One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side.
In defining the current nuclear competition with the Soviets as the most recent episode in a history of murder and hypocrisy, Dylan spews contempt on the liberal justifications for the Cold War and U.S. overseas interventions. In this song, Dylan expresses the embitterment of a generation of politically innocent young Americans who discovered with shock that the people they had been told were the good guys were actually something else entirely—the experience eloquently described by SDS president Carl Oglesby at a demonstration against the Vietnam War in October 1965: “Others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”72 In response to the growing horrors of Vietnam, more and more were to question their country’s historical record. The “social patriotism” that had inspired activists in the first half of the sixties came to seem naive or worse, and the radical analysis and uncompromising contempt of songs like “With God on Our Side” more truthful, politically and emotionally.
The Cold War and the bomb were always, for Dylan, as much a state of mind as a geopolitical reality. In the coming years, the ban-the-bomb movement would give way to the much larger anti-Vietnam War movement, which Dylan would shun. But the horror and absurdity of nuclear weapons competition, the insanity of a system that claimed “a world war can be won,” continued to haunt his music.
In April 1963, Dylan penned yet another song about the death of a black man. “Who Killed Davey Moore?”m is a rapid response to the fatal outcome of Moore’s featherweight title fight against Sugar Ramos (Moore died on March 23; Dylan premiered the song on April 12.). It is a concise but sweeping analysis of the ethical complicity of a whole society in the (avoidable) death of a single man. The cock-robin refrain is used to nominate and expose the guilty. One by one, Dylan allows them to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Anyone familiar with boxing and its history will recognize all the routine rationalizations, as the referee, the crowd, the manager, the gamblers, and the boxing writers wash their hands of the dead boxer’s blood: “Boxing ain’t to blame, / There’s just as much danger in a football game . . . Fist fighting is here to stay, / It’s just the old American way.”
In the final verse he focuses on the winner of the fatal fight. Dylan tells us he “came here from Cuba’s shore / Where boxing ain’t allowed no more.” This line got a big cheer when Dylan debuted the song at his milestone Town Hall concert (an indication of the explicitly leftist identity that bound Dylan and his audience at this point). But neither Dylan nor the audience had got it quite right. Revolutionary Cuba did not ban boxing; on the contrary, in the coming years Cuba would produce a rich array of world-dominating boxing talent, from Teofilo Stevenson to Felix Savon. The vehicle for this sporting efflorescence was a planned program of state intervention and funding. What Cuba had banned was “professional boxing,” prizefighting. Despite the error, Dylan was wise enough to place money at the center of boxing’s ethical morass. “I hit him, yes, it’s true, / But that’s what I am paid to do.” And in its portrait of the complicity of spectators in the violence of the spectacle, of the individual in the corruption of his society, the song foreshadows the more ambitious work Dylan was to produce later in the decade.
On April 16, 1963, Martin Luther King wrote from his jail cell in Birmingham:It’s better to go to jail in dignity than accept segregation in humility. . . . There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.73
Two weeks later, on May 2, four thousand black children marched through the city center demanding an end to Jim Crow. The subsequent police assault was broadcast worldwide. On May 10, Birmingham’s white authorities were forced to accept a deal with King and the movement. The victory renewed civil rights agitation across the South. In the ten weeks that followed there were 758 demonstrations and 14,733 arrests in 186 cities.74
One of those cities was Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, where local NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was leading an increasingly militant fight against segregation.n “In the racial picture, things will never be as they were,” Evers warned a local television audience, as the sit-ins and arrests mounted, “History has reached a turning point, here and over the world.”75 On the evening of June 11, President Kennedy told a nationwide TV audience that he too had come to believe that “a great change is at hand.” Under pressure from the actions in the South, and their impact in the North, Kennedy announced that he would send a major civil rights bill to Congress—a great triumph for the movement. Later that night, Evers returned home from one of the endless series of meetings through which that movement was sustained. As he stepped out of his car, he was shot to death by a hidden assassin. Three and half weeks later, on July 5, the twenty-one-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi, to give his support to a SNCC voter registration drive.
For decades, the black population in the Delta country around Greenwood had been terrorized by one of the most tyrannical white supremacist regimes in the South. It was considered impossible to organize these downtrodden rural workers, people who knew only powerlessness and isolation. Bob Moses, whose selfless dedication was already legendary among SNCC workers, had arrived there in the spring of 1962, determined to crack open the monolith.76 In June of that year, he took his first batch of local volunteers to Highlander for training. Two months later, the SNCC office in Greenwood was besieged and ransacked. One of Moses’s new recruits, a sharecropper (and singer) named Fannie Lou Hamer, was punished for the crime of seeking to register to vote by being kicked off the plantation where she had lived for eighteen years.
