Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Yet Kevin Krown assured biographer Anthony Scaduto in 1970 that he remembered Dylan singing the song in Chicago at the turn of the year, before he knew Guthrie personally. For once we can probably trust Dylan’s account rather than that of his close friend. What Krown almost certainly recollected (sadly, he’s no longer with us to ask) was "Song to Bonny" (see above), a song Dylan set to the very same tune—Guthrie’s "1913 Massacre"—clearly the prototype for "Song to Woody."

  "Song to Woody," the superior song, postdates "Song to Bonny." Whereas "Song to Bonny" reads like a note sent from either Madison or Chicago as New York beckoned, in which case it predates "Song to Woody" by at least six weeks (Bonnie herself cannot recall when exactly she received the lyric), the later song exudes a persuasive if naive charm borne of reverent respect.

  Dylan has consistently claimed he wrote "Song to Woody" during those first few weeks in the Village, beginning the following October when he told Izzy Young, owner of the Folklore Center, that he had written it in February. This accords with a manuscript copy of the song he left his adopted East Village parents, Eve and "Mac" MacKenzie, which he annotated with the following legend: "Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleeker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie." He subsequently spoke about the song at length to Gil Turner for a Sing Out! profile, in the summer of 1962. In the process he changed the date by a couple of days (the fourteenth was a Tuesday, the twelfth a Sunday) as well as the location of its composition, but even this description was still firmly rooted in the composition’s milieu:

  ["Song to Woody"] was written in the 1960th winter . . . in New York City in the drug store on 8th street. It was one of them freezing days that I came back from Sid and Bob Gleason’s in East Orange, New Jersey. . . . Woody was there that day and it was a February Sunday night. . . . And I just thought about Woody, I wondered about him, thought harder and wondered harder. . . . I wrote this song in five minutes . . . it’s all I got to say. . . . If you know anything at all about Woody then you’ll know what I’m trying to say. . . . If you don’t know anything about Woody, then find out.

  It should come as no great surprise that the youngster purloined one of Guthrie’s "own" tunes to pay tribute to him. Woody undoubtedly would have approved, having made a lengthy career out of appropriating tunes and even key lines from tradition—like every would-be balladeer from "Rabbie" Burns to A. P. Carter. Dylan quickly learned to do this, too. When asked about the practice by publicist Elliott Mintz, he cited Guthrie as someone who "used to write a lot of his songs from existing melodies."

  Dylan found an immediacy to Guthrie’s songwriting that he also discovered, on further investigation, in hundred-year-old ballads. As he told the LA Times’ Robert Hilburn four decades after expressing this debt in song: "Woody’s songs were about everything at the same time. They were about rich and poor, black and white, the highs and lows of life, the contradictions between what they were teaching in school and what was really happening. He was saying everything in his songs that I felt, but didn’t know how to [express]."

  Throughout the Never Ending Tour, while still occasionally performing "Song to Woody" in concert, he continued to idealize the way Guthrie constructed his songs: "He wanted to bring the news very quick to the people. In those times, whenever a mine collapsed, songs were written about it instantly." Actually, in the case of "1913 Massacre," it had taken Guthrie some thirty-two years to write about this particular mining disaster. Hence the opening line, "Take a trip with me in[to] nineteen thirteen," like something shown us by the Ghost of Christmas Past. Dylan was impressed by the way Guthrie compacted all the details of a massacre of miners and their families into a four-minute ballad. Displaying a credulity that lingered well into middle age, Dylan took Guthrie’s song at face value. In fact Guthrie (and his comrade Pete Seeger) saw nothing wrong with distorting the truth to suit his polemical purpose (Guthrie claims seventy-three children died; in fact it was seventy-three people).

  "Song to Woody" was the one original to feature in Dylan’s club set that spring. He was not as yet convinced he could or would become more than an interpreter of hallowed tradition. But he remained ever adept at playing the Woody Guthrie Songbook—"1913 Massacre" remained an integral part of a repertoire that allowed for few originals. And when he returned to Minneapolis in May, he refrained from playing "Song to Woody" to his old friends, while still playing a dozen or more songs derived from the man.

