Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  When I was growing up I had a record called Hank Snow Sings Jimmie Rodgers [sic] and that’s the first clue I had that Jimmie was unique. The songs were different than the norm. They had more of an individual nature and an elevated conscience, and I could tell that these songs were from a different period of time. I was drawn to their power.

  Rodgers clearly inspired Snow—and by proxy, Dylan—to write material in a similar vein. One song absent from Snow’s LP-long salute, though, was one Rodgers wrote with Reverend Andrew Jenkins, "A Drunkard’s Child." Snow evidently felt he could do something himself with this tale of a child beaten to death by his drunk father, rewriting it as "The Drunkard’s Son." The young Zimmerman apparently felt he might also make his own version of the song, writing out the lyrics by hand, presumably from that remarkable memory of his.

  "The Drunkard’s Child" is a rather fitting first lyric to have in Dylan’s handwriting. Both Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Snow would remain huge influences on Dylan; though, for all his name-dropping of Rodgers, it has been Snow’s work that Dylan has consistently covered, not Rodgers’s. (When it is Rodgers’s work, it has like as not been drawn from Snow’s 1953 tribute album, as with "My Blue-Eyed Jane" and "Mississippi River Blues.")

  HIBBING

  {1} SONG TO BRIGIT

  Rumored to be Dylan’s first-ever song, circa 1956–7.

  The first song Dylan ever wrote—or so he tells us (the song is now lost)—was for French actress Brigitte Bardot. Dylan told Izzy Young in October 1961: "First song was to Brigit [sic] Bardot, for piano. Thought if I wrote the song I’d sing it to her one day. Never met her." To be fair to Dylan, he has been surprisingly consistent in this claim. In 1964 he informed Nat Hentoff that he wrote the song when he was just fifteen, which would have been in 1956–7. By 1978, he was even prepared to reveal his motivation to Julia Orange: "I chose Bardot because she had that baby-girl quality and that grown-up woman quality all in one, which tends to attract me." He was still apparently in a post-Clara confessional frame of mind. Assuming Bardot was indeed the subject of his first song, she was by no means the last sex goddess he would depict lyrically, nor the last woman in which he found "that baby-girl quality and that grown-up woman quality all in one."

  {2} BIG BLACK TRAIN

  Possibly written with Monte Edwardson, circa 1957–8; one verse published in Isis: A Bob Dylan Anthology.

  {3} HEY LITTLE RICHARD

  {4} WHEN I GOT TROUBLES

  {5} I GOT A NEW GIRL a.k.a. TEEN LOVE SERENADE

  All songs "home" recordings, circa 1958–9; #4 made by John Bucklen, #5–6 by Ric Kangas. #5 [NDH].

  Apparently cowritten with high school buddy Monte Edwardson, "Big Black Train" was an early attempt at the kind of rock & roll song played by Bobby’s first rock & roll band, The Golden Chords. Lines like, "Well, big black train, coming down the line (x2) / You got my woman, you bring her back to me," suggest that long, dark trains already held an appeal to Bobby Allen in high school.

  By 1958 Bobby Zimmerman, as he now signed himself, had moved on, forming a band and a repertoire of his own. Ex–Golden Chord Leroy Hoikkala recalls how, even then, his friend had a happy knack for changing things around: "He’d hear a song and make up his own version of it. He did a lot of copying, but he also did a lot of writing of his own. He would sit down and make up a song and play it a couple of times and then forget it. I don’t know if he ever put any of them down on paper." It would appear that he did not, though a couple of home-made tapes by his old friend John Bucklen have him riffing away for the benefit of Bucklen’s reel-to-reel.

  Played during a 1995 BBC documentary on Highway 61 Revisited, "Hey Little Richard" is little more than a young Zimmerman rhapsodizing about the one man who had shown him a world of possibilities by pounding the shit out of an upright piano. We’re still some distance away from anything as evocative as, "Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote a song for you. . . ."

  Songs 4 and 5 derive from another home-made tape made during Dylan’s high school years. "When I Got Troubles" was included on the No Direction Home soundtrack CD, and a minute-long snippet of "I Got a Girl" can be found on that soundtrack (the full song apparently times out at two minutes, five seconds). While John Bucklen is rumored to have considerably more Dylan material on his home-made tapes, the Kangas "hoard" comprises just four songs.

