Bob Dylan (40 page)

When you’re listening to old records, or looking at old photographs, the more beautiful, the more lifelike the sensations they give off, the more difficult it is not to realize that the people you are hearing or seeing are dead. They appeared upon the earth and left it, and it can seem as if their survival in representations is altogether an accident—as if, as the Apocrypha quoted by James Agee at the end of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
reads, in truth “they perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born.” But that’s not what the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers sound like on “Rocky Road.” Here the persons singing are getting younger and younger with every line. By the end they are just emerging from the womb. Play the song over and over, and you hear them grow up—but only so far. You hear them born again, again and again.

It’s impossible to imagine that these people can ever die. That’s what they’re saying, of course—that’s their text. Thousands and thousands of people, over thousands of years, have said exactly the same thing. But they haven’t
done
it.

 

 

Harry Smith once said that his primary interest in American folk music was the “patterning” that occurred within it. It isn’t likely he meant what other record collectors would have meant: the stereotypically male, adolescent interest in classification, adding it up: trainspotting. Sorting it all out by region, style, genre, instrumentation, song-family, and, most of all, race.

Smith’s placement of recordings and performers make patterns all through his anthologies. Some of these patterns are easy enough to follow, such as the string of murders, assassinations, train wrecks, sinking ships, and pestilence that ends his original “Ballads” section. Some patterns are utterly spectral—you simply sense that two songs which in any formal sense could not be more
dissimilar have been commissioned by the same god. But in no case is the performer imprisoned by his or her performance—by the expectations the audience might have brought to it, or that the performer himself or herself might have brought to it. One singer is sly, a con man; another singer has already gone over to the other side, past death, past any possibility of surprise; a third laughs in the second singer’s face.

It’s interesting that most of the songs collected on Smith’s first
Anthology,
and many of those found on his
Volume 4
—the testimony of killers and saints, tales of escape and imprisonment, calls for justice and revenge, visitations of weather and the supernatural, songs that, overall, leave the listener with a sense of jeopardy, uncertainty, a morbid sense of past and future—had been sung for generations before Smith’s recordings were made. But the recordings he chose testify to the ability of certain artists to present themselves as bodies, as will, as desire, as saved, as damned, as love, as hate—as if their singularity has removed them from the musical historiographies and economic sociologies where scholars have always labored to maintain them.

In folk music, as it was conventionally understood when Smith did his work, the song sung the singer. But Smith’s work is modernist: the singer sings the song. His anthologies are a dramatization of subjectivity—a dramatization of what it might be like to live in a town, or a country, where everyone you meet has a point of view, and nobody ever shuts up.

Such a society does not merely decline to ask for a canon, it repels it. Look at the supposed canon-maker. Smith spoke of “the universal hatred” he brought upon himself. He dressed as a tramp and often lived as one. He claimed to be a serial killer. He denied he had ever had sexual intercourse with another person, and many people who knew him have agreed they could never imagine that he had. Enemies and even friends described him as a cripple, a dope fiend, a freak, a bum. “When I was younger,” Smith said in a lonely moment in 1976, speaking to a college student who had called him on the phone for help with a paper, “I thought that the
feelings that went through me were—that I would outgrow them, that the anxiety or panic or whatever it is called would disappear, but you sort of suspect it at thirty-five, [and] when you get to be fifty you definitely know you’re stuck with your neuroses, or whatever you want to classify them as—demons, completed ceremonies, any old damn thing.”

A canon? What you have behind the anthologies is a man who himself never shut up—a young man in his late twenties in 1952, from the West Coast, now in New York City, who was imposing his own oddness, his own status as one who didn’t belong and who may not have wanted to, his own identity as someone unlike anyone else and as someone no one else would want to be, on the country itself.

It was his version of the folk process. He would presuppose a nation, a common predicament, a promise and a curse no citizen could escape; he would presuppose a national identity, and then rewrite it. He would rewrite it by whim, by taste—in terms of what he, the editor (as he credited himself), responded to.

No pieties about folk music, about authenticity, about who the folk really are and who they are not, about whose work is respectful of the past and whose exploitive, can survive such a stance—and that may be why Smith’s project has proved so fecund, so generative. He suggests to Americans that their culture is in fact theirs—which means they can do whatever they like with it.

 

 

In the seminar I taught on Harry Smith’s anthologies of American folk music, I brought up the notion of the characters in all the performances—the characters named and shaped in the ballads about historical events as well as those only implicit and anonymous in the fiddle pieces and calls for deliverance, those representative fictional men and women in the tales told as if they really happened—as peopling a town, a community. If the songs did indeed make up such a town, what townspeople-like roles would those around the table assign the various performers on the anthologies?

This did not go over very well. “Well,” someone said finally, “I can see Uncle Dave as the town dentist.” “If this is a community,” another person said, “it’s not one I’d want to be part of.” “Of course no one wants to be part of this community,” a librarian said after class, frustrated and angry. “All of these people are poor!”

But no one is just like anybody else. No one, in fact, is even who he or she was ever supposed to be. No one was supposed to step out from their fellows and stand alone to say their piece, to thrill those who stand and listen with the notion that they, too, might have a voice, to shame those who stand and listen because they lack the courage to do more than that.

I think it’s a great victory, a victory over decades of losing those who had the courage to speak out in the sociologies of their poverty, that anyone can now hear these men and women, and those they sing about, as singular, as people whose voices no particular set of circumstances could ever ensure would be heard. But once that perspective is gained, it has to be reversed. If we now see the artists Harry Smith found gazing on a common predicament, each from their own perspective, it may be time to return them, not to the sociologies that once ignored them, but to their republic, where each is a moral actor: a citizen.

