Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Those are interpolations and interesting parallels. Without question, though, Copland contributed to the blend of music and downtown left-wing politics that in time produced the folk-music revival which in turn helped produce Bob Dylan. Long before Dylan had picked up Bound for Glory, Copland’s reinventions of folk songs and paeans to the common man had been part of the soundscape of 1940s and early 1950s America. The most familiar way of understanding Dylan’s musical origins goes back to Woody Guthrie. But another, strangely related way goes back to Aaron Copland, whose orchestral work raises some of the same conundrums that Dylan’s songs do—about art and politics, simplicity and difficulty, compromise and genius, love and theft.

  Those connections might have been clearer long before Dylan played “Hoe-Down” in 2001 had Copland acknowledged, more than he did, that he and some of his closest associates had been downtown left-wing composers and performers. Yet because of the course of Copland’s career in the late 1940s and after—when he broke from the pro-Communist Left, touched up his political past, and became a widely beloved elder statesman—that link was almost invisible, especially to Dylan and the rising generation.

  Copland’s music moved in both familiar and startlingly fresh directions after World War II. He worked on new experiments with jazz and choral music as well as further compositions in the “imposed simplicity” style. But he also turned to writing with the twelve-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg that he had long abjured—and that young composers after the war had embraced while regarding Copland as outmoded—resulting in his Piano Quartet of 1950.*

  His political loyalties, meanwhile, became troubled—and in time, to Copland, troublesome. Through the opening years of the Cold War, he remained attached to the pro-Soviet Left. At the notorious Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York in 1949, he gave an address in which he described himself as “a democratic American artist, with no political affiliations of any kind,” and criticized the Soviets’ condemnations of Western music and modern art—but also expressed concern that the Truman administration’s foreign policies were leading to a third world war, blamed the United States for provoking the Kremlin’s repressive arts’ policies, and generally relieved the Soviets of any blame for initiating the Cold War.22

  Yet as the decade ended, Copland was beginning to have new and serious doubts about his leftist connections. Stalin’s manipulation and mistreatment of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich disturbed him, as did his growing feeling that the American Communists were manipulating him in order to batten on his fame. (He was particularly perturbed by the Daily Worker’s brief report on his speech to the Waldorf conference, which completely omitted its criticisms of the Soviets’ attack on modern art and exaggerated his misgivings about Truman’s foreign policies.) In 1950, Copland began cutting his ties with the Stalinist Left. In 1951–52, in a set of lectures delivered at Harvard, he made a point of criticizing “each fiat of Soviet musical policy.”23 By 1954, when he resigned from the Workers’ Music Association, one of the last such groups to which he still belonged, Copland’s old romance with pro-Communist politics was dead.

  Copland’s break, however, came too late to ward off the agents of the 1950s Red Scare. Amid the controversy in 1949 over the Waldorf conference, Life magazine had run Copland’s photograph (and misspelled his name “Copeland”) as one of a group of fifty of the better-known participants, to illustrate an article entitled “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus.” (The others included Leonard Bernstein, Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller, and F. O. Matthiessen, described by Life as “a representative selection ranging from hard-working fellow travelers to soft-headed do-gooders.”)24 The following year, a right-wing newsletter, Counterattack, published Red Channels, a compilation of the names of 151 actors, singers, composers, and other entertainers who supposedly had strong Communist links or sympathies and who immediately became targets for blacklisting; Copland was named, along with Marc Blitzstein, Alan Lomax, Earl Robinson, and Pete Seeger. In 1953, an Illinois Republican congressman, prepped in part by Red Channels, fingered Copland as a Communist, which forced the cancellation of a performance of Lincoln Portrait as part of the inauguration festivities for Dwight D. Eisenhower. Later that year, Copland appeared as a putatively friendly but highly unforthcoming witness in closed session before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

  Protestors picket the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, Waldorf-Astoria hotel, New York City, March 26, 1949. Aaron Copland at the Waldorf Peace Conference. (photo credit 1.8)