  The full tape (which he recently attempted to auction, apparently unsuccessfully) was recorded circa May 1959, just before high school graduation. According to the description given online, the remaining two songs are a lot less interesting. One is sung by Kangas "backed" by Dylan; the other is a seventy-second burst of Dylan doing an impersonation of Clarence "Frogman" Henry (of "Ain’t Got No Home" fame). Since the recording was made at 1 7/8 ips, cassette speed, the quality also leaves a lot to be desired. As for Kangas’s claim that "this is the most important milestone in rock history," I’m not convinced it’s the most important tape Robert Zimmerman made that year.

  If "I Got a New Girl" sounds like a standard teen wish-fulfillment song, "When I Got Troubles" fits perfectly Dylan’s description (to CBS publicist Billy James, barely two years later) of the kinda song he used to write before he discovered Odetta and Lead Belly: "I never sang what I wrote until I got to be about eighteen or nineteen. I wrote songs when I was younger, [say] fifteen, but they were [pop] songs. . . . The songs I wrote at that age were just four chords, rhythm and blues songs. Based on things that the Diamonds would sing, or the Crewcuts . . . you know, in-the-still-of-the-night kinda songs."

  The single most revealing aspect of the Kangas tape is Dylan’s voice, which still has that slightly sweet croon suggestive of Jimmie Rodgers and the Louvin Brothers (much like the two pre-Sun demos Elvis Presley made at the Memphis studio in 1953–4). This trembling tenor he carries over till the following summer, as the May 1960 St. Paul tape demonstrates. But by then he would be taking his cues from the likes of the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte, not anything "that the Diamonds would sing."

  MINNEAPOLIS

  {6} ONE-EYED JACKS

  {7} BOB DYLAN’S BLUES

  {8} EVERY TIME I HEAR THE SPIRIT

  {9} GREYHOUND BLUES

  All songs are rumored to have been written in Minneapolis, circa 1960.

  I had to play alone for a long time, and that was good because by playing alone I had to write songs. That’s what I didn’t do when I first started out, just playing available songs with a three-piece honky-tonk band in my hometown. —Dylan to Jonathan Cott, September 1978

  Though we know of five "documented" Dylan originals from the months at the Ten O’Clock Scholar in St. Paul—i.e. before he discovered the Bound for Glory Guthrie—not a single recording is known for certain to be in circulation. One song, called either "One-Eyed Jacks," according to John Bucklen, or "Twenty-One Years," could be on the complete "St. Paul Tape," in the possession of one Karen Moynihan. But it seems more likely it is the traditional "Twenty Years Old," which Dylan recorded thirty-three years later for World Gone Wrong. Until a dub of Moynihan’s May 1960 home-made tape is accessed (see my Recording Sessions 1960–1994), we are reliant solely on John Bucklen’s memory for a description of this formative effort:

  He had a list of about 100 songs that he had written, and some of them were really great. I remember one that he did. . . . It goes: "I’m twenty years old, there’s twenty years gone, don’t you see me cryin’, don’t you see me dyin’, I’ll never reach 21." Another verse is: "The Queen of his Diamonds and the Jack of his Knave, won’t you dig my grave with a silver spade, and forget my name." It was one of those tragic things that was appropriate for the time—a backwoods blues folk song.

  Another Dylan "original," recalled by one of Dylan’s Minnesotan friends for the benefit of P. M. Clepper, writing a 1966 feature for the This Week magazine, was called "Blackjack Blues" and had the verse:

  Yea, yea, yea,
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  How unlucky can one man be?

  Every quarter I make

  Old blackjack takes away from me.

  But this turns out to be a Ray Charles song that Dylan adapted to his solo folk style and, it would appear, he took the credit, too. Evidently his inclination to take credit for the work of others to blur any debts began early. (Another song he claimed at this time, "The Klan," he had learned from a fellow folksinger in Denver.) Another song title remembered by locals he later reused. "Bob Dylan’s Blues" was a generic song title biographer Robert Shelton encountered when interviewing Dylan’s Minneapolis contemporaries.