In an attempt to starve out resistance, state officials blocked the distribution of federal food supplies in two Delta counties. On the brink of famine, the sharecroppers fought back. The turnouts for SNCC’s mass meetings grew, as did the numbers seeking to register. It was a show of black defiance unprecedented in the post-Reconstruction Delta. In February 1963, gunshots were fired at an SNCC worker sitting in a car on a country road. SNCC activists from around the country poured into Greenwood, including executive secretary Jim Forman, a onetime student activist from Chicago who had visited the South as a journalist and enlisted in the struggle. Throughout March 1963, amid shootings and arson attacks, Moses and Forman organized protests, marches, and meetings, and refused to scale down the voter registration challenges. Medgar Evers visited the town and was soon followed by Dick Gregory and reporters from the national press. Having been attacked by police dogs in the course of an attempt to register voters, eight SNCC workers, including Moses and Forman, found themselves convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced to eight months in prison. They elected to serve the time rather than appeal. However, they were quickly released as a result of a compromise deal cut by the federal government (behind the SNCC workers’ backs) with the Greenwood authorities.
The movement in the Delta soon ground to a halt. Despite promises by the White House that the perpetrators of racist violence would be brought to account, the Justice Department dropped its suit against Greenwood in late May. In early June, in nearby Winona, local cops jailed and brutally assaulted SNCC activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer. They were on their way back from a training session at Highlander—whose premises were themselves soon raided and padlocked by state authorities, then burned to the ground.o
So by the first week of July 1963, the beleaguered Greenwood movement was in need of outside support and attention, and Dylan’s visit promised both. It was the actor-singer Theodore Bikel’s idea that Dylan “should get a first-hand impression of the struggle in the South.” He approached Albert Grossman with the proposal, and when Grossman complained about the cost, Bikel wrote out a check. He and Dylan flew to Atlanta and then on to Jackson, where they were met by two SNCC worke
rs who drove them to Greenwood. Here they joined Pete Seeger, Len Chandler, and the Freedom Singers, who had all come down to sing at the rally scheduled for the next morning. Throughout the journey, Bikel told Shelton, Dylan was quiet, scribbling notes on stray pieces of paper, as was his habit. “His political attitudes were less strongly formed than many of ours. It seemed a personal thing with him to be going down into the deep South.”77
Dylan did not arrive in Greenwood unprepared. After all, this was the land where the blues began, as Alan Lomax called it. It was the land of Dylan’s early masters, Bukka White, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and John Lee Hooker. It was the land where Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, and Emmett Till had all met their fates. Through the music and the history, Dylan already knew the Delta as a place of suffering and disgrace as well as tortured resilience. But this close-up experience of Jim Crow and the people who had risen to challenge it was something different. Bikel recounts Dylan’s distress at his first sight of whites-only water fountains and toilets and the awe he expressed at the courage of the activists, many in the spartan SNCC uniform of work shirts and dungarees. Briefly, he shared the austerity and fear that made up their daily lives. That first night in Greenwood he slept in a church loft. The next morning he lay flat in the back of a car as he was driven the three miles out of town to attend a rally at a farm owned by the redoubtable McGhee family, who in Stokely Carmichael’s words, “asked and gave no quarter . . . that was one family that never ‘took low’ for anyone. There was no quit in them.”
The midday heat was intense, and the rally was postponed till later in the afternoon. In the meanwhile, Dylan conversed with Forman and Moses, as well as Julian Bond and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who told Shelton that it was at Greenwood that she felt closest to Dylan. “The Greenwood people didn’t know that Pete, Theo and Bob were well known. They were just happy to be getting support. But they really liked Dylan down there in the cotton country.” According to Bikel, Dylan admitted to the black farmers that “he hadn’t met a colored person till he was nine years old, and he apologized that he had so little to offer.”
At dusk, the visiting performers clambered onto the back of a truck next to a cotton patch and performed for an audience of some 300 black people. They were watched by police in patrol cars and Klan members—and recorded for posterity by New York filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, who was on hand with a TV crew.p Dylan chose this moment to unveil his response to the Medgar Evers killing. By all accounts, the topicality of the song gripped the audience—some of whom would have seen Evers himself in recent months. Even more, the political analysis exercised a strong appeal, as Johnson Reagon has confirmed. In contrast to the moralistic and utopian rhetoric favored by the movement at this time, Dylan’s song argued that racist violence was the product of political manipulation and an unjust social system.q
. . . the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
Racism is neither a natural nor an inexplicable phenomenon. “The poor white man” is taught:That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’s in
Dylan’s exposé of the white elite’s divide-and-rule strategy and his insistence on the link between poverty and racism struck powerful chords among the SNCC activists, whose thinking about the nature of the challenge they faced was undergoing rapid evolution. The concert finished with Dylan joining the Freedom Singers, Seeger, Bikel, and Chandler for renditions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome.” (Later that summer, the performance was to be reprised by much the same company at both the Newport Festival finale and the Washington march.)