  Some suspected Reds hauled before congressional committees, such as Marc Blitzstein, confessed their personal involvement but refused to name names. (Blitzstein had broken from the party in 1949 and cited the Communists’ hostility to his homosexuality as the chief reason.) Others invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Still others (including Pete Seeger) stood on the First Amendment and refused to answer any questions about their political associations. (Seeger was cited for contempt of Congress, and later convicted, but finally won his case on appeal.) Copland, though, preferred to present himself to McCarthy’s committee as an apolitical artist who had innocently stumbled into certain political connections out of humanitarian motives—a composer consumed by his music who cared little about politics and knew even less.

  Copland admitted he had been a member of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, had helped sponsor a concert in support of Hanns Eisler to protest Eisler’s deportation in 1948, and had participated in the Waldorf conference. But he testified not only that he had never been a member of the Communist Party but, parsing his words carefully, that he “had never thought of myself as a Communist sympathizer,” had “never sympathized with Communists as such,” and had “never attended any specific Communist function of any kind,” which was not so.25 When backed into a corner about one affiliation or another, Copland claimed that his memory failed him, although he also pointed out, reasonably, that he had only just received his subpoena, which had given him little time to prepare. When confronted with undeniable facts, he answered cleverly as well as evasively. Pressed about the Waldorf conference, for example, he testified that he was happy he had attended “because it gave me firsthand knowledge in what ways the Communists were able to use such movements for their own ends,” but he said nothing about his remarks to the conference, and he claimed that he was completely unaware of the widely publicized Communist domination of the conference and had attended simply to encourage Russian-American cultural and diplomatic relations.

  The exasperated senators finally decided that there was no point in pursuing the questioning and excused Copland from giving any further testimony. McCarthy’s critics called the episode an egregious attempt to humiliate a great American artist, which it was. Copland, for his own part, could take relief at how, having broken with the Communist commissars, he had parried the right-wing persecutors. While he would always remain something of a social utopian, he became thereafter a staunch political liberal—a firm supporter of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s and an opponent of the Vietnam War. But he would wear his public mask of political innocence for the rest of his life, while he shrouded his radical past in vagueness, circumspection, and platitudes.

  In 1955, Copland completed his only full-scale opera, The Tender Land, written in his popular style. Then his composing output sharply declined, “exactly as if,” he said, “someone had simply turned off a faucet.”26 He devoted the last thirty-five years of his life mainly to conducting, recording, teaching, writing, and traveling around the world as an unofficial ambassador for American music. By 1960, when RCA Victor released a celebrated recording of Copland conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the orchestral suites to Appalachian Spring and The Tender Land, his best years as a composer were behind him. By the time he finished his last significant work, the Duo for Flute and Piano, in 1971, he had become an owlish, beni
gn elder statesman, the dean of serious American music.

  Something profound had also happened to the place of Copland’s music in American life—another strange turn of the screw. The left-wing Popular Front politics that had helped animate his most popular work had crumbled; yet despite Red Channels and Senator McCarthy, Copland’s reputation, after a brief period of blacklisting, had survived the Red Scare virtually unscathed, thanks in part to his own evasiveness and in part to his rejection of the Communist Left. Thereafter, his stature among the general public as well as concertgoers continued to grow.

  In the 1940s, Copland’s mingling of folk music and orchestral form, informed by his leftist political sensibilities, became more generally accepted as an embodiment of American democratic culture embattled in Europe and the Pacific. Thereafter, that Popular Front aesthetic, stripped of its left-wing or even New Deal connotations, helped turn Copland’s most prominent works into landmark, all-embracing, modern statements of the American musical imagination. The former pro-Communist revolutionary became, in effect, America’s composer, his music a celebration of the nation itself—the essence of what listeners around the country and around the world regarded as American art music. Musically, this land was his land. Twenty-eight years after Lincoln Portrait was banned from Eisenhower’s inauguration ceremonies, Fanfare for the Common Man was featured at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, and in 1986, Reagan—a man of the 1930s and 1940s Left who, unlike Copland, had become a man of the Right—bestowed upon him the National Medal of Arts, to go along with the Congressional Gold Medal presented by the House of Representatives.