  "Song to Woody" disappeared from the live set after he signed to Columbia, as he moved toward the view expressed in his "Last Thoughts on Woody," written in April 1963, and the "Letter to Woody," the sixth "outlined epitaph," written in the fall of 1963 and put on the jacket of his third album. In free-form verse he would recall how Guthrie "taught me / face t face / that men are men . . . an’ that men have reasons / for what they do."

  Dylan would still visit Guthrie through 1961, "bring[ing] him cigarettes, play[ing] songs and . . . just [talking] about this and that." At the same time, he continued assimilating everything he could from Guthrie’s recordings and songbooks and from interrogating those who’d known him in his prime. One songbook, California to the New York Island, a copy of which he acquired at the Folklore Center in the winter of 1961, he learned by heart, including the introduction (by Pete Seeger), which he highlighted in pen, and which cautioned against imitating Guthrie directly. It gave Dylan a set of songs that provided a benchmark for the young imitator, songs like "Pastures of Plenty," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Vigilante Man," and "Philadelphia Lawyer."

  {14} COLORADO BLUES

  {15} DON’T LET MY DEAL GO DOWN

  {16} JUST AS LONG AS I’M IN THIS WORLD

  {17} MEAN OL’ MISSISSIPPI BLUES

  {18} VD SEAMAN’S LAST LETTER

  {19} ROCKY MOUNTAIN BELLE #2

  {20} DOWN AT WASHINGTON SQUARE

  All songs extant in manuscript form only, the MacKenzie papers, circa spring 1961.

  Those foolish souls (such as I) hoping to document Dylan’s early years can thank their lucky stars that the circles he moved in were frequented by chroniclers and hoarders. Folk music has always been about preservation and documentation, and not just of the past. Among those who had a real sense of history were Eve and Mac MacKenzie, with whom Dylan had an open invitation to stay and go as he saw fit. Never one to pass up the opportunity of an obligation-free home-away-from-home, the young Bobby would turn up for days at a time, crashing on the couch. During these protracted stays he would write out lyrics in longhand.

  Thanks to Eve and Mac’s foresight, almost twenty Dylan "originals" dating from the spring and summer of 1961 survived long enough to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in the early nineties, along with handwritten transcripts of traditional songs like "Omie Wise," "Mary from the Wild Moor," "Satisfied Mind," "Way Down the Ol’ Plank Road," "I’ll Be a Bachelor Till I Die," and "I Didn’t See Nobody Pray." All of these he was presumably considering as "possibles" for his club set, though only "Omie Wise" exists in a 1961 guise (one less song than he managed to perform in 1980). Here, in capsule form, is Dylan’s passage from pure imitation to emulation.

  He evidently toyed with an adaptation of the traditional blues "Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down" even as he was still sharpening his command of the idiom. In the version he wrote out at the MacKenzies’, he conjures up a couple of "new" verses using some very old folk commonplaces. One of these has the rambling boy telling his girl, "I be a long time gone," already a phrase looking for a song. He also references Johnny Cash’s not-so-traditional "Folsom Prison Blues," writing of how "momma always told me son." Thirty-one years later, Dylan gave up trying to improve the traditional original, debuting a terrific electric rendition of the real "Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down" at some antipodean shows.

  If Guthrie exemplified the republic of dreams the teenager was reaching back to, so did another, the talismanic Jimmie Rodgers. With "Missis
sippi River Blues," Dylan took an opening verse from the Singing Brakeman and crafted his own variant, one that name-checks his home state (the river now rolls "way up in Minnesota / down through to the Missouri sands"). Again, it would be another thirty-one years before he covered another of Rodgers’s Mississippi songs ("Miss You Mississippi"), for the aborted electric folk album he recorded before (and superseded with) Good As I Been to You.

