Bob Dylan (55 page)

That’s what’s uncanny—the sense that the truest tales the country can tell about itself must be incomplete, unfinished, left hanging in the air, so that whoever finds them can take up the story in the middle. And that, finally, is what took place near the beginning of this story, if this story is about a certain historical emergence of certain versions of the American story.

The one piece of music I know that sees every Gothic, pious, drunken, murdering, thieving, loving figure moving through the old American music for who he or she is, and embraces them all, is Richard “Rabbit” Brown’s “James Alley Blues,” recorded one day in New Orleans in 1927—the only day Brown ever recorded.

Brown lived and died. That he recorded only once is like Melville neglecting to keep Hawthorne’s letter about
Moby-Dick,
the letter of which Melville could say “a sense of unspeakable security is in me” because Hawthorne had, in Melville’s unbearably direct words, “understood the book.”

The smallest, most modest notes creep out of Brown’s guitar like tadpoles, swimming in search of their melody, their rhythm. A bass note gongs, shaking the air. Nothing is pressed. An old, ragged voice, now sour, now laughing at its own sourness, begins to tell a story about a marriage. He snaps at his strings to drive a point home, but every time he does, that weird gonging is there, pulling the real story away from the story being told.

When Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller produced the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby” in 1959, for the first time layering the equivalent of a complete symphony orchestra over a piece of rock ’n’ roll, the effect, they said, was like a radio dial stuck between
two different stations. You can imagine that Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues” could have had a similar effect for those few who heard it—except that it would have been as if the performance existed between different eras, different lives, different ways of understanding the world and, like “There Goes My Baby,” made you understand that those differences are meaningless. That was the meaning of that mystical gonging behind the prosaic facts the singer was relating; that was the meaning of the small searching notes that shot out ahead of every theme, blindly seeking a destination that could never be named.

It was those tiny, seeking notes that Sam McGee would seek himself in 1934, but not truly capture until three decades after that. He would from the start cast off the fatalism those notes carried. The thick, fat notes McGee would use to symbolize escape and liberation—that swoop, down and up, up and out, that “If you don’t believe I’m leaving you can count the days I’m gone”—the notes that in “James Alley Blues” are filled up by Brown’s echoing, flapping gongings, not warnings of what might happen but portents of what will—in McGee’s hands, those notes will no longer speak of death.

In “If Tonight Should End the World,” “Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “When First Unto This Country,” the singers value nothing so much as death—and “James Alley Blues” has room for them too. The small notes in “James Alley Blues” move like mice scurrying from one room to the other, never stopping, and the house only gets bigger. The man singing “James Alley Blues”—and you have to imagine him small, wiry, wary, moving carefully, smiling, looking over his shoulder—welcomes them all, and they enter his house, because they sense that he knows more about death than they do.

But that is not all Rabbit Brown knows. “Railroad Blues” is frank about the fact that it is made for pleasure; it is an argument that freedom is more pleasurable than death. “If Tonight Should End the World,” “Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “When First Unto This Country” are arguments that death is more meaningful than
pleasure—arguments that hide their power in passion or the perfection of form, elements of performance that give pleasure because their beauty makes it seem as if their arguments are true.

But Rabbit Brown knows something about pleasure that, it seems, no one else does; he knows how to give pleasure as if it were the gift of a guardian angel. What he leaves behind—the sense of a place that is so big there is room for anyone, a place that is too big for anyone to escape—is exactly a story that can only start in the middle, with whoever might be telling it unsure if he or she should go forward, or go back.

 

Sam McGee, “Railroad Blues” (Champion, 1934), collected on
Sam McGee: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, 1926-1934
(Document, 1999) and on the anthology
Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be, Vol. 5
(Yazoo, 2002).

 

———. “Railroad Blues” (1964), collected on the anthology
Classic Mountain Songs
(Smithsonian Folkways, 2002). Originally released on McGee Brothers and Arthur Smith,
Old Timers of the Grand Old Opry
(Folkways, 1964).

 

Bela Lam and His Greene County Singers, “Tell It Again,” “If Tonight Should End the World,” “Glory Bye and Bye,” and “Crown Him” (OKeh, 1929), collected on the anthology
Virginia Roots: The 1929 Richmond Sessions
(Outhouse 2002).

 

———. “See That My Grave Is Kept Green” (OKeh, 1927), collected on the anthology
Rural String Bands of Virginia
(County, 1993). See also Bela Lam with Rose Lam and a little boy filmed in front of a sharecropper shack performing “Poor Little Benny,” on the video anthology
Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be: Early Rural & Popular American Music, 1928- 1935
(Yazoo DVD, 2000), a performance that can also be found on YouTube.

 

Emry Arthur, “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow” (Vocalion, 1928). Collected with “Reuben Oh Reuben,” “She Lied to Me” (both 1929) and “Short Life of Trouble” (1931) on the anthology
The Music of Kentucky, Vol. 2
(Yazoo, 1995). See also “I Am a Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow” by the Indian Bottom Association of Defeated Creek Church, Linefork, Kentucky,
an Old Regular Baptist version recorded in 1997 by Jeff Todd Titon and collected on
Classic Mountain Songs.

 

Bob Dylan, “Man of Constant Sorrow,”
Bob Dylan
(Columbia, 1962).