  Aaron Copland on the Brooklyn Bridge, 1969. (photo credit 1.9)

  Copland’s was not the sort of music—and Copland was not the sort of figure—that attracted Bob Dylan to New York in 1961, even though, unknown to Dylan, Copland and his music shared common political origins and sensibilities with the folk revival, and even though Copland, while still on the left in the 1940s, had done as much as any American to celebrate and elevate American folk song. Dylan came looking for the authentic hobo troubadour Woody Guthrie and for a different piece of the legacy of the radical 1930s and 1940s. Yet that journey, inevitably, brought Dylan into contact with what remained of a New York musical world once inhabited by Aaron Copland as well as the Seegers—including one shard that would affect him deeply.

  In 1950, just before the blacklisting began—and just after the People’s Songs movement, beleaguered by the Cold War political backlash, fell apart—the Weavers enjoyed a national number one hit with their recording of “Goodnight, Irene,” a slightly bowdlerized rendition of the version that John Lomax and Alan Lomax had picked up in 1933 from Leadbelly.* (Later that same year, “Goodnight, Irene” became a hit record for, among others, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, and the Nashville duo of Ernest Tubb and Red Foley—but the Weavers’ success dwarfed the others’.) The flip side of the Weavers’ record, the exuberant Israeli hora “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” was also a smash hit, reaching number two on the Billboard chart. Suddenly Pete Seeger and the rest of the quartet found themselves booked in proper supper clubs and hotels—which elicited swift denunciations of them from doctrinaire leftists for allegedly abandoning their political mission and selling out to big-money show business. For a moment, it seemed as if the quintessential folk-song leftists of the 1940s might make a successful commercial transition into the postwar era. But it all came crashing down when Red Channels named Pete Seeger as a subversive, the group was blacklisted, and Seeger defied the Un-American Activities Committee by standing on the First Amendment.

  It is possible that nine-year-old Bob Zimmerman first heard Seeger and the Weavers on the radio or on a jukebox or at summer camp during their fleeting early success. He certainly heard Seeger and the Weavers—along with the Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, and a cavalcade of other folk performers—after he moved to Minneapolis in 1959 and gravitated to Jon Pankake, Tony Glover, and other local folk and blues sophisticates—and began to emerge as Bob Dylan. One biographer states that Dylan first saw Seeger in the flesh at one of Seeger’s college concerts at the University of Wisconsin at Madison at the very end of 1960 or beginning of 1961. (Still blacklisted, Seeger had been keeping body and soul together for years by playing on the less-than-lucrative but open-minded campus circuit.) That story, unfortunately, is apocryphal. But Seeger’s reputation, and his music, were very much in the air, and may have helped fire up Dylan’s ambition to travel to New York and meet Guthrie, his newly acquired hero and musical model.

  Dylan got his wish at the end of January 1961, about five days after he arrived in Manhattan, at a Sunday gathering at the home of Guthrie’s friends Bob and Sidsel “Sid” Gleason in East Orange, New Jersey. Guthrie, ravaged by Huntington’s chorea, was under permanent care at Greystone Park Hospital in Morris Plains, but the hospital released him to the Gleasons’ care on weekends, when old friends and young admirers from New York would hop a bus to East Orange, pay their respects, eat, hang out, and play music. The elders included Pete Seeger and, now and then, Alan Lomax, as well as other spirits and comrades from the Sing Out! crowd and the old People’s Songs movement. In his successful search for Guthrie, Dylan had stumbled upon the surviving remnants of the original folk revival that, along with Aaron Copland, had emerged out of the Composers’ Collective and the rest of the left-wing music world in New York City at the depths of the Great Depression. He would remain closely identified with these circles, including Seeger, through the mid-1960s, and thereafter he would occasionally reappear to pay homage to Woody Guthrie, including, late in 2009, a televised appearance on a History Channel special presentation on which he sang Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballad “Do Re Mi.”