  The other lyrical exercises from spring 1961 reveal a Dylan trying on various songwriting hats for size. The "VD Seaman’s Last Letter" represents his attempt to rewrite "VD City," one of four Guthrie VD songs Dylan would perform for his Minneapolis friends in December. "Rocky Mountain Belle #2," on the other hand, is an attempt to write something similar to the original "Rocky Mountain Belle," which Dylan presumably heard from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who still sang it. After a single verse that manages to rhyme "love the best" with "queen of all the west," and includes a six-line chorus about how the singer likes to think about his mountain belle when "nobody is around," Dylan decided that perhaps the song wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  "Colorado Blues"—mentioned in Scaduto’s 1971 biography—is a simple twelve-bar blues alluding to struggles past and gone, drawing on the time spent in Denver and Central City the previous summer. Dylan suggests that Denver is "a mean old place to stay" but fails to explain why. Nor would a line like "Central City / ain’t no friend of mine" have meant a great deal to anyone save the handful of folk who knew he had spent some weeks there, playing "Muleskinner Blues" and other songs in a stripper’s bar.

  "Just As Long As I’m in This World" constitutes another early attempt at a would-be spiritual, Dylan applying a new coat to suggest he has come from the house of hard knocks. The song tries hard to evoke a Pentecostal fervor, the singer suggesting he has "fiery fingers / I got fiery hands / And when I get to heaven / I’ll join the fiery band." The main thrust of the song is the trouble in the world, Dylan aligning his own interests with those poor folks who hope to get to "sit on the welcome shore," a surprisingly apocalyptic message for a twenty-year-old, and a pre-sentiment of "When the Ship Comes In." By December he had replaced these formative efforts with rollicking renditions of "Gospel Plow" and "Wade in the Water," brimful with brimstone, and by the following September he was predicting a hard rain of his own.

  Also among such detritus are at least three attempts to write a "New York is a mean ol’ town" song, one of which is a long ballad about the Sunday when the weekly communal folksingers’ gathering at Washington Square was broken up by the police [see #21]. This infamous event took place on April 9, 1961. Given that Dylan still "wanted to bring the news very quick to the people," we can assume that "Down at Washington Square" was composed in the immediate aftermath, when feelings still ran high downtown. One might also assume that Dylan, new in town and wanting to belong, was at Washington Square on that very Sunday.

  And yet a documentary film and the hundreds of photos taken at the Sunday showdown fail to reveal a single shot of the Minnesotan and his Huck Finn hat. Sixteen years later Dylan certainly implied he was a regular at these gatherings, talking about Washington Square as "a place where people you knew or met congregated every Sunday, and it was like a world of music." As he remembered it, "There could be two hundred bands in one park in New York . . . fifteen jug bands, five bluegrass bands, and an old crummy string band, twenty Irish confederate groups, a southern mountain band. . . . There was bodies piled sky-high doing whatever they felt like doing. . . . Poets who would rant and rave from the statues."

  But the more well-to-do residents in the neighbourhood viewed the average folksinger as more of a deadbeat. Finally the police turned up mob-ready one Sunday and warned the folksingers they could only enter the square if they did not use their instruments. According to folk-etymologist Peter Tamony, in a later article about the fracas: "When unaccompanied singing [then] commenced, the officers undertook to clear the fountain, suppress factional fights and remove all elements from the park." Folksinger and author Oscar Brand details what happened next in The Ballad Mongers:

  It was a warm Sunday afternoon. Police were thickly stationed in the park. They wanted no trouble. At first, they tried to move the demonstrators out with courteous shoves. The crowd moved turgidly, and so those left in the rear were vulnerable to most of the shoves. Some of those shoved turned back and protested. This led to more shoves and a few pokes. One hothead even went so far as to swing at a policeman. A few of the finest hurried over to subdue the swinger. A few folk singers hurried back to help their comrade. More police arrived. Someone began to sing. From the middle of the crowd, a banjo picker began to play the chords to accompany the singing. A guitarist joined in. According to the law, singing wasn’t illegal, but playing an instrument without a license was. . . . And so [the police] attacked the folk singers. . . . To the great delight of the television and newspaper reporters, a melee ensued directly in front of their cameras.

  Having already developed a propensity for exaggeration, exemplified by the tall tales he told everyone about his background, Dylan took another lesson (and the tune) from Guthrie’s "Pretty Boy Floyd": don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. Like a true balladeer, the Dylan of "Down at Washington Square" set out to print the legend. Relying little on the comic understatement he was about to use to such good effect on "Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues," he penned a kind of "1961 Massacre," wherein boys and girls "dancing in the sun" find themselves on the receiving end of "a gang of policemen . . . in trucks." "A girl with a banjo" is trampled to the ground, and one man is "beaten by two big men in blue."

