Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  To the entire population

  But I ain’t a doing a thing tonight

  On account of this “new situation.”27

  After World War II, many of those involved in the Almanacs took part in People’s Songs, a more organized attempt to promote the left-wing politics of folk as it had been refined through the years of the popular front. The board of directors included Guthrie, Seeger, Lomax, and John Hammond. In the midst of the great strike wave of 1946, the organization declared, “The people are on the march and must have songs to sing” and announced that it intended to circumvent “the music monopoly of Broadway and Hollywood.” But even as Lomax insisted that “the whole American folk tradition is a progressive people’s tradition,” the Cold War began to freeze American public life and the House Un-American Activities Committee began to strut the stage. In 1948, Lomax served as the musical director of Henry Wallace’s third-party presidential bid, and insisted that a folksinger appear on every platform. Seeger himself accompanied Wallace on an embattled tour of the South. It was the last hurrah of the popular front.

  As the anticommunist witch-hunt intensified, all the protestations of Americanism were for nought. People’s Songs and the artists associated with it were excluded from the CIO unions. By 1950, Lomax had left for Europe and Guthrie had been crippled by Huntingdon’s chorea, a degenerative disease of the nervous system inherited from his mother. Josh White and Burl Ivese gave the witch-hunters what they required—I WAS A SUCKER FOR THE COMMUNISTS ran a headline after White’s HUAC testimony.

  Even after its demise, People’s Songs had a long-range impact on the folk revival that was to produce Bob Dylan. In May 1950 a new magazine, Sing Out!, was launched, taking its title from “The Hammer Song,” written by Seeger and Hays the previous year: “I’d sing out danger! I’d sing out a warning!” The song crept into the pop world during the next decade, and, miraculously, Sing Out! was to survive and to thrive during the second folk revival.

  Meanwhile, four Almanac veterans—including Seeger and Lee Hays—decided to try a more commercial route. They formed the Weavers (named after a play about the peasants’ revolt of 1381), spruced up their appearance, tempered their presentation, and enjoyed a succession of hit records, most notably the chart-topping “Goodnight, Irene,” a Leadbelly song, and Guthrie’s “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You.” However, the belated commercial success of the first folk revival proved brief-lived. After finding themselves on every blacklist in the industry, the Weavers disbanded in 1952. Folk music became politically tainted, a rich hunting ground for the inquisitors. Country star Tex Ritter observed: “It got to the point where it was very difficult to tell where folk music ended and communism began. So that’s when I quit calling myself a folksinger. It was the sting of death if you were trying to make a living.”28

  John Hammond’s track record as a talent spotter was legendary long before he signed the twenty-year-old Bob Dylan to Columbia Records in 1961. In the thirties he had recorded Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, promoted Benny Goodman and Count Basie, and fought a stubborn battle against racial segregation in the music industry. Hammond was a rich white kid turned on by the “race” records of the late twenties. In blues and jazz he found a spontaneity and energy absent from the concert hall music preferred by his parents. As a critic, as well as a producer and promoter, Hammond championed both rhythmic drive and individual improvisation. From the beginning, he aimed to distinguish the authentic in jazz from its commercial dilution.

  Like Alan Lomax, and many in the decades to come, Hammond found his way to politics through music. Jazz and blues alerted him to the brutalities of racial oppression. He became increasingly aware of the material conditions in which the music he loved was produced. In 1931, he took an active role in the defense campaign for the Scottsboro Boys, and soon joined the national board of the NAACP.

  In 1938, Hammond staged the historic From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, hitherto a bastion of concert music propriety. The event was sponsored by New Masses, a CP-controlled magazine markedly different in tone and style from its Greenwich Village predecessor. For New Masses, the concert was a welcome popular front initiative in which the Left appeared as the champion of an authentic, multiracial American culture. The magazine promised the audience “the true, untainted, entirely original works that the American negro has created. We mean spirituals sung in their primitive majesty.”29 What Hammond presented that night was not, however, a menagerie of musical primitives but a succession of accomplished and sophisticated performers, a number of whom were far from “untainted” by modern American culture. The boogie-woogie piano of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis was followed by the gospel singing of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the harmonica antics of Sonny Terry, the New Orleans finesse of Sidney Bechet, the wry blues of Big Bill Broonzy, and a climactic swinging set from Basie and his band.

  “Forget you’re in Carnegie Hall,” Hammond told the audience, urging them to create the sort of “informal atmosphere” that would bring out the best in the musicians. But simply by importing these musicians into this august venue, Hammond was making a powerful statement. This wasn’t just popular entertainment; it was great art and deserved recognition as such. The program, as devised and presented by Hammond, was a narrative summary of the African-American musical tradition. It staked a claim for that tradition’s rightful place at the heart of a modern democracy. In tracing the black genealogy that lay behind swing—then a huge craze among white American youth and a money-spinner for the industry—Hammond proclaimed and exposed the black roots of America’s contemporary culture. As a teenager in Hibbing, Dylan listened to the recorded version of the concert on old 78s.

