Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Consider McTell’s best-known song, “Statesboro Blues.” For four verses, the song follows the standard twelve-bar form but then moves into unfamiliar turf as McTell, singing and playing in a jumpy double time, instructs various family members—“Sister, tell your brother, brother, tell your auntie”—to get out the word: “Goin’ up the country, mama, don’t you want to go?” The hybrid musical arrangement is pure McTell—yet virtually the same lyrics had appeared on earlier records by the popular Chicago-based blueswomen Sippie Wallace and Lucille Bogan. Other elements of “Statesboro Blues” came from recordings by Bessie Smith and the lesser-known Ivy Smith.

  McTell’s own commercial recordings, meanwhile, barely began to describe his musical range and ambitions. Playing to whites and blacks for nickels and tips, in Atlanta’s drive-in restaurants, taverns, and clubs, as well as on the road, demanded that McTell become not just a songster but a human jukebox—a performer who could provide, on demand, what people on both sides of the color line, affluent and poor, and in the countryside as well as the city, wanted to hear, including the latest hit records. And if McTell was best known, on records and off, for his secular music, he also played gospel songs such as “The Little Black Train” and more jazzy sacred music such as “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” at revivals and in churches, much as he had when he was a boy. Some of his secular rags, folk songs, and hybrids did appear commercially in the 1930s; they included a breathtaking, sped-up, fingerpicked version of Blind Blake’s “Wabash Rag” (which he renamed “Georgia Rag”) and “Hillbilly Willie’s Blues,” a reworking of the country tune “This Train”—the popular song that Woody Guthrie would later make famous as “This Train Is Bound for Glory”—that featured references to President Roosevelt (“a mighty fine man”), the rich and the poor, moonshine, a bottle of beer, and Arkansas. But McTell concentrated on recording his religious songs for commercial release only once, during a few days of sessions for Decca Records in Chicago in 1935.

  McTell’s broad musical interests and talents actually came across best in his hastily arranged two hours of recording for the Lomaxes and the Library of Congress. McTell’s tenor pitch had deepened slightly by 1940, but his voice’s timbre was as round as ever. If his right hand no longer fingerpicked with quite the ferocity he’d shown on “Georgia Rag,” his bottleneck-slide technique had mellowed to become at once more delicate and more resonant. The diversity of his material, meanwhile, was spectacular. Along with an assortment of spirituals, he performed folk songs and ballads (“Boll Weevil,” “Delia,” “Will Fox,” and a bowdlerized “Chainey”), a blues (“Murderer’s Home Blues”), a rag (“Kill-It-Kid Rag”), and a pop song (“Baby, It Must Be Love,” which he told John Lomax he had written himself, but which had been recorded in 1937 by the Harlem singer Sally Gooding, accompanied by the Three Peppers jive combo). Most impressively, he performed a deathbed frolic, filled with some of his most strikingly visual lyrics, which he said he had put together by himself out of three different songs (one of which, certainly, was “St. James Infirmary”) as the dying request of a friend who had been gunned down in 1929, Jesse Williams—“The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.”

  Sung to a dirgelike melody, the song is the exact opposite of a dirge, in its lyrics as well as its tempo, as it relates Williams’s riotous last requests:

  Little Jesse was a gambler, night and day

  He used crooked cards and dice,

  He was a sinful boy, good hearted but had no soul,

  His heart was hard and cold like ice.

  The police have shot Jesse, he knows he’s going to die, and with a gang of crapshooters and gamblers gathered at his bedside, he plots his own funeral. Eight crapshooters will serve as pallbearers; behind them will be a motley procession of mourners that includes a contingent of policemen, judges, and court solicitors, sixteen bootleggers, sixteen racket men, and seventy-seven women from what appear to be some of Atlanta’s most notorious brothels and gambling dens—all headed to Jesse’s grave, freshly dug with the ace of spades, his tombstone a deck of cards.