  As it happens, closing down Washington Square served as a much-needed economic boost to the Village folk scene. Tourists were now obliged to pay for their folk music fix. Dylan himself, just two days away from his Gerde’s debut when the billy clubs came out, had no intention of trying out such songs on the Gerde’s diehards. Save for "Song To Woody," which was as yet more of a debt acknowledgment than the calling card of Guthrie’s heir, he stuck ruggedly to his (musical) roots. Though he appears to have worked long and hard on "Down at Washington Square," leaving behind several drafts, there is no evidence it ever made it into his live set.

  {21} NYC BLUES/ TALKIN’ NEW YORK

  Published lyrics [NYC Blues]: Isis #136.

  Published lyrics [Talkin’ New York]: Isis #44 [draft]; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: [Gerde’s Folk City, September 26, 1961] Carnegie Recital Hall, NY, November 4, 1961.

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

  [BD—tk.2].

  A second attempt at a New York song, "NYC Blues," appears to coincide conceptually with the Washington Square diatribe (a six-verse draft appears opposite an early version of "Down in Washington Square"). At one point the mayor is told about some trouble in Midtown and retorts, "There ain’t no trouble / It’s all down in Wash[ington] Sq[uare]." The song, though, was never finished. Just one line—"Seen so many people I never saw before in my life"—was transposed to a different song—"Talkin’ New York"—another lyric bent on trashing New York, which he had started to sketch out by May. This one would survive in his set until 1963 and became his first talkin’ blues on record.

  The "talkin’ blues" as a genre can be dated at least as far back as 1926, when Chris Bouchillon recorded "Original Talking Blues." In The Formative Dylan, Todd Harvey suggests that Guthrie probably learned the form from early Carter Family recordings, though I can’t raise a single such example. Guthrie himself seemed to write ’em for kicks, penning at least eight such songs between 1937 and 1957. But it was a form common to all folkies, and just as commonly adopted by early country singers. As a format it coalesced many elements important to Dylan the young performer. Its rich comic possibilities and every verse containing a long, tapering punch line appealed to the boy’s innate sense of delivery
and timing. It also required only rudimentary technique on the guitar. Its half-sung, half-spoken manner of delivery released the performing poet in him.

  It was Guthrie’s talkin’ blues persona, along with Bound for Glory, that appealed most to the young Dylan. By the time he arrived in New York, Dylan had already executed a number of Guthrie’s talkin’ blues, even improvising at least one of his own ("Talkin’ Hugh Brown"). But it is "Talkin’ New York" that provides the first glimpse of a man who could compose his own bombshells of bile. Just to hear the man intone, "They gotta cut something!" is to know the reserves of antipathy he was storing up.

  According to Dylan, he first began jotting down the lyrics to "Talkin’ New York" as he was hitching back to "the frostbitten North Country" in May (not to East Orange and another surrogate family, "Sid" and Bob Gleason, as he implies in the song). When he returned from the Midwest at the end of the month, he wrote out a draft version of the song for the MacKenzies. The song as it stood six months before it was recorded contains its fair share of rough edges, but it demonstrated someone honing his songwriting skills—witness its opening two verses (see also The Bob Dylan Scrapbook):

  I rambled to NY one time, came to see a friend of mine

  After I found my way in, couldn’t find my way out again . . .

  When I rolled into this here town, two feet a snow covered the ground

  I couldn’t find no place to stay, I rode the subway for a couple a days . . .

  So at that time he had already started to romanticize those first few weeks. Those days of struggle and strife would come to have an irresistible fascination for the worldly-wise wunderkind. As he wrote in Peter, Paul and Mary’s In The Wind sleeve notes (1963): "Snow was piled up the stairs / an onto the street." Or twenty-one years later in a rewritten "Tangled Up in Blue": "There was snow all winter, and no heat / Revolution was in the air." He even dramatizes the situation in Chronicles: "When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I’d started out from the frostbitten North Country . . . and icy roads didn’t faze me." Nor, it seems, did New York Town.