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Photo: John Shearer (for Columbia Records)
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Bob Dylan turns 75 today (May 24) – 55
years and a few months after he first arrived in New York City with a
repertoire of folksongs learned from Odetta and Woody Guthrie
records.
Within a relatively short time, Dylan was
one of the premier folk artists in Greenwich Village and was well on his way to
becoming, arguably, but certainly in my opinion, the most important and
influential songwriter ever.
I’m reminded now of something the young
Dylan said.
In 1963, talking to Nat Hentoff for
the liner notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan about his ability to pull
off a song as difficult as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Dylan said, “It's a
hard song to sing. I can sing it sometimes, but I ain't that good yet. I don't
carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Lead
Belly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be
able to someday, but they're older people.”
Dylan was all of 21 years old when he made
that statement. Woody Guthrie – hospitalized with the Huntington’s disease that
would kill him in 1967 – and Lightnin’ Hopkins were both then around 50. Big
Joe Williams was about 60 and Lead Belly had died in 1949 at 61.
Dylan now is significantly older than
Williams, Guthrie and Hopkins were then – and older than Lead Belly was when he
died. The young Dylan was highly influenced by those legendary artists who had
come along decades earlier – his own influence would soon surpass all others.
He changed what was possible to do in the context of a song.
And, yes, he does carry himself with all of
the musical gravitas that Williams, Guthrie, Lead Belly and Hopkins had then.
Dylan’s music has been part of my life for
most of my life. I bought Dylan’s first few LPs in 1967 when I was 13 and have
listened intently to everything he’s released over the past 50 years (and a
fair bit of what’s never been released). I’ve seen him in concert a bunch of
times and I’ve read most of the good books (including his own Chronicles
Volume One), and maybe a few too many of the bad books, that have been
written about Dylan over the years.
I was even introduced to him once – in 1975
– for about half a second. “Pleased to meet ya,” he said. I was 21, he was 34,
ages that now seem so young.
I’ve written about a bunch of Dylan albums
and books over the years in newspapers and magazines (and here on the Folk
Roots/Folk Branches blog), I’ve produced and hosted a bunch of radio
specials on him and his songs, but I don’t know Dylan. He is easily the most
enigmatic, the most unknowable, person I’ve ever encountered.
As I noted in my book review of Bob
Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz in a 2011 issue of Sing Out!
magazine, I’ve long thought that one of the reasons I so appreciate so much of
Bob Dylan’s oeuvre is that (I think) we’ve listened to so much of the same
music. To the traditional folk and blues songs, and to so many of the musicians
who played them. When Dylan sang, “no one can sing the blues like Blind
Willie McTell,” I knew what he was talking about because I’ve listened to
all those old Blind Willie McTell records. When he borrows lines or settings
from Woody Guthrie or Lead Belly or others, I know where they come from.
Dylan’s music is rooted ever so strongly in what Greil Marcus termed the
“old weird America,” the folk music and the folk-rooted blues and country music
that developed in particular regional locations and began to spread everywhere
in the first half of the 20th century.
This leads me to the point I wanted to make
when I started writing this little essay. Even before Dylan went electric at
the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, there have been commentators who’ve said
that Dylan left folk music behind. I don’t think that’s at all true. To this
day, Dylan’s songwriting continues to be rooted in the “old weird America.”
Dylan didn’t leave folk music behind when he embraced rock ‘n’ roll, he changed
what was possible in a folk music context; both in how it’s played and how it’s
expressed. I hear folk music at the heart of so much of Dylan’s songwriting --
from his earliest work to his most recent.
And anyone who thinks that folk music is
necessarily defined by acoustic guitars does not understand folk music.
Even Dylan’s two recent albums celebrating
the Great American Songbook, in my opinion, are less a homage to Frank Sinatra, than they are a
recognition that those classic songs somehow form part of that “old weird
America.” It’s not so much the circumstances of how and when they were written
as the context in which they are interpreted.
When jazz musicians like Charlie Parker
and Dizzy Gillespie developed bebop, they weren’t leaving jazz behind,
they were changing it; even though some of the traditional jazz greats like Louis
Armstrong were slow to accept or understand what Parker and Gillespie were
doing. Just like some in the folk establishment of 1965 were slow to accept and
understand what Dylan was doing. Bob Dylan changed folk music in much the same
way Charlie Parker changed jazz.
As far as I’m concerned, Dylan playing his
folk-rooted songs with rock musicians in his time is not very different from the
Weavers playing folksongs with the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra in
theirs.
Anyway, real rock ‘n’ roll, is a folk-rooted form. Just listen to the Sun-era
recordings of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash or Jerry Lee Lewis.
Listen to Wanda Jackson’s 1950s records, listen to Chuck Berry, Buddy
Holly, Bill Haley or Little Richard. The folk and blues
roots are there in that music.
By the way, Louis Armstrong was a
folksinger, too.
Happy Birthday, Bob!
(For folks in Montreal: there are Bob Dylan birthday celebrations tonight at Club Soda and Cafe Mariposa.)
---Mike Regenstreif