  Once Jesse finishes listing the women, his heart suddenly starts thumping and he goes down “bouncin’ and jumpin’,” but no tears are to be shed for the crapshooter. “Folks, don’t be standin’ around Jesse cryin’,” McTell sings in an aside, “he wants everybody to do the Charleston whilst he dyin’.” The song concludes with a deadpan mixture of the comic, the frivolous, and the grotesque:

  One foot up, a toenail dragging

  Throw my buddy Jesse in the hoodoo wagon

  Come here, mama, with that can of booze

  He got the dyin’ crapshooter’s blues,

  Passin’ out,

  With the dyin’ crapshooter’s blues.

  The song, which had started in a mournful E minor key, ends with a G major chord, and the crapshooter Jesse’s blues winds up laughing at death and even damnation.

  McTell added a great deal of Atlanta detail, but his rewrite of “St. James Infirmary,” supposedly a true story, resembled a version of the song that Cab Calloway recorded late in 1930, and which may have been one of the three tunes from which McTell said he borrowed:

  An’ give me six crap shooting pallbearers,

  Let a chorus girl sing me a song,

  Put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head,

  So we can raise Hallelujah as we go along.

  But McTell’s source (and possibly Calloway’s) is more easily identifiable, and McTell’s pilferage was greater than he suggested. In 1927, the second-string jazz and blues pianist and composer Porter Grainger pulled together a number he called “Dyin’ Crap-Shooter’s Blues,” and that same year the prolific blues singer Martha Copeland, backed by a jazz combo, recorded it for Columbia:

  Jim Johnson gambled night and day,

  With crooked cards and dice,

  A sinful man without a soul,

  His heart was cold as ice.

  Half of the lyrics in McTell’s song repeat Grainger’s word for word, or nearly so, including the lines about the dragging toenail and the hoodoo wagon. All of whatever tunes McTell exploits, including “St. James Infirmary,” also appear in Grainger’s version. Indeed, there is virtually nothing in Grainger’s lyrics and melody that does not appear in McTell’s song—a song he told the Lomaxes that he had “made myself.”

  McTell did not lie here, as he did over “Baby, It Must Be Love”—“making” a song is not the same as writing one—and he acknowledged that he borrowed, though the recording has misled later generations.* And the song that McTell sang to the Lomaxes, although recorded under primitive conditions, is far superior to Martha Copeland’s recording of Porter Grainger’s “Dyin’ Crap-Shooter’s Blues.” About half again as long as Grainger’s version, McTell’s turns a novelty number into a three-part tale, depicting Jesse’s decline and shooting, followed by the strange, slightly zany funeral procession that Jesse requests, and concluding with Jesse’s death. Grainger’s smooth musical forms are self-consciously soldered together, as if intended for a stage revue; McTell’s performance, by contrast, is jagged, played at slightly uneven tempos, sounding (perhaps deliberately) as if McTell were figuring out, line by line, where he is headed. Grainger’s song consists almost entirely of the crapshooter’s words as he contemplates his own death. (The lyrics suggest it will be a suicide; there is nothing mentioned about a police shooting; indeed, when the song ends, the crapshooter is still alive.) In McTell’s song, the perspective of the lyrics shifts, switching from the voice of the singer to that of the mortally wounded man and finally back to the singer, and time shifts as well, moving from the past to the present to the future to the present again.

  One of McTell’s masterpieces, “The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” marked him as a composer and performer like no other songster bluesman, with an unusually rich, descriptive imagination and a striking ability to bend both time and prospect—an ability that was remarkable in virtually any artistic context in the 1920s and 1930s. It would take t
wo decades for the song to appear, first on the Last Session album in 1960, and then, six years later, on the LP of the Library of Congress recording. (McTell also recorded the song for Atlantic Records in 1949, but that rendering was not issued until 1972.) There is no evidence that, more than forty years after McTell first recorded it, Bob Dylan (who was also known to jump songs from other writers and arrange them his way) had the song on his mind, although he’d certainly heard it many times. But when he started recording Infidels in 1983, he plainly was thinking about sin, God, America, the blues, and Blind Willie McTell, and he was also thinking about “St. James Infirmary.”

