The Highlander Folk Center, founded by radical Christians in the thirties, functioned as a training ground, retreat, and political workshop for the labor and civil rights movements. It was one of the few places in the South where blacks and whites were encouraged to meet and organize together. As a result, it was under constant attack. Billboards went up around the south displaying a picture of Martin Luther King at Highlander with the caption Communist Training School. The House Un-American Activities Committee held a series of hearings into Highlander’s alleged role in subverting the American way.48
Patient, undaunted, and far-seeing, Highlander launched an early outreach project teaching literacy skills to blacks who wanted to pass the voter registration tests. One of its first schools was organized in the Sea Islands off the coast of Charleston. (The islands were home to many of the tobacco workers who had adapted “I’ll Overcome.”) In 1956, at a class on John’s Island, Guy Carawan, a white folksinger and activist, sang an old spiritual already favored in the labor movement: “Keep Your Hand on the Plow, Hold On.” A local woman, Alice Wine, told him that she knew a different chorus—“Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” In the coming years, the song was reworked by many hands, and emerged as one of the major anthems of the movement. 49
The gospel original—a typically idiosyncratic version of which Dylan recorded on his first album—aims to exhort and uplift. It offers redemption from current tribulations in a future that can be attained through spiritual striving.
I’m going to heaven and I hain’t a-going to stop,
There hain’t going to be no stumbling-block.
As in other freedom songs, there’s a great deal carried over from the original: above all, the sense of determination. And some of the Biblical imagery proved remarkably apposite. “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” retains the line:Paul and Silas, bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail
But the new version transforms the very nature of the struggle described in “Gospel Plow.”
The only thing we did wrong,
Stayed in the wilderness a day too long.
But the one thing we did right,
Was the day we started to fight.
This lyric transition from spiritual to secular, individual to collective, passivity to activism was, in part, the work of particular individuals engaged in concrete social struggles. It was a transition involving personal and political interaction between the Sea Islands, Highlander, and the sit-ins and freedom rides.
The new anthems from the front lines of the civil rights struggle in the South quickly received a hearing in New York. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC published volumes of them. In late 1960, Folkways released a Nashville Sit-In album compiled by Guy Carawan and the Highlander people, featuring the refashioned “We Shall Overcome,” and followed it up with 1961: We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins. Folkways may have been a small, specialist label, but even so, never before had the music of resistance been recorded and disseminated so instantaneously. Both of these records would have been known to Dylan, who in any case had heard the songs at hootenannies and benefits.
During the winter of 1961-62, the city of Albany, in southwest Georgia, witnessed one of the most bitter and costly battles of the early civil rights years. Wave after wave of protest action resulted in nearly a thousand blacks jailed, but no tangible victories. However, in this struggle, large numbers of older blacks joined the students, and singing acquired a new centrality. “The harmonies and intensities of naked voices became a trademark of the Albany movement,” wrote historian Taylor Branch. Among the songs that sustained the Albany community in its trials were “Oh Freedom,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and the defiant “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.” All were featured on an LP, Freedom in the Air—Albany, Georgia, produced by Alan Lomax and Guy Carawan for Vanguard in 1962.
Out of the Albany campaign emerged the SNCC Freedom Singers—among them, the nineteen-year-old Bernice Johnson, who was studying music at the local state college. As a result of her role in the protests, Johnson was expelled from college and fired from her job. She plunged full-time into the movement and married SNCC organizer Cordell Reagon, also a member of the Freedom Singers. (As Bernice Johnson Reagon, she later founded the female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.) Looking back on the Albany experience, she recalled the stylistic changes the freedom songs underwent as they were taken up by a genuine mass movement:A lot of the older people in the Albany movement were entrenched in older black cultural tradition and not as much into the black culture you’ll find in the colleges—rhythm and blues and arranged spirituals. A lot of the sit-in songs were out of the rhythm and blues idiom or the arranged spiritual idiom. Those songs, as they went through Albany, Georgia, got brought back to the root level of black choral traditional music.50
From Albany, the Freedom Singers carried the message far and wide. They sang in halls and churches and streets and jails. They also sang on northern college campuses, where they became, in Julian Bond’s words, SNCC’s “public face.” They used the songs to explain the movement to an audience bred, for the most part, in relative comfort and at a safe distance from the cruelties of Jim Crow. They provided, in Johnson Reagon’s phrase, “a singing newspaper,” simultaneously raising funds and consciousness. Dylan met them during their visits to New York in 1962. Johnson Reagon sang at the Carnegie Hall hootenanny at which Dylan premiered “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
The freedom songs, more even than the example of Guthrie, inspired Dylan to adapt traditional material to new ends, specifically the ends of political intervention. It was the great participatory drama of the civil rights movement that infused Dylan, and others, with the desire, confidence, and capacity to make the old traditions anew, as Alan Lomax had demanded. It also stirred deeper longings. “Singing voiced the basic position of the movement, of taking action on your life,” said Johnson Reagon. That mingling of the movement, the songs and the lure of self-fulfilment unleashed the creative energies of the folk revival and its major artist.
