enable the audience to participate, increasing the authority of its sentiments and reinforcing the strength of the song’s union.24 This historical union of folk and politics meant that folk practitioners were also expected to be political activists and many of the leading figures of folk music, including Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, were members of the Communist Party. This ideological position was generally wedded to a ‘social patriotism’ that promoted America as ‘one big union’ in which all workers needed to unite to harness the potential of their country. Such a perspective was a viable political position during the 1930s and early 1940s. Though not exactly mainstream in American political life, it sided with the victims of the great depression, linked with FDR’s New Deal policies to rebuild America for the common man, and was anti-fascist, with the Soviet Union being seen as a key bulwark against the rise of Nazism. Following the end of the Second World War, however, the Soviet Union became defined as America’s chief opponent and a paranoid environment existed in which the American government sought to counter ‘Communist subversion’. Individuals from all walks of life were accused of being Communist supporters, often on flimsy evidence. Once accused, it became almost impossible for people to exonerate themselves and being labelled a Communist meant there was little chance of obtaining work. One particular field that was decried as awash with Reds was the entertainment industry, particular Hollywood, and a number of actors, directors and other professional entertainers were ‘blacklisted’, which meant that they could not be employed in the entertainment sector.

  Many in the folk movement were victims of McCarthyism but none more so than Pete Seeger. As part of the witch-hunt, Seeger was called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He refused to declare any personal or political links and was therefore charged with contempt and blacklisted.* Ironically, however, one of the indirect effects of Seeger’s blacklisting was the increasing popularity of folk music by the end of the fifties. Unable to play at the majority of professional venues, Seeger engaged in ‘cultural guerrilla warfare’, playing at school summer camps and college campuses. These performances engaged a new generation with the sounds of folk music. According to Cantwell, however, the experience of McCarthyism stripped the songs of their ideological roots and the new revivalists therefore approached folk song in a different way, without an explicitly class-based ideology.25 Rather than being entwined with working-class activism, the new generation heard folk songs as an aesthetic representation of particular types of life. This change can be demonstrated in the pages of Sing Out!, a folk magazine established in 1950. Whereas its first issue had lavished praise on the Soviet Union and its folk culture, it gradually dissociated itself from working-class politics until its mission statement fully explained the purpose of folk music in the new revival: ‘We are, first of all, interested in folk and traditional music, as a living heritage – a link to the past – as an aesthetic experience, and as a vehicle for contemporary music.’26 In the summer of 1959, John Cohen wrote in the magazine ‘the emphasis is no longer on social reform or on world-wide reform. The effort is focused more on the search for real and human values’.27 The purpose of folk music was thus seen as recreating lived experience, giving its listeners ‘first hand’ understanding of others’ lives. The emphasis on individual experience within Dylan’s work can be seen as reflecting this emerging ideology. In 1963, he wrote an open letter to his old friend Tony Glover explaining why he had to sing his own songs rather than traditional songs such as ‘Red Apple Juice’ and ‘Little Maggie’. He made clear his debt to his folk heritage, however, for ‘the folk songs showed me . . . that songs can say somethin’ human’.28 At the same time, however, the fact that Dylan was defending his need to sing songs such as ‘Masters Of War’ and ‘Seven Curses’ indicates that the shift in consciousness does not mean that folk song necessarily became depoliticised. Many from the earlier folk movements certainly saw it this way but the new generation of folk music aficionados reoriented folk’s politics away from the collective politics of labour unions and towards the politics of individual experience. The songs dispersed by Seeger’s guerrilla warfare, and those heard on Harry Smith’s Folkways Anthology Of American Folk Music ‘introduc[ed] into the cultural stream, folk images and sounds, dehistoricisized and yet replete with the past, deideologized but inherently political’.29 *

  I do not mean to suggest a simple binary split between the old folkies and the new generation engaged in the folk revival. Many younger members of the folk revival clearly did have simplistic political views with goodies and baddies, black and white (of the kind Dylan would later criticise in ‘My Back Pages’). Neither do I want to suggest a clear time period for these changes. Real life is messy and things not necessarily clear. In fact, I would argue that the political differences between the old and new ways of interpreting folk music only become clear in the mid-sixties, once rock replaces folk as the voice of student protest. The relationship between folk music and collective politics was reoriented around this time, but it did not disappear entirely. Indeed, as it is intimately associated with the nascent civil rights movement, the fifties and sixties folk revival was highly politicised. The historical link between the revival and the civil rights movement can, I think, be explained by the fact that the advancement of black people in the US was a cause that could be placed into the interpretative framework of both the old left and the newly developing sensibility: racism could be addressed both in socio-structural terms and in terms of individual experiences of racist brutality. Nowhere is the tension be
tween these two ways of seeing the same issue better expressed than in Dylan’s ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’, a song that offers ‘a supreme understanding of the difference between writing a political song and writing a song politically’.30 It tells the story of the murder of a barmaid by William Zanzinger, the son of wealthy tobacco farmers. The first verse details the murder, the second verse describes Zanzinger. The third verse describes Hattie and her experience as a mother and waitress. After each of these verses the same refrain is repeated:

  Ah, but you who philosophise disgrace

  And criticise all fears

  Take the rag away from your face

  Now ain’t the time for your tears.

  The final verse details the courtroom scene, where Zanzinger is given a six-month sentence for murder. The refrain then changes to:

  Ah, but you who philosophise disgrace

  And criticise all fears

  Bury the rag most deep in your face

  Now’s the time for your tears.

  Here Dylan recognises that the real tragedy is in the death of a real woman and not the injustice of the courts. What matters is not the representative role that Hattie plays, but the fact that some real children have lost their mother. The final refrain chastises those who cry crocodile tears over the woman when they are really crying over the judge’s trivial sentence.31 Another way the song achieves this is through the absence of any mention of race: there is no telling from the song that Hattie Carroll is black and Zanzinger white. To those crying crocodile tears it is the crucial factor but to Dylan it misses the point. As he once rebuked a journalist, ‘you have no respect for me, sir, if you think I could write about Negroes as Negroes instead of as people’ (Sydney press conference, 1966).