Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  When Dylan arrived in the Village, the folk scene was still a ghetto whose appeal was limited to a few. It was already, however, a counterculture in miniature—a self-defined minority with a uniform dress and a common frame of reference. But unlike the mass counterculture of the late sixties that it helped to breed, the folk revival was characterized by earnestness and restraint. It was self-consciously opposed to the glitzy superficiality and addled consumerism it associated with America’s prevalent youth culture. In its place it offered something untainted by packaging, by commerce, something that was part of a greater and more enduring whole, something with a mission. The spectacle of white middle-class kids setting themselves apart from and in opposition to the society that had granted them privileges their parents hardly dreamed of puzzled and irritated many commentators (then as now). But what was clear from the beginning was that the critique of commercialism, the rejection of the manufactured pabulum of corporate America, wasn’t merely ideological. Young people came to the folk revival looking for a personal experience of a type they felt was denied to them elsewhere. They came looking for the authentic.

  And the princess and the prince discuss

  What’s real and what is not . . .

  —“Gates of Eden”

  What the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno called “the jargon of authenticity” had been present in the first folk revival, but it was elevated to a higher and wider status during the second. It was applied to musical performance, artistic purpose, personal style; it coursed through the shared understanding of history, tradition, politics, the “folk” and the “people,” and it levied existential demands: honesty was the touchtone. In manner and dress, unadorned plainness was preferred. Anything standardized or mass manufactured was despised (except, of course, acoustic guitars, folk magazines, and sheet music). When it came to musical subject matter, teenage melodrama was discarded in favor of venerable sagas of work and physical hardship and early death; these songs crystallized the struggles of past generations; they were seen as rooted in real experience, tinged with hard-earned wisdom. Not surprisingly, for white, middle-class folksingers who had grown up in the fifties, and were singing the songs of the thirties and forties, the demand for authenticity was, from the beginning, a paradoxical one.

  The word derives from the Greek autos (“self”) plus hentos (“to make”). In common use it means something original, genuine, not a copy or simulation, something that is what it professes to be. But ever since the rise of industrial production, the spread of market relations and the congregation of humanity in vast anonymous cities, the authentic has carried additional connotations that make it both less precise and more potent. The world was no longer experienced as “self-made” but as an aggregate of products and conditions produced by remote forces. There was an emotional absence, difficult to define, but widely felt, a sense that there was something artificial in the mass culture of industrial society. During the nineteenth century, it became commonplace to counterpose the organic to the mechanical, the rooted to the cosmopolitan. Thus the idea of the authentic emerged both in opposition to and out of the heart of capitalist society. In the conditions of mid-twentieth-century America, its appeal was powerfully reinforced.

  Ever since it began to be named, collected and catalogued in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, folk music (and folk dances and customs) had been seen as a carrier of authenticity—organic, rooted and therefore somehow an antidote to the sense of alienation that was the curse of modern society. A revived folk culture promised to heal the historic breach between production and consumption, performer and audience. It promised community and continuity—both of which were felt to be achingly absent from consumer culture that emerged in the fifties.

  Adorno argued that the jargon of authenticity was an illusory, self-indulgent, and futile attempt to evade the dissatisfactions of capitalist society. “While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates.” In a passage that could easily be applied to the folk revival (and the later counterculture) “the stereotypes of the jargon . . . seem to guarantee that one is not doing what in fact one is doing—bleating with the crowd.”37 Or as Dylan put it, “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”

  The folk revival notion of what constituted authentic folk music was itself an artificial construct, strongly influenced by the work of Lomax, Smith, and others. Two great folk artists, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, had been exploring the expressive capacity of the electric guitar for years, but they unplugged for the folk boom and reinvented themselves, briefly, as acoustic troubadours. Dylan arrived on the scene wearing his Woody Guthrie mask—a mask of authenticity. As early as 1960, the Village’s bohemian heritage was being packaged for tourists; Dylan himself made a few dollars posing as a “beatnik” for souvenir photographs.

  Visiting Guthrie, he met Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, recently returned from five years in Europe. Dylan already knew and admired his recordings. Elliott had a vast repertoire of cowboy songs and had made himself the major living interpreter of Guthrie’s works, though he showed little interest in the politics that fired his hero. But Elliott didn’t just sing the songs, he lived them. In his vocal delivery and his demeanor both on and off stage, he seemed the authentic embodiment of hard traveling individualism. But Ramblin’ Jack, it turned out, much to Dylan’s amazed amusement, had been born Elliott Adnopoz, the Brooklyn-reared son of a Jewish doctor. Did this make him a phony? Dylan never thought so. In fact, Rambin Jack’s example helped liberate him. From his teenage years, Jack had hit the road and immersed himself in the world he’d learned about from the songs. He surrendered himself to the tradition and made the tradition his own. He might be an invention, but he was a self-invention; he had paid his dues, and his stage presence was charged with a frisson of authenticity that performers with more authentic pedigrees sometimes lacked.