This republic is not a town, but a train—a train that, at least as a song, left the station only a short time ago. “You know you won’t be back,” Bruce Springsteen says at the beginning of his song “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which he began performing in 1999—take what you can carry. “This train,” he says—reversing the gospel train that “don’t carry no gamblers”—“Carries saints and sinners / This train / Carries losers and winners / This train / Carries whores and gamblers.” “This train,” he sings, as the voices of the members of his band circle him like shades, “Carries lost soul ramblers / This train carries broken hearted / Thieves and souls departed / This train / Carries fools and jails.”

 

Anthology of American Folk Music,
edited by Harry Smith (Folkways, 1952; Smithsonian Folkways, 1997).

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 4
(Revenant, 2000).

 

Bob Dylan,
Chronicles, Volume One.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004, 256.

 

Robert Cantwell,
When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.
Cambridge: Harvard, 1996.

 

Nothing Seems Better to Me: The Music of Frank Proffitt and North Carolina—The Warner Collection, Volume II
(Appleseed, 2000). Includes seventeen performances by Proffitt, including “Tom Dooley” from 1940 and 1959.

 

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” from
Live in New York City
(Columbia, 2001).

5 July 2001

 

Covering not thirty-nine but forty years—that’s what recordings from 1961 to 2000 add up to—the sixteen tracks on this official but bootleg-like Japanese collection seem to come out of nowhere. “Dead Man, Dead Man,” from New Orleans in 1981, rushes by like a gang of thieves. The posturing gospel of “Wade in the Water,” recorded in a Minneapolis apartment in 1961, is somehow not as fake as it sounds. “Things Have Changed” was recorded last year in Portsmouth, England; heard now, it seems as unimpressed by its Oscar as it is by the price of gas or the meaning of life.

This album is a Bob Dylan show. When he takes the stage today, no song is older than any other. “Handsome Molly,” from the nineteenth century, recorded in New York in 1962, seems in this performance hundreds of years older than its provenance, like a dream of the past—but wherever he is tonight, Bob Dylan could make it seem older still, which is to say even more present.

But the same is true of Dylan’s own “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” recorded with the Band in 1974. This too takes you back to the nineteenth century, where it holds—but what doesn’t hold is the face on the song. The old man in the music is no longer Slim Pickens, sitting on the ground in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,
ready to die as the song plays in the background; the old man is the singer, or whoever is listening. “Slow Train,” from Dylan’s 1987 tour with the Grateful Dead, is no longer the flag of the singer’s late-1970s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity but a sign of hope little different from the blue-grass spiritual “Somebody Touched Me,” from Portsmouth in 2000, which opens the album—a song no less scary than the version of “Things Have Changed” recorded the next night.

As with any show, there are the numbers you take away and those that might never have been played, and which those are depend on who you are. I keep coming back to “Grand Coulee Dam,” recorded with the Band at a 1968 Woody Guthrie tribute—and done as a drunken rockabilly rave-up at the party thrown by the men who built the thing, on the night they opened the spillway for the first time. That, and “Dead Man, Dead Man.” The singer and the people around him look the devil in the eye, daring him to take their lives. Suddenly you can feel the devil tremble, like a vampire with a cross shoved in his face. Then comes “Born in Time,” and you figure it’s time to hit the restroom.

There’s a long line, though, and you lose out on “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” It will never be sung and played quite like it is this night in 1975. You missed it. Or would have, if this record didn’t exist.

June 2001

 

Listening to
Live 1961-2000,
it strikes me that the most outrageous act Bob Dylan has ever performed was to sing “Handsome Molly” the way he does here—which is to say the way he sang it in the Gaslight Café in the fall of 1962.

Imagine walking into the Greenwich Village joint in late October, maybe early November. “Folk music” is it, really all that matters now, if you can get your mind off John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev playing chicken with the world, Freedom Riders being beaten and left for dead in Alabama, and whether you’re going home alone tonight. You’ve probably seen Bob Dylan before; of course you’ve heard of him. You’re too cool to admit to admiration, let alone envy. Maybe you’re a little scared. Isn’t it about time for this guy to expose himself for the fraud he has to be?

You came in late, to show you could be here or not be here, just checking the scene on your way to somewhere else. “‘No More Auction Block,’ man,” someone says, indicating what you’ve missed. Sure, like he’s a slave, you’ve seen people try that act before. You feel comforted when he goes into “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos.” He seems a little bored with the song, or the place, or maybe people like you. (
Stop thinking that way! He’s got nothing on you!
) “Cocaine”—everybody does that, big deal. The guitar is pretty but—anybody can fingerpick, and he’s out of tune. Then “Coo Coo.” For a moment, you’re not quite in the club anymore; the walls are suddenly transparent, and it’s as if you can see the bird flying by outside right through them. Then he says he’s going back to West Texas and you know he isn’t.

And then he’s a hundred years old and you are too. “Oh, I wish I was in London, or some other seaport town—I’d put my foot on a steamboat, sail the ocean ’round.” “Londonnnnnnn-ummmmmm,” he says, as if it isn’t a real place, just a notion, too far away to
credit. Now it isn’t the walls that are about to fall away, it’s the ground beneath your feet. He seems to have all the time in the world; the dead are like that. They’re not in a hurry. Anything you can show them, they’ve seen it all before.

He’s just strumming, with a chord to point towards a melody he doesn’t quite bother with, not on the guitar—the voice drifts over the melody, letting you imagine it for yourself. You were about to say it again—anybody can do that strum—but your mind isn’t quite your own anymore. Your memories are not your own. Your memories are now replaced by those of a lovesick man who died before your parents were born. He’s traveling the world, to get away from his memories of Handsome Molly, knowing that the further he goes, the more indelible her face will be. You see it; right now, in this moment, it beckons you towards everything you’ve ever lost.