Bob Dylan & Folk Music (A Song & Dance Man Excerpt)
This is an excerpt from From Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan - Vol. 1: Language & Tradition. Written by Michael Gray. Reprinted With Permission.
The new movie ‘A Complete Unknown’ puts a spotlight on Dylan and folk music, but doesn’t have time to really explain Dylan’s relationship to folk, what he got from it, or what he did with it. Fortunately Michael Gray wrote the definitive treatment of this subject 50 years ago, and we share some of it below. Michael discusses much more about this topic in a recent interview released today on our podcast.
Vol 1: Chapter One: Dylan & The Folk Tradition
When Dylan first went East and arrived in New York, at the start of the 1960s, the repertoire and styles of delivery he brought with him provided a culture-shock not only to Sinatra-tuned audiences but also to the patrons of the many small “folk clubs” then in bloom around Greenwich Village. As he recalls the latter’s reaction, it ran as follows:
You sound like a hillbilly:
We want folk-singers here...
The point, made here with a characteristic lightness of irony, is of course that Dylan was a folk singer; and to learn how his early work was received is to understand the various misconceptions that obtained in New York at that time and which, from New York, spread (though not back into the Appalachians) via college circuits and out across the Atlantic.
To sound like a “folk singer” you were supposed to be smoothly ingenuous, Angry and above all, Sensitive. It is hard to pin down precise criteria but it’s enough to say that Peter Paul & Mary fitted the bill. With a name like that how could they fail? They were the Greenwich Village ideal — white, clean and middle class to the point of cultivated preciousness. They had all the essentials required: coyness and a bourgeois gentility that functioned as marketable post-adolescent reproach.
Young, white, middle-class Americans were thus provided with a handy collective psyche that was a palliative to all kinds of inadequacy. This was encouraged and strengthened by the arid folk preservation movement, which judged its music on ‘purity of style’, regardless of quality of content. A formidable alliance. If you could only keep away the hillbillies, you could fill out life amiably enough with an indulgent, deadening orthodoxy.
This did not suit Dylan. His first album consisted mainly of his own impressionistic arrangements of traditional songs and songs like Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’, performed without any gentility and with a voice that, far from suggesting a soul-mate for Peter, Paul or Mary suggested some black octogenarian singing personal blues at the back of his shack. The blurb that went out on the album could quite plausibly call Dylan the newest voice in country blues.
In fact Dylan’s recordings of folk material are very much more extensive than those officially released suggest, but this first official album is a unit, a collection that stands up by itself.
There are tracks that ring a little false. On Dylan’s rendition of ‘Gospel Plow’, for instance, the death-wish of the young man (Dylan was 20) may be genuine but the evocation is not: wrongly, it relies on a pretense at the experience of age to “justify” that death-wish. So that what comes through is a clumsiness of understanding as to what the artist requires of himself.
Yet what comes through from the album as a whole is a remarkable skill and more than a hint of a highly distinctive vision. In the context of what was happening at the time — American folk culture all but obliterated and a stagnating “folk” cult established as if in its place — Dylan’s first album can hardly be faulted. It is a brilliant debut, a performer’s tour de force, and served as a fine corrective for Greenwich Village: it was the opposite of effete.
The asset of irony appears again, and to greater effect, in the other self-composed song on the album, the reflective ‘Song To Woody’. Here, the irony closes the lyric:
Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that travelled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind
I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday…
But the very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I bin hittin’ some hard travellin’ too.
Clearly, to say he’d been hitting some hard travelling too is not the last thing Dylan would like to be able to do.
It is with those final lines — which get their special strength not just from the understatement but from the carefully clipped reluctance of the cadence — that we get a fresh focus on the whole theme of the song. At the same time, we still hear the echoes of all those delicate rushes of confidentiality which, throughout the lyric, establish its tone.
Other aspects of the song also contribute to its appeal. There is the frank if implicit statement of what is, on Dylan’s part, a plea for an innocent drop-out and the concern to find a new allegiance in the “hard travelin’” ethos. Again there is a delicacy in handling this — a balance struck in perceiving both the harsh reality and the romantic flavour of this ethos. The song not only reflects Guthrie faithfully but assesses his real but disappearing America from Dylan’s, the young man’s, perspective. We are offered a highly intelligent understanding of the subject.
This comes over, equally, in the rhythmic balance of the lyric — look at the third and fourth lines, the seventh and eighth, and so on; and likewise, the wind and the dust are there in the song’s construction. Lines and syllables take the form of a list: the suggestion is one of restless movement within a preordained pattern of repetition. The share-cropper’s life rhythm.
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If Dylan’s debt to Guthrie is, as he admits, substantial, it is not in essence just derivative. Few people can have gained so much from Guthrie’s work even though that work is among the best of the American folk art accessible to us from the pre-1960s. When Dylan sings that “I’m seein’ y’r world of people and things” he is too modest: he has not so much seen as re-created.