  As later critics have noted, Hammond’s package could be construed as a white appropriation of a black narrative. It was he who determined what was and was not authentic, and he was often uneasy when the musicians he patronized ventured outside the niches he had created for them. Hammond was a finicky populist. He demanded virtuosity and sophistication, but he scolded Duke Ellington for daring to write symphonic works and he had little time for the bebop vanguardists of the post-World War II era: “instead of expanding the form, they contracted it, made it their private language.” He praised rock ’n’ roll for “getting America’s youth dancing again.”

  “Hammond was no bullshitter,” recalled Dylan. “There were maybe a thousand kings in the world and he was one of them.” The veteran producer’s ability to spot Dylan’s talent was a remarkable leap across musical generations and genres. (When Dylan’s first album proved a commercial flop, the boy singer was dubbed “Hammond’s folly.”) In a sense, through his earlier efforts to redefine musical boundaries—between black and white, between traditional and popular and classical—Hammond exercised far more influence over Dylan before they had met than he did during their brief time together in the studio. As a producer, Hammond’s method was stark and straightforward. In his view the job was to capture a live performance, not create an aural artifact. That suited Dylan, but Hammond was soon elbowed out of the young singer’s career by his new manager, Albert Grossman, a hungrier and altogether less austere figure than the patrician Hammond.

  In 1952, at the height of the Cold War clampdown, Folkways quietly issued its canon-shaping Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection destined to exercise a profound influence on Dylan and his folksinging contemporaries. Folkways was a small business run by Moe Asch, a nonaffiliated leftist (and son of writer Sholem Asch) who had already been involved in recording Guthrie, Seeger, and Leadbelly, and who had made it his mission to preserve and publish a wide range of vernacular music. The anthology itself was compiled and edited by a younger man, Harry Smith, whose worldview seemed eccentric in the extreme to the popular front veterans.30

  Smith was an avant-garde filmmaker and painter, an amateur anthropologist who had studied Native American chants (and taken part in a peyote ritual), a marijuana-smoking bohemian with a fascination for the occult. After visit
ing Berkeley in 1944 to hear a Woody Guthrie concert, he was drawn into the Bay Area’s experimental arts scene, and became associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Smith was also a compulsive collector of old 78s. Out of this collection, he selected his anthology, eighty-four songs on six LPs. There were no field recordings and no art-form renditions by classically trained performers. Instead, these were “race” and “hillbilly” records, released on commercial labels, and recorded between 1927, when new technology boosted the quality of musical reproduction, and 1932, when the depression finished off the regional markets. The performers were anything but anonymous members of a folk tribe; they included a host of distinctive stylists—Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton (disguised as the Masked Marvel), the Carter Family, Mississippi John Hurt, Dock Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson. Neither Folkways nor Smith bothered to license the recordings from the original labels or the performers (many of whom were still alive and working). They treated this hoard of song as a common treasure.

  Smith saw the 1927-32 interval as unique. During those years, “American music still retained some of the regional qualities evident in the days before the phonograph, radio and talking picture had tended to integrate local types.” But it was also a period in which, for the first time, commercially distributed records made “available to each other the rhythmically and verbally specialized musics of groups living in mutual social and cultural isolation.”31 It was the beginning of a long-running process, consciously stimulated by Smith’s own anthology, of interchange among musical modes, a process that created rock ’n’ roll in general and specifically the work of Bob Dylan, not to mention reggae and punk and Afro-beat and the myriad varieties of drum-and-bass and acid house.

  Enclosed with the LPs were Smith’s extraordinary notes. For each song, he provided what he called a “condensation of lyrics”—truncated summaries of the stories in the songs, presented with a deadpan irony and an alertness to the mundane surrealism of many of the narratives. He traced the lyrics back to their roots in a common stock, and at the same time emphasized the actual historical events that often gave rise to them. Smith’s idiosyncratic selection of American music was a bold and sensitive collage, an avant-garde transformation of a vernacular idiom.

  The anthology was filled with what seemed to listeners in the fifties and still seems to us today a mélange of archaic, other-worldly sounds; voices and instruments tuned to scales and deploying textures left behind by or excluded from the commercial musical mainstream. The past inscribed on these LPs was only a quarter of a century gone, but it felt much more remote. Like Guthrie’s book, the anthology alerted Dylan to the existence of other American traditions—ones he could make use of in inventing and expressing himself.

  Smith saw his Anthology, as he did his experimental artworks, as an instrument of social enlightenment, not an antiquarian retreat. When he was presented with a Grammy shortly before his death in 1996, he said, “I’m glad to say that my dream’s come true. I saw America changed by music.” By which he meant, said his longtime acquaintance, Allen Ginsberg, “the whole rock ’n’ roll, Bob Dylan, Beatnik, post-Beatnik youth culture . . . he’d lived long enough to see the philosophy of the homeless and the Negro and the minorities and the impoverished—of which he was one, starving in the Bowery—alter the consciousness of America sufficiently to affect the politics.”32

  For Dylan, the anthology was not only a link to the lost art of the late twenties, but also, through Harry Smith’s sensibility, to the bohemian avant-garde of the fifties. As Dylan said, “I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the beat scene, the bohemian, be-bop crowd; it was pretty much connected.” Dylan relished the Beats’ shock tactics and was intrigued by their candor about drugs and sexuality. Beat prosody entered his songwriting armory as surely as the methods of Guthrie and the discoveries of the Anthology. In promoting a renewed interest in publicly performed poetry, the Beats also stimulated the coffeehouse scene in which the second folk revival gestated. This was a do-it-yourself poetry to complement a do-it-yourself music.