 

———. “When First Unto This Country,” from “Alternates & Retakes,”
The Genuine Never Ending Tour Covers Collection 1988-2000
(Ashes & Sand bootleg). See also the uncanny performance of the related “Sometimes in This Country” by Lee Monroe Presnell of North Carolina, recorded by Ann and Frank Warner in 1951, collected on the anthology
Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still
(Appleseed, 2000). “We are accustomed to looking at photographs of people born before Washington died,” Jeff Davis writes in his notes, “but we are not used to hearing their voices.” Presnell was born in 1876; unaccompanied, he sang as if it were 1776. Live versions of “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “When First Unto This Country” from between 1988 and 1992 can be found on the remarkable Dylan bootleg
Golden Vanity
(Wanted Man).

Soggy Bottom Boys, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” ghost vocal by Dan Tyminski as George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, and Chris Thomas King tear it up on screen, from
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack
(Mercury, 2000).

 

Richard “Rabbit” Brown, “James Alley Blues” (Victor, 1927). Collected on
Anthology of American Folk Music
(1952; Smithsonian Folkways, 1997), and on
The Greatest Songsters: Complete Works (1927-1929)
(Document), which also includes Brown’s other four recordings: “Never Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice,” “I’m Not Jealous,” “Mystery of the Dunbar Child” (for the mystery behind that, see Tal McThenia’s report “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar,”
This American Life
(14 March 2008,
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=352
), and the unforgettably gleeful “Sinking of the Titanic.”

New York/Dublin

2005/2010
²²

 

It was six years ago that
Mojo
magazine ranked “Masters of War,” Bob Dylan’s 1963 song about arms merchants—“
war profiteers,
” Franklin Roosevelt liked to call them, his voice dripping with contempt—number one on a chart of “The 100 Greatest Protest Songs.”

It was followed by Pete Seeger’s version of “We Shall Overcome,” James Brown’s 1968 “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” the Sex Pistols’ 1977 “God Save the Queen,” and Billie Holiday’s 1939 “Strange Fruit.” Not to mention Lesley Gore’s 1963 “You Don’t Own Me,” one of the first feminist rock ’n’ roll hits (written by a man, of course), let alone Eddie Cochran’s 1958 “Summertime Blues”—a record about a teenager with a mean boss, mean parents, and a congressman who won’t help because the kid’s too young to vote.

But really, “Masters of War”—that lumbering old warhorse? Why not Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” which in 1965 was such an obvious jump on the protest-song trend it went past parody and became the thing itself, and which didn’t make the chart at all?

Except for “Eve of Destruction,” all of these songs were less obvious, less self-deciphering, than “Masters of War”—but for “Masters of War” the lack of subtlety was the point. “Come you masters of war, you that build the big guns,” Dylan begins slowly: “You
that build the death planes / You that build the big bombs.” He goes on, flattening a somehow mysterious, inviting melody. The masters of war cause death and destruction: that’s their bottom line. It’s like a cartoon from
The Masses.
You can see the fat businessmen smoking cigars and gorging on huge meals as their feet rest on the necks of honest workers. They’re old, evil, and rich: cannibals. “Not even Jesus would forgive what you do,” the twenty-two-year-old Bob Dylan sings.

And then he does something that, even for a protest song, was shocking in 1963 and is shocking now: he calls for the death of the people he’s singing about. “I hope that you die,” he says, directly, without embellishment, like a gunfighter in a western shootout—like Marshal Matt Dillon of
Gunsmoke,
whom Bob Dylan might as likely named himself for as Dylan Thomas, Matt Dillon standing in the middle of main street for a shootout in Dodge City in the 1955 Hollywood version of Kansas in 1873, Dillon waiting for the bad guy to draw first, Dillon’s draw a split-second later, but his nerves cooler, the bad guy’s shot going wide, his own true.

No matter what Bob Dylan has done in the last forty-seven years, or what he will do for the rest of his life, his obituary has already been written. “Bob Dylan, best known as a protest singer from the
1960s, died yesterday . . .” The media loves a simple idea. No matter how famous you are, how complex you are, how not obvious you are, when you die, you get one idea, and one only.

In 1963, in the world of folk music, the protest song was a speech a lot of people wanted to hear and a language a lot of people wanted to learn. Protest songs were the currency. They said that the world should be changed, even implied that songs could change it, and no one wrote better protest songs—or as many—than Bob Dylan. It was a way of jumping on the train of his own career, he’d say years later. But to the high-school and college students who had begun to listen to Bob Dylan because, they said, he could say what they felt but couldn’t express—because he could draw on their own unshaped anger and rage, terror and fear, and make it all real, even, they said, make it poetry—for these people, more with each passing day in the early 1960s, the songs seemed not to contain the cynicism Dylan later proclaimed but to banish it.

They felt like warnings that the world couldn’t turn away from, crimes that had to be paid, promises that had to be kept. Bob Dylan wrote songs about the nuclear war that, in 1963, almost everyone was sure would happen sometime, somewhere—and in 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, almost had happened, the war that, Robert McNamara said just a few years ago, in the film
The Fog of War,
holding his thumb and forefinger not a half-inch apart, came closer than even the most paranoid protest singer dared imagine.