  Two other Dylan originals Dinkytowners recalled to Shelton were "Greyhound Blues" (presumably a reference to the bus company, founded in Hibbing, rather than the animal) and "Every Time I Hear the Spirit." The former was mentioned by local folksinger Dave Morton, who also implied he had cowritten it: "There was a sorority house that Bonny Jean Beecher and Cynthia Fisher [sic] belonged to. [It was] there Bob sang a new song called ‘Greyhound Blues,’ which didn’t last more than a day, but it was a good song. That was one of a bunch of songs that Bob and I made up."

  The other song was an adaptation of a famous traditional Negro spiritual, "Every Time I Feel the Spirit." It thus marks the first instance of Dylan adapting a black Baptist spiritual to proclaim his own, more humanistic worldview. Nor did Dylan forget his first such foray, because he later used the opening two lines of "Every Time I Feel the Spirit" in his fiery December 1961 adaptation of "Wade in the Water":

  Up on the mountain my Lord spoke,

  Out of his mouth came fire and smoke.

  Even at this tender age, he was soaking up the sounds of salvation. As he told Cott, "When I was first living in New York City . . . they used to have gospel shows there every Sunday, and you could see everyone from the Five Blind Boys, the Soul Stirrers and the Swan Silvertones to Clara Ward and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. I went up there every Sunday." It was because of that influence, presumably, that he chose to record the likes of "Gospel Plow," "In My Time of Dyin" (a.k.a. "Jesus Make Up My Dyin’ Bed"), and "Wade in the Water" in his first year in New York.

  And according to "Spider" John Koerner, "Every Time I Hear the Spirit" was not the only example of Dylan adapting a spiritual during his time in Minneapolis: "He was writing some songs at the time but they were like those folksy spirituals that were popular at the time, like ‘Sinner Man’ and things . . . similar to that. . . . He had a very sweet voice [then], a pretty voice, very different from what it is now." Dylan’s rendition of "Sinner Man," another revival favorite, can be found on the incomplete, circulating St. Paul tape, albeit in execrable quality. It may or may not stick to its soulful source. But if it was a song Dylan adapted, it was also one of the more popular pieces he played at The Purple Onion Pizza Parlour.

  {10} TALKIN’ HUGH BROWN

  {11} BONNIE, WHY’D YOU CUT MY HAIR?

  Both songs performed by Dylan in the fall of 1960, Minneapolis; #10 appears on the first Minneapolis tape, circa September 1960; #11 appears on the so-called Minneapolis Party Tape, May 1961.

  {12} SONG TO BONNY

  In manuscript, circa winter 1961; published in The Telegraph #36.

  Songs 10 and 11 are the first "originals" to appear on tape from the post-Guthrie songwriter. Both appear to have been entirely improvised. As such, they provide early markers of that rare ability Dylan has frequently displayed in the studio and onstage of composing "on the spot." In the case of "Talkin’ Hugh Brown," the tape recorder has been rolling for some time, Dylan firing off a number of Guthrie "talkin’ blues," before making his roommate the subject of one. He takes great delight in portraying Brown (presumably in his presence) as "the laziest man in town / Got up this morning and combed his hair / He’s so lazy, he just don’t go anywhere." His lyrical barbs became a lot more forensic once he reached New York.

  "Bonnie, Why’d You Cut My Hair?" was Dylan’s response to a particularly severe haircut administered by girlfriend Bonnie Beecher before to a visit home to Hibbing (probably to raise further funds from his estranged father). As Bonnie tells the tale: "It was an unexpected trip he had to make up to Hibbing and he wanted me to cut his hair real short, real short so that [they] won’t know that I wear long hair. He kept saying, ‘Shorter! Shorter! Get rid of the sideburns!’ Then in the door come Dave Morton, Johnny Koerner and Harvey Abrams. They looked at him and said, ‘Oh my God, you look terrible!’ . . . [and] he went and wrote that song, ‘Bonnie, why’d you cut my hair? Now I can’t go nowhere!’" When he returned to Minneapolis the following May, Dylan still remembered the incident and song well enough to record it for posterity, via Bonnie’s trusty tape recorder.