  By chance, Dylan also bumped into the work of another, very different, and far less renowned survivor from that same 1930s New York Communist and pro-Communist Left, who, though he had left the Communist Party, never renounced his leftist politics or his musical preoccupations of the 1930s. The effects on Dylan were profound. In the fall and winter of 1961–62, the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street presented Brecht on Brecht, a new revue consisting of excerpts from Bertolt Brecht’s varied works, starring Kurt Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya. A landmark production of Brecht and Weill’s masterpiece, The Threepenny Opera—inspired by a concert performance sponsored by Copland’s greatest protégé, Leonard Bernstein, at a Brandeis University music festival in 1952—was just ending a six-year run at the same theater. In Brecht on Brecht, Lenya, who had starred in the Threepenny production for its first two years, would return to perform once again her spine-chilling, showstopping song, “Pirate Jenny.”

  Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger in Greenwood, Mississippi, July 6, 1963. (photo credit 1.10)

  A year and several months later, Dylan’s young girlfriend Suze Rotolo, the daughter of Communists, who had begun introducing him to the Village’s bohemian drama world, was helping out backstage with a bare-bones production of Brecht on Brecht at the Sheridan Square Playhouse. One day, Dylan showed up at the theater, and while waiting for her, he caught the show and heard the black actress Micki Grant sing “Pirate Jenny.” It bowled him over.

  The young folksinger and aspiring songwriter—his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, appeared in May—returned to his dumpy apartment, stunned. He would listen, over and over, to the original Off-Broadway cast album of The Threepenny Opera, with Lotte Lenya as Pirate Jenny. “The raw intensity of the songs,” he recalls in Chronicles, immediately aroused him:

  “Morning Anthem,” “Wedding Song,” “The World Is Mean,” “Polly’s Song,” “Tango Ballad,” “Ballad of the Easy Life.”27 Songs with tough language. They were erratic, unrhythmical and herky-jerky—weird visions … They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated.

  Lotte Lenya in 1962, photograph by famed writer and artist Carl Van Vechten. (photo credit 1.11)

  He pored over the lyrics of “Pirate Jenny”—a “nasty song, sung by an evil
fiend,” he now calls it, even though in Weill and Brecht’s score Jenny was singing of sublime proletarian justice—with its repeated menacing image of “a ship, the black freighter.”28 The free verse association, the strange melodic lines—everything about “Pirate Jenny” was, to Dylan, a revelation, although, he now recalls, he stayed “far away from its ideological heart.”29 Inspired anew, he was headed in directions that would one day lead him to write the strong but imitative song of prophecy “When the Ship Comes In” (which suggested that, however much he disdained ideology, he at least partly absorbed Weill and Brecht’s Marxist apocalypse as anything but nasty or evil). Those same impulses would later help lead him into the imagined twilight world of “Visions of Johanna” and the rest of Blonde on Blonde.

  The words that laid Dylan flat on his back, and forever changed his thinking about songs and songwriting, came from an inventive, powerful new American translation of Brecht’s German lyrics, written by Marc Blitzstein.

  Blitzstein had been struggling for years to complete an expanded version of his 1932 song play about Sacco and Vanzetti, and the work would remain unfinished at his death early in 1964. It was disheartening, Aaron Copland wrote in an appreciative memorial note for his friend, that the present generation of musicians knew little or nothing about Blitzstein or about “the moral fervor that fired his work during the depression-haunted thirties.”30 Although Blitzstein had quit the Communist Party in 1949, he had never lost that 1930s fervor—and, like Pete Seeger, he had been blacklisted by the television and movie industries. Copland, who unlike Blitzstein and Seeger had renounced his Communist sympathies out of artistic and political principle and then dodged the Red-baiters, enjoyed a very different career and entered a comfortable musical world very different from the Village bohemia that lured the young Bob Dylan.