Nevertheless, Guthrie’s influence can be traced much further through Dylan’s work than simply to tribute-songs. Elsewhere on the latter’s first album we recognise Guthrie’s subject-matter — the hobo’s America — and Guthrie’s humour. In the famous Dylan “protest songs” of his second and third LPs (‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, ‘Oxford Town’ and others) it is largely Guthrie’s idealism. And it must have been Guthrie, rather than Dylan’s “first idol”, Hank Williams, who impressed upon Dylan, by his example, the need of the artist to stand alone, true to his individual vision.
Like his early “hillbilly sound” this sense of responsibility to oneself and to one’s art was not understood (it is not surprising) by the Greenwich Village / Newport Folk Festival devotees. Even when the protest phase was rampant, most of its fans preferred it with jam: preferred the sweeter versions of the ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ kind of song, by — the example is inevitable — Peter, Paul & Mary. There were, in fact, over sixty different recorded versions of that song, all performing the same function: anaesthetizing the Dylan message. Columbia Records (CBS), being in it for the money, were caught both ways: on the one hand they forced the suppression of his ‘Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues’ and then they mounted a campaign with the somewhat mournful slogan “Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan”.
In fact, of course, the “protest” songs are rarely of outstanding quality: Dylan’s performances of them can do little more than partly compensate, as it were, for the lack of anything in them but “messages”. It is not just the clichés that mar these songs but — along with their obviousness — the assumption that cliché is necessary for emphasis: the assumption that the listener must be spoon-fed. Dylan the writer is giving us rhetoric, not art. In contrast, where societal comment is present in his later work — as for instance in ‘Desolation Row’ — Dylan’s critique is always offered in a form dictated by a most formidable art and not by an anxiety based on lack of trust in the listener.
We have already seen from ‘Song To Woody’ that the early Dylan was aware of such criteria; his early folk-protest-conservationist audiences were not. Here was a folk singer, by any sane definition of the term, who was first upbraided with the hillbilly tag and then, because he had written ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, told in effect to keep on writing that song, again and again, for the rest of his artistic life. When he broke away from this, the response was again an upbraiding: you sound like a pop-star: we still want folk-singers here.
Michael Gray discusses this chapter on the Dylan.FM podcast.
Available on Dylan.FM on all major podcast platforms.
When American life was wholly localized and regional, there were four main types of American folk music (apart from the traditions preserved by foreign-language immigrants). These four were: Yankee, Southern Poor White, Cowboy and Black. All four figure strongly in Dylan’s art, if in very different guises as that art has matured.
The Yankee, who first sang on packet ships and there revived the sea-shanties that had dropped out of circulation in the British Navy, adapted his songs to the newer environment when working in the forests that stretch from Maine to Dylan’s home-state of Minnesota. The nature of this life and work produced a tradition of song in which the workman was a hard and grimly realistic hero. A less “reflective” Hemingway ideal.
The Yankee backwoodsman sang in a hard, monotonous, high-pitched, nasal voice; his songs used decorated melodies in gapped scale structures; and words mattered more than tunes. Those familiar with Dylan’s early work will recognize aspects of it, both of style and content, in that description. Indeed, the close relation much of the early Dylan output keeps with this Yankee tradition is what makes that output difficult to attune to, not only for those trained to Gilbert and Sullivan (in which the words are nonsense and a-tune-you-can-hum is the main ingredient) but also for the pop-orientated.
Southern Poor White folk music, hillbilly mountain music, the music of the settlers, consisted of hybrids. Its songs fused Scots, Irish and English influences and yet expressed a new-world pioneer milieu. Songs like ‘Come All You Virginia Girls’, ‘Old Blue’, ‘I Love My Love’, ‘Went Up On The Mountain’ and ‘Pretty Saro’ reflected normal life all across the southern backwoods, and testified to the cultural bonds between poor whites as far west as Texas and Oklahoma.
It was a tradition linked fundamentally to Calvinist precepts: to the passionate belief in sin, the concern for individual salvation and the surety of a God On Our Side. Uncle John, from Oklahoma, in “Grapes of Wrath”, is in this sense the complete descendant of the pioneers who constructed the tradition.
With its vital mixing of ancient and fresh vocabulary and its truly pioneering grammatical freedom, this tradition offered what is the real core of folk song, a conserving process which is at the same time creative; and in his use today of that fundamental life-force, Dylan is the great white folk singer. He has drawn on this tradition in two ways: he has used its established characteristics for some of his song structures, and he has used its very lively inventiveness as a source of strength for his own.
His adaptation of the traditional Scottish song ‘Pretty Peggy-O’, on his first album, gives a Texas accent a central rhythmic purpose. The guitar-work and melodic structuring on ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’ are straight from the Appalachians, where such forms and modes had evolved, in comparative isolation, over a period of almost two hundred years. And a traditional song such as ‘East Virginia’ reflects the brooding about death which Dylan echoes throughout his first album (and sometimes in later work) and which is rooted as much in the orthodoxy of Calvinism as in black folk culture.