  Bonnie Beecher probably qualifies as Dylan’s first significant song muse. Yes, he had improvised a verse for Echo Helstrom at a high school "hoot," and Judy Rubin received a couple of references in a long autobiographical poem composed in Minneapolis, in which he claimed, "I thought I loved her." But she is hardly singled out. In the same poem, the young Dylan also enthuses about Carol ("who had tits like headlights"), Barbara (who also "had big cans"), another Judy (who "wanted some day to be an actress"), and finally Adele. (This poem is among the set of self-conscious beat poems, Poems Without Titles, written in Minneapolis and recently auctioned.)

  "Song to Bonny"—apparently written circa December 1960—appears to be Dylan’s first serious attempt to put a real girl into one of his own songs. Not surprisingly, he begins "Song to Bonny" with a folk commonplace found in the ever-popular "Knoxville Girl" (and a number of other American narrative songs). But whereas the traditional norm would be to cite both parents, Dylan merely credits his maternal half: "My mother raised me tenderly / I was her pride and joy. . . ." (He had already written another poem in 1960 addressed to "all you mothers.") The tune, though, is not traditional. It is one of Guthrie’s.

  Beecher remembers "1913 Massacre" being a regular part of Dylan’s repertoire at the Ten O’Clock Scholar, so perhaps Dylan chose to set "Song to Bonny" to this tune because it was one of her favorites. In the lyric he wrote out by hand for the gal, Dylan makes three attempts at addressing an intimacy he may never reclaim:

  Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now,

  The song I’m singing is the best I know how . . .

  Hey Bonnie Beecher I think that you know

  What I am doing and where I must go . . .

  And finally:

  Hey, hey, Bonny I wrote you a song,

  ’Cause I don’t know if I’ll see you again.

  Of course, Dylan did continue to visit Bonny (who later married Hugh Romney, a.k.a. Wavy Gravy), but as this last couplet does rather suggest, he is half in love with the kind of hard travelin’ that Guthrie had so romantically expounded in Bound for Glory. Dylan liked the idea of being long gone (he had made the exact same statement in the yearbook of a female Hibbing student the year he left school). "Song to Bonny" would hardly prove to be the last time Dylan wrote "a song of remembrance of a girl in my mind." This one, though, soon mutated into a different kind of song—one that directly addressed the man whose notion of hard travelin’ held so much allure for the young tyke . . .

  [1]The poem about Bobby’s Harley was dated 1956 in the recent exhibition at the Morgan Library, but that would make him just fifteen when he was allowed a motorbike. Surely, 1957 is the more likely date.

  { 1961: Bob Dylan }

  It seems Dylan arrived in New York the third week of January 1961 and returned home to Hibbing for Christmas the third week in December. In those eleven months, he would write his first set of songs, establish himself at the leading Village folk clubs, sign to Columbia Records, and record his first album. Appropriately, his first "serious" composition would be about the inspirational figure who brought him to the Big City, the great Woody Guthrie, while his last song of the year would convey a homesickness that still gna
wed at him ("I Was Young When I Left Home"). In the interim, he would begin to create a select body of satirical, spoken-word "talkin’ blues," while at the same time studiously reworking a number of traditional songs at the kitchen table of the MacKenzies, a family wise enough to gather up these uncut gems and file them safely away. As such, though he would record just three original songs for his eponymous debut, there are some twenty-seven documented songs written or recrafted during these eleven months, the bulk of which survive only on the page, in Dylan’s spidery scrawl . . .

  {13} SONG TO WOODY

  Published lyrics: Sing Out! October 1962; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Gaslight Cafe, New York, September 6, 1961.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, November 20, 1961—2 takes

  [BD—tk.2]; Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970.

  We can be pretty sure that "Song to Woody" is the first song a

  nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan wrote after arriving in New York around January 21, 1961, and that it was inspired by meeting the great man himself at the imposing Greystone edifice where he was incarcerated as Huntington’s chorea worked its pernicious poison. Whatever inspiration he got from Guthrie "face t face," it was on a nonverbal level. As he told playwright Sam Shepard in 1986: "I never really did speak too much to [Woody]. He would call out the name of a song—a song he wrote that he wanted to hear—and I knew all his songs. . . . I’d go out there. You had to leave at 5:00. It was in Greystone. . . . Bus went there . . . from the Forty-Second Street terminal. You’d go there and you’d get off and you walked up the hill to the gates. Actually, it was a pretty foreboding place."