Bob Dylan at 80

Photo: John Shearer (for Columbia Records)

Note: This is an updated version of my essay, Bob Dylan at 75, which was an updated version of my essay, Bob Dylan at 70.

Bob Dylan turns 80 on May 24 – 60 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 (as am I, for that matter). 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 that he’s released over the past 60 years (and a fair bit of what’s never been released). I’ve seen him in concert many 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.

As I noted last year when Dylan released Rough and Rowdy Ways, “On his first album of new songs in eight years, Bob Dylan, at 79, has given us his some of his most fascinating songs in decades. From the opening song, “I Contain Multitudes,” an exploration of complicated identity, to the final, epic song, “Murder Most Foul,” ostensibly about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but also much about iconic music, cinema and literature, Dylan continues to use a musical foundation drawing on folk music, blues and the Great American Songbook composers to complement his often-spellbinding lyrics.

And anyone who thinks that folk music is necessarily defined by acoustic guitars does not understand folk music.

Even the three albums celebrating the Great American Songbook that Dylan released between 2015 and 2017, 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!

I will be hosting a series of three radio specials “The Times They Are A-Changin’: A Nod to Bob Dylan at 80,” on CKCU during the week surrounding Dylan’s birthday.

            Part 1 will be on Stranger Songs on Tuesday May 18, 3:30-5 pm (EDT). Click on "LISTEN NOW" at this link to hear the show.

            Part 2 will be on the Saturday Morning show on Saturday May 22, 7-10 am (EDT). Click on "LISTEN NOW" at this link to hear the show.

            Part 3 will be on Stranger Songs on Tuesday May 25, 3:30-5 pm (EDT). Click on "Listen Now" at this link to hear the show.

All of those shows can be heard at 93.1 FM in the Ottawa area or online at ckcufm.com at the time of the broadcast. They will also be available 24/7 for on-demand streaming. I will update this post with links for each show’s stream here as soon as they are available (a few days before each broadcast).

Find me on Twitter. www.twitter.com/mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

–Mike Regenstreif

Rory Block – Shake ‘Em On Down: A Tribute to Mississippi Fred McDowell

RORY BLOCK

Shake ‘Em On Down: A Tribute to Mississippi Fred McDowell

Stony Plain

roryblock.com

Rory Block has been one of the finest revivalists of traditional, acoustic-based blues for decades now – both on stage and in a now-formidable body of recorded work. Whether in interpreting the songs and stylings of earlier generations of blues masters, or in adding to the tradition with her well-crafted original material, almost everything she’s done over the years (save perhaps a brief foray into pop music in the mid-‘70s) has been first-rate.

I had the pleasure of producing her first Montreal concerts at the Golem in the 1980s and visiting with her on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio show when she returned to the city to perform at the jazz festival in 2000.

In recent years, Rory has been turning her attention to a series of compelling tribute albums honouring some of the earlier blues masters whose music and/or personalities have inspired her.

The first in the series, The Lady and Mr. Johnson, released in 2006, cemented her reputation as perhaps the foremost contemporary interpreter of the songs of Robert Johnson, the most influential of the Delta blues masters of the 1930s.

The second, Blues Walkin’ Like a Man: A Tribute to Son House, released in 2008, paid tribute to Son House, a Delta blues artist who had influenced Johnson and who, unlike Johnson, survived into old age, allowing for his rediscovery in the 1960s folk and blues revival, and allowing for young aficionados like Rory to meet and learn directly from him

She’s now released the third in the series, Shake ‘Em On Down: A Tribute to Mississippi Fred McDowell, which also pays tribute to a blues elder that she had the opportunity to meet and learn directly from in the 1960s.

Mississippi Fred McDowell was an interesting blues elder in the 1960s in that he never recorded in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s like so many of his contemporaries. Despite decades of music making in Tennessee and Mississippi, he was first discovered and recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1959. Those 1959 tracks are available as The First Recordings on Rounder as part of its Alan Lomax Collection.

But, as an active recording and performing artist throughout the 1960s (he died in 1971), McDowell was an important and influential presence in the folk and blues scene.

To my mind, Shake ‘Em On Down is the most personal of Rory’s tribute albums to date in that she includes four of her own songs alongside eight written by, or from the repertoire of, Mississippi Fred McDowell.

She opens the album with two of her original pieces. She wrote and sings the first, “Steady Freddy,” in McDowell’s style and from his (imagined) perspective recounting essential details from the history of his life in music leading up to his discovery by Lomax and his first forays into touring beyond his home region. Rory uses her poetic-blues license to take McDowell’s famous statement, “I do not play no rock ‘n’ roll,” and turn it into long-standing advice from his mother who tells him, “Don’t ‘cha play no rock ‘n’ roll.”

In the second song, “Mississippi Man,” Rory recounts her own first encounter, at age 15, with McDowell.

The other two original pieces, later on the CD, include “Ancestral Home,” which combines musical influences from McDowell’s guitar playing and African music, to imagine McDowell singing about his ancestors stolen from Africa by slave traders, and “The Breadline,” a song based on McDowell guitar riffs and lyrically inspired by both the Great Depression that McDowell lived through and the contemporary hard times of the past several years.

Among the highlights of Rory’s interpretations of McDowell’s material are great versions of the infectious “Kokomo Blues,” the title track, “Shake ‘Em On Down,” a role-reversal version of “The Girl That I’m Lovin’” that she sings as “The Man That I’m Lovin’” and an inspired take on the gospel song, “Woke Up This Morning.”

The only thing that I would question is the inclusion of “Good Morning Little School Girl,” which she sings as “school boy.” I’ve got a lot of versions of the song in my library – by such blues elders as McDowell, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters, and by other revivalists including Taj Mahal, Jim Kweskin and Johnny Winter – and as much as I respect all of those artists, and many others who have done versions over the years, the song has creeped me out for decades. Essentially, it is a pedophile’s come-on to an innocent kid.

To be fair, Rory addresses the issue in her liner notes saying “the song is a prime example of a message we would object to in today’s world due to heightened sensitivity regarding child predation.” She goes on to make the point that we shouldn’t apply today’s standards to people who lived in earlier times under different standards of morality.

I agree with Rory when it comes to appreciating artists and their recordings from earlier eras. But, I’d just as soon wish that my own contemporaries – like Rory – and younger artists not revive such songs. About 60 years ago, Louis Jordan, one of my favourite artists of that period, recorded a song called “Gal, You Need a Whippin’,” and while the contemporary morality of 1949 or ’50 may have allowed him to express such sentiments – tongue-in-cheek or not – then, I don’t want to hear anyone sing that song today. I would say the same about “Good Morning Little School Girl.”

That quibble aside, Shake ‘Em On Down: A Tribute to Mississippi Fred McDowell, is a great album.

--Mike Regenstreif