  But in the mid-fifties, this small group of social pioneers found themselves in near total isolation. The gulf between their beliefs, cultural practices, personal habits, and those recognized by official America seemed unbridgeable. Unlike the political activists, they gloried in their isolation, in their apparent irrelevance, and in the freedom it gave them. Rejecting the Puritanism shared by the American mainstream and the old Left, they plunged into subcultures: criminal, musical, racial, drug-and sex-related. They kept their ears peeled for a new demotic—and through their encounter with bebop-era black jazz they fashioned a jargon that, by the end of the decade, would be parodied across the country. This jargon was to prove one of the major sources for Dylan’s extraordinary speech—it was not long after he arrived in the Village that he began layering the hillbilly with the hipster.

  Ginsberg hailed from an immigrant Jewish family immersed in Communist Party activity. He was always both a rebellious and affectionate son of the old Left. He inherited from his reading of Whitman and his upbringing in the popular front years an interest in American national identity, but he gave it a new twist. In 1956, in San Francisco, he wrote “America,” a long-lined, rhythmically seductive, joke-filled address to his native land that adopts a tone neither Whitman nor Guthrie ever essayed: “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” As well as praising marijuana and homosexuality and satirizing Cold War paranoia (“them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen”), the poem invokes the then largely hidden history of the American Left: Tom Mooney, Scottsboro, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Wobblies, America’s “one million Trotskyites.”

  It occurs to me that I am America

  I am talking to myself again

  Through sheer bardic energy, Ginsberg sought to transform his isolation into its opposite. Though the poem ends on a note of cheerful resolve (“America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”), it places Ginsberg, at the outset of his career, in an embattled but somehow symbiotic relationship with “America”: Your machinery is too much for me

  It made me want to be a saint33

  The Beats are also a reminder that the spirit of the pre-World War I Masses still flourished in hidden corners of America, preeminently in Greenwich Village, which had long been home to a variety of leftist traditions, many of them fiercely anti-Stalinist. The World War II years had been the heyday for the CP-linked popular front artists, but they were dog days for pacifists, anarchists, and Trotskyists. However, the crisis of Stalinism in the fifties created a vacuum on the Left that other tendencies began to fill. Anarcho-pacifists and cultural critics—Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth, Dave Dellinger—began to get a hearing among a select few. The new American peace movement of the late fifties was dominated by neither the Communist Party nor the liberal Democrats; its revolt against the Cold War was infused with the “plague on both your houses” spirit of the Beat poets and organizations like the Catholic Worker, edited by that survivor of the first Village generation, Dorothy Day, and the radical pacifists of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Activists from this tradition were also responsible for founding Pacifica Radio, whose New York City arm, WBAI, began broadcasting in 1960, providing an in-house forum for the latest avatar of the Village tradition.

  After nearly a decade in Europe, Alan Lomax returned to the United States in 1958. The man who had done so much to create the first folk revival was now on hand for the flowering of the second. “The modern American folk-song revival began back in the thirties as a cultural movement, with overtones of social reform,” he wrote in Sing Out! “In the last ten years, our gigantic entertainment industry, even though it is as yet only mildly interested in folk music, has turned this cultural movement into a small boom.”34

  In the late fifties, the Kingston Trio and the New Christy Minstrels had enjoyed commercial success with easy-listening arrangements of old folk tunes. They were followed by a posse of im
itators, but, at the same time, a less commercial side of folk music was also flourishing. Sing Out!, under Irwin Silber’s editorship, no longer looking to Moscow but still defiantly of the Left, reached a circulation of 15,000. Izzy Young, an anarchist from the Bronx, had opened his Folklore Center on Macdougal Street in 1957, and in 1961 it was the subject of an impromptu Dylan verse:I came down to New York town,

  Got out and started walking around,

  I’s up around 62nd Street,

  All of a sudden comes a cop on his beat;

  Said my hair was too long,

  Said my boots were too dirty,

  Said my hat was un-American,

  Said he’d throw me in jail.

  On MacDougal Street I saw a cubby hole,

  I went in to get out of the cold . . .

  At the Folklore Center, “They got real records and real books, / Anybody can walk in and look.”

  When you come down here you’re on common ground—

  Common people ground—

  Common guitar people ground—

  WE NEED EVERY INCH OF IT!35

  For the fresh-faced Dylan, the subway ride from uptown to downtown was a voyage from alienation and rejection to acceptance and community. The folk revival offered something unavailable in commercial youth culture as he’d known it:The thing about rock ’n’ roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough. Tutti Frutti and Blue Suede Shoes were great catchphrases and driving pulse rhythms and you could get high on the energy but they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings . . . life is full of complexities and rock ’n’ roll didn’t reflect that.36