  The Power Station studio is hushed; there is a barely audible footfall, then Dylan strikes a single piano key. It is a quiet but stark call to musical order. Mark Knopfler softly, exquisitely picks an acoustic guitar in the background, then joins in; Dylan hits a quick pair of somber E-flat minor chords, sketches two measures of melody, and begins to sing, wearily: “Seen the arrow on the door po-ost, sayin’ this land is condemned.” Twenty years after “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” he has written another of his many songs that traverse appalling sights and sounds. Almost right away, it is obvious that the melody of “Blind Willie McTell” comes from “St. James Infirmary”—the same melody that dominates Blind Willie McTell’s own “The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues”—with possibly just a touch of Frédéric Chopin’s Marche Funèbre.

  Recording the song has been giving Dylan difficulty. Three complete takes from the first day of work on the album, with his entire ensemble, don’t work, and neither do two complete takes from the seventh Infidels session. Now, after a grueling three weeks of recording sessions, working six days a week, Dylan returns to “Blind Willie McTell” and attempts to rediscover it at the piano, much as he attempted in 1966 after he lost “She’s Your Lover Now.” With Knopfler playing beside him, his foot quietly tapping out the time, Dylan runs through the entire song, slowly, but fails to reconnect: whatever he had once heard in his head is gone. Infidels would appear later in the year without “Blind Willie McTell,” and the recording of Dylan and Knopfler’s studio run-through would circulate as a demo tape for possible use by other performers, until it finally appeared in 1991 on an official three-CD retrospective of rare Dylan performances and outtakes. Only then did listeners learn that Dylan had recorded a masterpiece.

  The arrow on the doorpost that the singer sees when the song begins is a sign. It might protect the home inside, much as doorway signs of lamb’s blood protected the enslaved Israelites in the Passover story. It might mark the household as righteous and observant, like the Jewish mezuzah, affixed to the doorposts of the pious in accord with the holy injunctions in Deuteronomy. But it certainly signifies that the land as a whole is condemned. Which land? “All the way from New Or-leeans to Je-ru-sa-lem,” Dylan sings. The land where blacks were enslaved; the land where the Israelites ruled only to be cast out and oppressed, and where Herod, in trying to kill the Christ child, massacred the innocents: these lands and all the lands between them, the whole world over, are damned.* The singer suddenly tells of traveling through East Texas—home to Blind Lemon Jefferson, though not to McTell—“where many martyrs fell.” The martyrs could be, as the word normally connotes, holy victims, or they could be broken slaves and lynched freedmen, or even Confederate and Union soldiers, or soldiers from the war against Mexico, or the fallen fighters at the Alamo. Or they might include John F. Kennedy. Or they could be all of these. And what does the singer know from these sights and travels? That “no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

  The next verse thrusts us into Willie McTell’s world. The singer recalls hearing a hoot owl singing late at night, after some sort of show had ended and the tents were being struck and folded. (They could be revival show tents or medicine show circus tents; McTell had connections to both.) Yet even though the singer heard the owl—symbol of wisdom and victory in ancient Greece, although in other cultures a symbol of bad luck and evil—nobody else did; the owl’s only audience was the stars above the barren trees.* By contrast, one can only imagine that an enthusiastic crowd cheered the charcoal gypsy maidens, strutting their feathers, whom the singer recalls next. It seems that the tent show was a lusty one, with swaggering black chorus girls who might have stepped out of “The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues”—although Dylan himself had performed with his own soulful black maidens, who were also, at various times, his lovers. In the American South, the lines between one kind of show and the other—Holy Rollers and hoochie-coochie—had always been blurry; indeed, one sometimes followed the other on the same night. But no matter because, finally, Dylan sings, “No-bu-dee can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

  Now sunk in deepest Dixie, the song moves backward in time, not forward through space, and the singer doesn’t just relate what he finds, but calmly bids us to look for ourselves:

  See them big plantations burnin’

  Hear the cracking of the whips

  Smell that sweet magnolia bloomin’

  See the ghosts-uuuuuuuuuvv slavery ships.