The Cowboy music tradition was, like the Southern Poor White, a hybrid: it was basically an amalgam of Southern and Yankee brands of folk. In Lomax’s phrase, “the cowboy singer was a Yankee balladeer with a southern accent”.
As with the hillbilly genre, Dylan uses the cowboy tradition in two ways. He uses the structures and conventions, and he uses the atmospheric essence. This essence is the lyric magic that first takes its being from the “noble” struggle of hard-living men in a hostile work environment (and later, much more famously, from the communion of the individual with his own loneliness in the environment of the great western plains). A traditional sample of the hard-struggle song is this:
Our hearts were made of iron, our souls were cased with steel,
The hardships of that winter could never make us yield,
Our food, the dogs would snarl at it, our beds were in the snow,
We suffered worse than murderers up in Michigan-i-o.
That recalls, in Dylan’s output, more than his delighted use of that last rhyming device in his version of Pretty Peggy-O (“He died somewheres in Loos-i-ana-o”).
Dylan’s relation to the black folk music tradition is at least as strong and clear. Black folk music began by reflecting the basic dream of release — yet it first impinged upon white America as a novel, engaging entertainment (which is as telling an introduction to the history of race relations on that continent as the attempt to wipe out the Amerindian: the “Red Indian”, as we used to say). The distinctive, animated dancing of slaves won the attention and applause of their owners. Then enforced initiation into the prosaic mysteries of the Protestant tradition gave rise to spirituals which reflected a double burden: chains plus original sin.
Dylan, then, inherited black folk traditions not entirely from the outside — not as a separate form but as ever-present influences on other hybrid forms. This inheritance shows clearly right from the start. As Wilfrid Mellers expressed it: “In the first phase of his career... [his] musical materials were primitive: modal white blues, hillbilly, shaker songs and hymns, with an interfusion of (pentatonic) black holler, relating the young white outcast to the Negro’s alienation.”
Artistically, Dylan the middle-class white Minnesotan also anticipated the (uneasy) attempts of the militant hippies to hold hands with Black Power at the start of the 1970s.
The strands for Dylan are pulled together by his ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’, a song written after the murder of Medgar Evers. The poor white is the pawn.
Dylan can not only give the railroad the importance a hard-travelin’ hobo might give it but can also use it as an axis round which to spin ideas of what is real and thus pursue his quest for the concrete.
The railroad appears in many other songs — ‘Freight Train Blues’ among them — and in several an essential ingredient is the railroad’s importance where some fundamental choice is involved, related to the real or the true.
[Then] there is Dylan’s first-album adaptation of the traditional ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’. In this song, he wants the girl but cannot have her. He has travelled a long way to make the attempt to win her, and so the railroad becomes the symbol of a nomadic no-man’s-land:
Through this open world I’m bound to ramble
Through ice and snow, sleet and rain
I’m bound to ride that mornin’ railroad
P’raps I’ll die on that train.
With this, of course, Dylan has come away from the concrete — despite the “realism” of that wintry weather — and into the realms of romance. What could be more splendid, granted the imagined death-wish, than dying on that train?
The romance returns, but more respectably than in ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, or even ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’, in another part of ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’, where the narrator grows lyrically expansive:
Well I ride on a mailtrain baby; can’t buy a thrill
Well I’ve been up all night, leanin’ on the windowsill
Well if I die on top of the hill
Well if I don’t make it, you know my baby will.
That last line provides the ballast, taking the railroad romance away from narcissism and into a wider context, that of a more selfless and universal celebration of life. The goal here is to “make it”, to survive, not to die in glory on the train (although paradoxically, that conjectured dying “on top of the hill” brings in by allusion a picture of history’s most celebrated martyrdom, that of Christ on the cross on Calvary).
Such celebration of life is, naturally, the business of any artist, but the use of the railroad theme, as of the highway theme, is the province very largely of the folk artist. Dylanis more than a folk artist — his social class, its literacy and education and his own creative insight and integrity all set him beyond that sphere — but his work has been gorged on the folk culture of America. It has provided a basis for his creativity, has literally been fundamental. In both senses, folk music is behind him.
A Podcast Discussion with Michael Gray on this chapter is now available:
This excerpt includes several sections from Chapter 1, but represents a small portion of the total chapter. See below for reviews and quotes about the book.
“Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” – ROLLING STONE
“The definitive critical work.” – EVENING STANDARD, London
“Extraordinarily useful… I have always admired Gray’s reach, tone, and acuity but the research here is just amazing.” – GREIL MARCUS
“Serious Dylan criticism… intricate analyses monumental.” – SUNDAY TIMES, London
“Michael Gray… probably Dylan’s single most assiduous critic.” – NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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