  Dylan was alert to the perils of authenticity—and conjured some of his best songs out of its conundrums. Today, “authenticity therapy” is offered on the Web; ready-faded, “stone-washed” jeans are a commonplace; cars, colas, and microwave meals are flogged to us as “authentic.” For the critic Jean Baudrillard, the invocation of the authentic is the signal that we are in the realm of the fake-authentic. But the postmodern permutation of off-the-peg identities, without regard to the demands of authenticity, has in turn bred its own dissatisfactions. The desire to reclaim the self from an inhuman social reality, to find meaning in something bigger, other, truer, older, is more powerful than ever—because more than ever the world is experienced as anything but self-made. These are longings that corporate branding cannot satisfy.

  For some in the folk revival, authenticity consisted in truth-to-history. Arrangements and instrumentation were dutifully researched and the results shared with audiences. Dylan belonged to a different school. He was never the kind of folksinger who sought to disappear from the song and present it as an artifact. His approach, from the beginning, was with the blues singers for whom adding yourself to the tradition was what the tradition was all about.

  Dylan’s understanding of that tradition was enhanced by the release in 1961 of King of the Delta Blues Singers, a collection of recordings made by Robert Johnson in the mid-thirties. While he was preparing his From Spirituals to Swing concert, John Hammond had stumbled across Johnson’s discs in the Columbia storeroom and was startled by their power. He hoped to bring Johnson north to join his Carnegie Hall company, but the young bluesman had vanished from sight. Hammond shared his latest enthusiasm with Alan Lomax, who went hunting for Johnson on his next Mississippi field trip, only to learn from his mother that the prodigy had died in mysterious circumstances.38 For two decades Johnson’s work lay in the vaults until Hammond persuaded Columbia to issue the 1961 compilation, which was to influence young musicians on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Hammond introduced Dylan to the album, which appears
amid other in-group totems on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. “The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window,” Dylan said, years later. “Johnson’s words made my nerves quiver . . . big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction.” There was an anguished complexity in Johnson’s art that struck listeners of Dylan’s generation as distinctly modern. This was a man about whom next to nothing was known, yet who was there in full on the record, in every nuance, in every drawl, in every bent guitar note. For Dylan and his friends, Johnson became an icon of the kind of authenticity they were seeking, an authenticity in which the individual and the music formed a seamless whole. After listening to the Columbia reissue, Dylan added Johnson’s “Ramblin on My Mind” and “Kindhearted Woman” to his set. He told Izzy Young he was writing a song called “The Death of Robert Johnson.”39 He later inserted lyrics from Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway” into “Corrina, Corrina” (“I got a bird that whistles . . .”). In many ways, Johnson embodied Dylan’s emerging aesthetic. In the free-verse liner notes he wrote for a Joan Baez album, he ruminated on why it was that he had been so resistant to “Joanie’s” voice and its pure, sweet tone: The only beauty’s ugly, man

  The crackin’ shakin’ breakin’ sounds’re

  The only beauty I understand

  In those early days in the Village Dylan was befriended by Dave Van Ronk, only five years his senior but with a wealth of experience Dylan could only envy. Growing up in an Irish working-class environment in Brooklyn, he sought refuge from a regimented Catholic education in music—jazz and especially trad jazz, New Orleans style, the purist’s choice. From there he moved on to the blues, fashioned a growling vocal style and plumbed the mysteries of the acoustic guitar. He was happily passing his time in the merchant marine when Odetta convinced him he could make a living as a folksinger. Van Ronk became one of the first white, city-based musicians of his era to emulate the expressive vocal and finger-picking styles of the old records. He felt no shame in being a white man singing the blues, since he held himself to the same high standards as the original blues masters. “Van Ronk’s voice was like rusted shrapnel and he could get a lot of subtle ramification out of it,” Dylan recalled, “delicate, gentle, rough, explosive, sometimes all within the same song.” But it was the man’s personality even more than his music that awed Dylan. “No puppet strings on him ever. He was big, sky high, and I looked up to him. He came from the land of giants.”

  Unlike some of Dylan’s Village cohorts, Van Ronk never begrudged the younger man his later success. He remembered him as an enthralling performer, even before he wrote any of his own songs, with “a gung-ho, unrelenting quality, a take-no-prisoners approach that was really very effective.” Dylan learned from Van Ronk’s repertoire and technique and soaked up what he needed from Van Ronk’s knowledge of poetry and history. Somewhere along the way Van Ronk had become a socialist with a decidedly anti-Stalinist bent (in the mid-sixties he was a member of the Trotskyist Workers League).40 In 1959, he had collaborated with an anarchist printer named Dick Ellington to produce The Bosses’ Songbook—Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent, which included the “Ballad of a Party Folk Singer”:41 Their material is corny, but their motives are the purest

  And their spirits will never be broke

  And they go right on with their noble crusade

  Of teaching folk songs to the folk

  Van Ronk was skeptical about the politics of the folk revival, not least its romance with America. “There is this social patriotism running though all of them, but really less in Dylan. It makes me sick, because I’m an internationalist myself. I don’t think the American people are any special repository of goodness and duty, nor are they a special repository of evil.” Van Ronk’s little anti-Stalinist songbook included a revision of Woody Guthrie’s anthem surprisingly close in sprit to the two excised verses of the original 1940 composition:This land is their land, it is not our land

  From their rich apartments to their Cadillac carland

  From their Wall Street office to their Hollywood Starland

  This land is not for you and me.