  From the Civil War and slavery’s Armageddon back to slavery times, cruelty cracked while lush beauty bloomed, and in back of it all stood the shades of the deathly Middle Passage. Suddenly, though, time has slipped again: these are ghosts, not the ships or slaves themselves, and the singer tells of how he can still “hear them tribes a-moanin’ ” and hear the undertaker’s bell ringing. The moaning tribes are the tribes of Africans being sold into slavery, but they could also be the moaning Africans of today, or the ancient enslaved tribes of Israel, or any suffering tribe you choose, at any time you choose. And though the undertaker’s bell tolled all over the slave South, that bell has tolled forever, and it tolls for everyone. And still—still—the singer repeats, “Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

  Now the song flashes on other southern scenes, and Dylan’s voice rises in revulsion. A woman, who seems to know exactly what’s up, is down by the riverside with a fine young man, dressed to the nines, who is carrying a bottle of bootleg whiskey. (The song does not say whether they are black or white, because they could be either.) Up on the highway, a convict chain gang toils and sweats. The singer can hear rebel yells. And now he knows no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

  An instrumental break sets off the singer’s tale of his journey from his final reflections. Atop Knopfler’s strums and liquid licks, Dylan plays a jumpy piano, banging out the chorus with doubled-up, backbeat chords. Then he sings: “Well, God is in His heaven / And we all want what’s His.” As performed on the session tape, the lines echo the famous conclusion of the poet Robert Browning’s “Pippa’s Song”—“God’s in His heaven— / All’s right with the world!”—by which Browning really meant that despite all of the evil and vicious injustice in the world, it is still possible to have faith in God.12 But as rendered in Dylan’s official book of lyrics—“Well God is in heaven”—the lines echo the Bible and convey a darker message. “God is in heaven, and thou upon earth,” reads Ecclesiastes 5:2. Dylan’s revision of the second line describes a yearning for life everlasting—but also humankind’s blasphemous disregard for the separation of heaven and earth. Continuing in a biblical vein, the song explains that in this world, all is vanity, and “power and greed and corruptible seed / seem to be all that there is.”* And there is still another possibility, just as close to Dylan’s preoccupations and the historical themes of “Blind Willie McTell”: “But God is in Heaven, and Grant in the Town, / And Right through might is Law— / God’s way adore,” Herman Melville wrote in one of his poems in Battle-Pieces, describing the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital, and the conclusion of the Civil War.13

  The singer has seen, heard, and smelled unspeakable things, in the past and in the present. He reports no redress and no redemption, even in Jesus Christ; the only sign he sees of the Lord’s true and righteous judgment is an arrow marking condemnation of a heedless world riddled with gr
eed, corruption, and the lust for power. And with that the singer concludes, gazing out a hotel window, his voice rising again, as if to give himself and his listeners something to hold on to, proclaiming one last time the one thing that he really knows, that “no one can sing the blu-oo-ues like Blind Will-ah-ee McTe-uhl.”* All he has left is the song and its singer.

  Dylan and Knopfler play two more verses of instrumental, slowing and swelling at the end, and the performance concludes with a softly ringing harmonic and quick single note from Knopfler’s guitar.

  There the studio life of “Blind Willie McTell” ended for Dylan. It was May 5, 1983—which, as best anyone can tell, but unknown to everyone at the Power Station, would have been Blind Willie McTell’s eightieth birthday.

  “Perhaps the most entrancing challenge in ‘Blind Willie McTell,’ ” Greil Marcus writes, “is to hear in its namesake’s music what Bob Dylan heard.”14 One thing Dylan certainly heard was a touch of grace in a ruthless world.

  St. James Hotel, New York City, in the early 1980s. (photo credit 6.10)

  It’s not that Blind Willie McTell was the best blues singer ever. Dylan’s song makes no such claim, although some listeners have thought it does. McTell was, rather, at least to the singer in the song, unique, unmatched—in the sweetness of his voice, the clarity of his singing, the shimmer of his guitar playing, and the range of his mastery. He was a rambler who lived by his wits and his talent, earned good money, and lived nicely in Atlanta; an unassuming character who was a thoroughgoing professional and nobody’s fool; a musical collector and stasher and reinventor; a blind man who wrote intensely visual lyrics that could bend time and space like magic. He was also a godly man whose bottleneck-guitar spirituals were enough to make you shiver; who concocted knowing songs about outlaws and hustlers and painted ladies that described sin but did not judge; and who cut through the racist presumptions of his times with the equalizing spiritual wisdom that, as he told John Lomax, the world was a mean place to live in for whites and a mean place to live in for blacks.