In their attempts to exercise their basic rights in a peaceful and dignified manner, the black youth of the South were met by violent reaction, often supported by state agencies. Vincent Harding wrote of the inner cost of this experience: “Every time they smashed away some obstacle to black freedom, and equality, another larger, newly perceived hindrance loomed before them, challenging the last ounce of their strength and their spirit.” This dynamic of aspiration and frustration, hope and anger informs Dylan’s music throughout the protest period, and haunts it for years after.
The Congress of Racial Equality had been founded in 1942 by a small group of Gandhian socialists, among them A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin. In 1947, the group launched the Journey of Reconciliation, an early attempt to desegregate interstate public transport by nonviolent direct action. Nearly extinguished in the fifties, CORE chapters in the northern cities reemerged in the wake of the sit-ins in the South. In late 1961 the organization relaunched the journey of reconciliation as the freedom rides, which met with well-publicized violence as they made their way south. Along with SNCC (based mainly in the South), CORE was the organization for people who wanted to do something at the grass roots, who wanted to participate directly in social change. Unburdened by Stalinism and Cold War liberalism, self-consciously interracial, it drew in increasing numbers of young activists, both black and white.
One of them was Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend, who booked the unknown singer into a CORE benefit gig to be held in February 1962. Dylan decided to write something for the occasion. The result was “The Death of Emmett Till,” his first protest song. Dropping by the Folklore Center, he boasted to Izzy Young that it was “the best thing I’ve ever written” (not saying much at the time). Two weeks later, he sang it on WBAI, to an enthusiastic response from program host Cynthia Gooding. Dylan never released the song and soon dismissed it as “bullshit.”51 It is certainly heavy-handed and sappy (its fina
l verse is an excruciating example of the social patriotism Van Ronk decried). But the choice of subject was an interesting one. In 1956, at the age of fourteen, the Chicago-based Till had been brutally murdered by racists while on a visit to Mississippi. Dylan was born in the same year as Till, as was Muhammad Ali, who often cited the Till murder as a critical moment in the formation of his own racial consciousness. It was also pivotal in the life of Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi who investigated the case and watched in helpless horror as the perpetrators walked free.
From the beginning, Dylan had little interest in dreams of interracial harmony or paeans to patiently born suffering. What spurs his writing is racist violence, the brutality and madness of the white backlash. In 1961, Dylan regularly performed a version of Lord Buckley’s satirical rant, “Black Cross,” about an intelligent black man murdered by idiot whites. He followed “Emmett Till” with “The Ballad of Donald White,” the life story of a black man speaking from death row. “They killed him because he couldn’t find no room in life,” Dylan explained. “They killed him and when they did I lost some of my room in my life. When are some people gonna wake up and see that sometimes people aren’t really their enemies, but their victims?”52
In the two years following “Emmett Till,” some 200 original compositions poured from Dylan’s pen, including the protest songs that made his name. He dealt with race, war, class, and social change itself. He wrote about poverty, violence, outcasts, prisoners, friendship, and love. Because Dylan so decisively and rapidly repudiated his protest songs, critics and biographers have been tempted to dismiss them as simplistic and derivative, somehow not the “real Dylan.” But these songs are not only an immense achievement in their own right, they are the foundation of Dylan’s subsequent evolution. And they are as personal—as deeply felt, as much an expression of the artist’s personality—as anything else he wrote. That’s one reason they still carry a powerful charge.
There was nothing new in setting topical lyrics to familiar or traditional tunes. Black soldiers in the Civil War did it with “John Brown’s Body.” In the 1880s, miners rewrote “The Vacant Chair” (about the Lincoln assassination) as “The Miners’ Lifeguard”; the IWW turned “Just Before the Battle Mother” (a Civil War ballad) into “I’m Too Old to Be a Scab.” Joe Hill, the master of the art—he remade “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” as “The Preacher and the Slave”—explained his thinking:A song is learned by heart and repeated over and over, and if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.53
An echo of that patronizing populism can be heard in the Almanac Singers’ advice to “sing the truth as simply as you can and repeat it as many times as it has to be repeated.” Dylan’s approach was different. He wasn’t out to educate or agitate, but to participate and to express himself. As he explained in the Newport Folk Festival program of 1963:I can’t sing “John Johanna”f cause it’s his story an’ his people’s story—
I gotta sing “With God on My Side” cause it’s my story an’ my people’s story—
Dylan arrived as a political actor with knowledge and ideas gleaned largely from records. The songs led him to the politics and the politics unlocked his songwriting gifts. The struggles over equality and peace unfolding around him provided an objective correlative for the feelings coursing through him. In his study of the Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus criticizes the protest songs on the grounds that there are “no individuals in them,” only social types. Not so: they are filled with the nascent individuality of Dylan himself. Remember that he was composing his bittersweet, love-hate songs—“Don’t Think Twice,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “One Too Many Mornings”—at the same time and in much the same artistic vein as his “finger pointin’” songs: moodily aggrieved and tenderly utopian at the same time.