  The “America” of the popular front had resurfaced in the folk revival of the late fifties and early sixties. But superimposed over its legacy was the ubiquitous Cold War liberal narrative of social progress, of the rational superiority and inexorable spread of “American values.” What was assumed by this narrative was assumed by the young people entering the folk revival. It was their starting point. This liberal faith in “American ideals” had a more directly formative impact on these young people’s consciousness than the heritage of the thirties and forties, which they had to seek out (to the disaffected minority, it was the seeking out that made it attractive). For them the search for an alternative America was less politically programmatic than it was for Seeger or Lomax, and owed much to the rising discontents of the new consumer society. Smothered beneath the vapidly smiling billboards and the cornucopia of household goods and televisions sets there must be, they believed—prompted simultaneously by faith in and disaffection with their native land—another America, a truer and more admirable America. Talking to Izzy Young in October 1961, the still unknown Dylan claimed, “I can offer songs that tell something of this America. No foreign songs. The songs of the land that aren’t offered over TV or radio and very few records. . . .”42

  What Van Ronk identified as “the social patriotism” of the folk revival could be heard in its routine appeals to American values and traditions, its dogged attempts to construct an idealized American “people” free of their rulers’ sins. In the broader political discourse of the era it wore many guises: the notion that America is the embodiment of an idea, universal and cleansed of ethnicity, the belief that America enjoys a special destiny among nations, the assumption that America is somehow the theater of the human soul, in which all human traits and capacities stand naked. It was a package that weighed heavily on the activists and the folksingers, including Dylan, as they began their journey through the sixties.

  Asked to explain the rise of the folk revival, Van Ronk said “it was all part and parcel of the big left turn middle-class college students were making. . . . So we all owe it to Rosa Parks.”43 More precisely, they owed it all to the student sit-in movement launched by four young African-Americans at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. Within weeks the movement had spread to other cities, notably Nashville, and at a conference of the new activists held in Raleigh in April, SNCC was formed, committed to smashing Jim Crow through nonviolent direct action. In its early years it was saturated in an ethic of personal moral witness and defined its mission in quasi-religious terms. It was also, from the outset, more militant than the other civil rights groups and more immersed in the grass roots. “We did go out and live and suffer with the everyday people,” John Lewis recalled.44 The black students brought together by SNCC were new and unexpected agents of social transformation. In the beginning, they had no institutional base and no support or recognition from the media. Nonetheless, their initiatives immutably altered the political landscape. They redrew the boundaries of the possible. They tore the veil from American society and revealed the power of mass action. Everything that happened subsequently in America in the sixties emanates from their movement. Dylan, the folk revival, and the youth culture in general were all transformed by its emergence, and their evolution was profoundly tied to its subsequent fate.

  For all the efforts of Lomax, Hammond, and the Almanac Singers, music was rarely more than an occasional accompaniment to the social movements of the thirties and forties. But in the southern United States in the early sixties, song came into its own. It was no longer an intermission in the serious politics; it was a motivator, an explainer, and as much a binding force as ideology or program. Above all, it was a weapon in the ceaseless battle against white terror that had to be waged town by town throughout the South. “The fear down here is tremendous,” SNCC fi
eld secretary Phyllis Martin explained. “I didn’t know whether I’d be shot at or stoned or what. But when the singing started I forgot all that.”45

  Song took on a special importance in the civil rights movement because of the African-American musical tradition, with its wealth of collective expressions of suffering and celebration, as well as the conscious efforts of political activists, black and white, to place music at the service of the movement. The insurgents adopted left-wing standards—“The Hammer Song,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Which Side Are You On?”—as well as fitting familiar R&B and pop tunes with new topical lyrics. Ray Charles’s “I’m Movin’ On” became “Jim Crow ’s Movin’ On;” Little Willie John’s “Leave My Kitten Alone” became “Leave Segregation Alone.” But most of all, they plundered the gospel tradition.46

  “We Shall Overcome” was derived from Charles Tindley’s gospel song “I’ll Overcome Some Day” (1900), whose melody has the same nineteenth-century spiritual base as “No More Auction Block” (a critical song for Dylan), and harks back to the work songs of the southern plantations. Pete Seeger tells the story of the song’s evolution:In 1946, several hundred employees of the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, South Carolina were on strike. They sang on the picket line to keep up their spirits. Lucille Simmons started singing the song on the picket line and changed one important word from I to we. Zilphia Horton learned it when a group of strikers visited the Highlander Folk School, the Labor Education Center in Tennessee. She taught it to me and we published it as “We Shall Overcome” in our songletter, People’s Songs Bulletin, in 1952. I taught it to Guy Carawan. . . . Guy introduced the song to the founding convention of SNCC in North Carolina [in 1960]. It swept the country.47