Dylan’s encounter with the era’s premier agents of social change was brief but seems to have left a deep impression. He certainly listened carefully to the Forman-penned, Lewis-delivered SNCC speech later that summer in Washington, and over the years he made many respectful references to the people he met in Greenwood. Soon after his stay in one of America’s poorest and most oppressed communities, Dylan was whisked off to a Columbia Records sales conference in Puerto Rico. He chose to entertain the assembled reps by playing “With God on Our Side” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” (its second public outing). The southern contingent, especially, didn’t like it; many walked out. That didn’t seem to bother Dylan. In contrast, when he was asked to put on a tie so that he could join the Columbia execs at an expensive restaurant, he exploded.78
Meanwhile, the SNCC workers in Greenwood made little headway. In the six months following the federal government’s deal with the white officials, only 590 blacks succeeded in registering to vote. On election day, white voters outnumbered black by 33 to 1—in a county where the black population was twice that of the white. The frustrations of Greenwood led many in SNCC to rethink their assumptions. The problem they faced was not so much redneck prejudice as reactionary institutions: from the courthouse to the White House. Forman argued that the movement should turn to “challenging the political structure of the country.” Moses conceived his “white shield” strategy, and began recruiting white northern students for what was to become the Mississippi Summer project of 1964. In a way, Moses had decided that what was needed to protect the movement in Greenwood and similar places was not one, but many Bob Dylans, and not just for a fleeting celebrity visit.
Sometime during that early summer of 1963 Dylan wrote “North Country Blues.” Unlike “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” it’s a formally conservative exercise in first-person narrative. But in matching his tale of Mississippi to one of Minnesota, Dylan brought the systemic critique of “Only a Pawn” back home. The voice in the song belongs to a woman in an iron-mining town in the Mesabi range in northern Minnesota. Her life is the story of a community married to an industry. She speaks of the dangers of mining, of accidental death, of early marriage and child-rearing, and of times when “the lunch bucket filled every season” before “The work was cut down / To a half a day’s shift with no reason.” Through her tale, Dylan shows us, close-up, how decisions made afar, in the name of market forces, shatter lives.
They complained in the East,
They are paying too high.
They say that your ore ain’t worth digging,
That it’s much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing.
“North Country Blues” must be one of the earliest musical protests against what’s come to be known as globalization. Dylan’s portrait of a working-class community broken by unemployment, and the drink and depression that follow, has proved dismally prescient: the narrative of “North Country Blues” has been repeated across the United States and Europe; it’s become the common experience of the world. (The song anticipates Bruce Springsteen’s “Youngstown” by thirty years.)
The summer is gone,
The ground’s turning cold,
The stores one by one they’re a-foldin’.
My children will go
As soon as they grow.
Well, there ain’t nothing here now to hold them.
In a way, this impersonal tale is one of Dylan’s most personal: this is a song about his home turf and some of the people he grew up with. But the song is not just a montage of personal observations; it grows out of the application of those observations to a political framework. In “North Country Blues,” the community is broken by an economic system—the same system that pits white against black. The system that murdered Medgar Evers.
Three weeks after the giant march on Washington, the racists replied. On a Sunday morning, the 16th Street church in Birmingham, which had served as an organizing center during the victorious spring campaign, was bombed. Four African-American girls were killed. The naked brutality of the act—and its ramifications in the context of the historic victory won at Birmingham earlier in the year—elicited songs f
rom Dylan’s friends Phil Ochs and Richard Fariña (“On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine, / And the choirs kept singing of Freedom”), jazz from John Coltrane, poetry from Langston Hughes, and prose from James Baldwin. And it transformed Nina Simone, a classically trained pianist with an eclectic range of musical interests. Simone had been born in the South but had moved to New York to study at Juilliard; she had already recorded jazz, blues, and Broadway tunes. As a black woman who defied musical categories, Simone had long been acquainted with the realities of power in white-dominated America. But the Birmingham bombing put an end to her patience. She wrote her first protest song, “Mississippi Goddam,” and sent it off to Broadside. “It erupted out of me,” she recalled.
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You’re all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you any more
You keep on saying “Go slow!”
“Go slow!”
Do things gradually
“do it slow”
But bring more tragedy
“do it slow”
“Mississippi Goddam” was an uncompromising outcry not just against a racist atrocity, but against a nation and its liberal defenders. But Simone dedicated far more than a song to the movement. From the autumn of 1963, she was ever-present on the front lines in the South. Bernice Johnson Reagon said she “captured the warrior energy that was present in the people. The fighting people.”79
As usual, Dylan shied away from direct comment on big events. But in the weeks following the Birmingham bombing he wrote “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and he never wrote better.
The story came from a newspaper clipping Gordon Friesen gave to Dylan, one of many the Broadside co-editor offered the singer as possible sources for topical songs.80 In February 1963, Hattie Carroll, a middle-aged black woman, had died after being struck with a cane by William Zantzinger, a young white man from a wealthy family. The incident had taken place at a charity ball, where Zantzinger was a patron and Carroll served behind the bar. In August, Zantzinger was sentenced to six months in prison for his offense. It was a report of the sentencing that sparked Dylan’s song.
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