Later, Dylan liked to claim that he was only “jumping into the scene to be heard” and irritated Joan Baez by telling her he wrote “Masters of War” for the money. Biographers who take this claim seriously underestimate Dylan’s impish perversity—and misjudge the context. In the years during which Dylan wrote his protest songs, the overwhelming majority of white American youth subscribed to opinions that ranged only within the narrow band between deeply conservative and cautiously liberal. The politics he embraced in these songs were fashionable only among a small minority. That minority, however, was linked to a movement on the rise. This movement gave Dylan a stance from which to view a confusing world, a musical outlet for his inchoate emotions, and an appreciative audience. In these plainspoken democratic songs, Dylan was writing for and taking his place within a vanguard. There were easier ways to get attention or make a buck.
These topical songs have proved surprisingly durable. That they served in the first instance as instruments of self-expression for a particular young individual makes them no less authentic as expressions of a collective experience. On the contrary, Dylan’s songs live inside the historical moment in a way that more programmatic efforts do not. As a result, they live beyond that moment. They rise out of their era and speak to ours, not least because of Dylan’s hard-edged, increasingly radical political perspective.
As a teenager in Hibbing, Bob Dylan had been struck by the surreally inhuman logic of the fallout shelter boom—and in this he was not alone. In the late fifties, a small but significant section of American youth was getting worried about the bomb. In 1959, a Student Peace Union was formed, based on a rejection of both superpower blocs. Within a year it had chapters on one hundred campuses and boasted 3,000 national members. In the spring of 1960, to the surprise of the media and veterans of the Left alike, 1,000 New Yorkers—mostly college students—publicly defied the city’s annual civil defense drill, which they found both farcical and horrifying. Their anxieties were not assuaged when the new president, elected on a pledge to close a fictitious “missile gap” with the Soviets, boosted military spending and in April 1961 authorized the CIA-organized invasion of Cuba. In early 1962, a student march against nuclear testing drew five thousand to Washington—the biggest protest march in the capital since the thirties, and a harbinger of much that was to come. 54
Around the same time, shortly after he completed “Emmett Till,” Dylan told Izzy Young that he wanted to write “something about fallout and bomb testing.” But he “didn’t want it to be a slogan song. Too many of the protest songs are bad music. . . . The bomb songs, especially, are usually awkward and with bad music.” On February 22, Young wrote in his notebook: “Bob Dylan just rolled in and wants to sing a new song about fallout shelters [called] ‘Let Me Die in My Footsteps.’ . . .”g
The song is a marvelously determined, fresh-faced refusal to take part in the fraud of civil defense and the larger insanity of the nuclear weapons race. More than that, it uses a visceral reaction to a perverse social policy to make an argument that is both wider in political scope and more intimately personal. It sounds themes that reappear in Dylan’s work over many years and in many guises. The bomb shelters are symptoms of a life-fearing mentality: “some people thinkin’ that the end is close by / ’Stead of learnin’ to live they are learning to die.” The nuclear threat was part of the strategy through which we are ruled: “There’s always been people that have to cause fear / They’ve been talking of the war now for many long years.” And it was also the ultimate expression of a profoundly wrong turn in human development:
If I had rubies and riches and crowns
I’d buy the whole world and change things around
I’d throw all the guns and the tanks in the sea
For they are mistakes of a past history.
Dylan insists that we cannot leave our world to the experts and stakes a claim for the presumption of youth in a society whose elders are steering it to war: I don’t know if I’m smart but I think I can see
When someone is pullin
’ the wool over me
And in the spirit of Ginsberg, he counterposes the miracle of life to the institutions of death:Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood
Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood
In the song’s conclusion Dylan again invokes the “social patriotism” that irritated Van Ronk. The antidote to the fallout shelters can be found in: “Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho / Let every state in this union seep in your souls.” This was a straitjacket Dylan was soon to burst out of.
In February 1962, Pete Seeger took Dylan to meet Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, who were in the midst of launching their new “topical song magazine,” Broadside. Cunningham and Friesen were products of the labor battles of the thirties, had been involved with the Almanac Singers, and had preserved their political commitments through the isolation and calumny of the McCarthy years. Dylan played them a new composition, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a satire on anticommunist paranoia—which duly appeared in print in the new magazine’s first issue. Some have seen this episode as an example of the ever-cunning Dylan ingratiating himself with potential patrons. The boy was on the make in the Village and he wanted the veteran leftists’ support. Whatever truth there may be in that speculation, what is certain is that at this time defying and deriding anticommunism—not only a right-wing shibboleth but also one of the foundation stones of liberal support for the Cold War—would have been regarded by most as a serious career risk. And all Sis and Gordon had to offer was publication in a new, noncommercial, small circulation magazine. For the next year, Dylan attended the monthly Broadside songwriters’ meetings and contributed twenty-nine original “topical” songs to the magazine, which also published new work by Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Len Chandler, and Peter La Farge (whom Dylan considered the most skillful of the pack).55
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