Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  With Lanois adding his complex voodoo production effects, Oh Mercy had a rich, layered contemporary sound unlike any previous Dylan album. It also contained some very strong songs and a few excellent ones. The themes ranged from cutting commentary on the contemporary scene (“Political World”) to laments about personal unsteadiness, loss, and resignation (“Most of the Time”). “Ring Them Bells,” although quietly scary, was the most noble and moving Christian hymn that Dylan had yet composed. “Shooting Star,” the album’s final track, beautifully combined Dylan’s religious faith with his latest reflections on love’s vicissitudes. Above all, there was “Man in the Long Black Coat,” a ballad of false prophecy and seduction in the old Anglo-American tradition, yet with overtones of the frightening Charles Laughton–James Agee film from 1955, The Night of the Hunter, in which Robert Mitchum played a black-coated fanatical preacher. With its rendering of a blaspheming sermon about abandoning conscience, it was a song of and for the 1980s as well.

  Reviewers praised Oh Mercy warmly, calling it Dylan’s latest comeback. Less than a year later, though, an energized Dylan released Under the Red Sky, and the critics once again bemoaned his continuing decline. Oh Mercy, it seemed, was a fluke; its successor supposedly proved that Dylan was truly a has-been. The sour reviews translated into disappointing sales.

  It was easy enough to ridicule Under the Red Sky. Song titles such as “Wiggle Wiggle” and lyrics like “The man was saying something ’bout children when they’re young / Being sacrificed to it while lullabies are being sung” (from “T.V. Talkin’ Song”) sounded risible. In fact, though, the detractors went overboard. Listened to as the children’s song that it is, “Wiggle Wiggle” is not silly but charming. (Dylan had dedicated the album to “Gabby Goo Goo,” his playful nickname for his four-year-old daughter.) The album’s title track, written in the style of a fairy tale, is an equally charming evocation of Dylan’s own childhood in Hibbing. On “Unbelievable,” Dylan conjured up an abiding outrage at the world’s ways and how his life was turning out, both of which were “unbelievable like a lead balloon.” “Cat’s in the Well” effectively combines a nursery rhyme with social commentary and old-time songster images—“Back alley Sally is doing the American jump”—before ending as a bedtime prayer. A few reviewers understood the album’s strengths; one, Paul Nelson, writing in Musician, even called it a curious kind of masterpiece. Yet the commercial and critical failure of Under the Red Sky led Dylan to step back from songwriting as well as from recording, though not from touring. He would not produce another album of original material until 1997.

  A look over Dylan’s work in the mid- to late 1980s reveals changes and continuities that were not so evident at the time. Reflections about fatherhood, evident in compositions dating back to “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” on Slow Train Coming, reappeared in the nursery songs on Under the Red Sky. Tracks such as “Death Is Not the End” on the lackluster album from 1988, Down in the Groove, followed by “Ring Them Bells” on Oh Mercy and “God Knows” on Under the Red Sky, showed that, contrary to widespread assumptions, Dylan had hardly abandoned his apocalyptic Christian beliefs. The hectoring was gone, but his faith in Jesus and his certainty of Christian redemption were still there, in jarring counterpoint to his disordered personal life.

  Both Dylan’s recordings and his concerts also revealed his continuing, and even deepening, connection to older songs, traditional and commercial, and in a wide range of genres. Dating back to the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan’s concerts had often featured at least one or two cover versions of folk-music classics; by 1986, old country hits such as Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” had begun taking up a large portion of each show; and through the end of the decade, Dylan’s set lists included songs like the Irish air “Eileen Aroon,” the ancient Anglo-Scots ballad “Barbara Allen,” and two American mountain tunes, adapted from the British, that he had sung on his first album, “Pretty Peggy-O” and “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Dylan’s studio album Knocked Out Loaded included a new version of Bill Monroe’s “Drifting Too Far from the Shore,” and Down in the Groove included four cover versions of songs by others—including Hal Blair and Don Robertson’s “Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street),” first recorded by Hank Snow, and closing with “Shenandoah” and “Rank Strangers to Me.”

  Dylan’s musical thinking, meanwhile, also ranged far beyond the folk and country music with which he was most closely associated. “Sinatra, Peggy Lee, yeah I love all those people,” he informed an interviewer in 1985.3 “But I tell you who I’ve really been listening to a lot lately—in fact, I’m thinking about recording one of his earlier songs—is Bing Crosby. I don’t think you can find better phrasing anywhere.” Dylan’s loyal fans may have taken his praise of “Der Bingle” as a goof, but he was deadly in earnest.* And although it would be a long time before Dylan seriously took up singing Crosby, his attachment to older traditional music, the music he had reinvented in the 1960s, would lead him into a new and better phase of his career.

  Bing Crosby, 1940. (photo credit 7.1)

  The turnabout began in 1992. Depressed by the failure of Under the Red Sky, with the formal ending of his second marriage nearing, and with contractual recording obligations looming, Dylan linked up in June at the Acme Recording Studio in Chicago with an old collaborator, the blues singer and extraordinary instrumentalist David Bromberg, and Bromberg’s band, which included trumpet, trombone, tenor saxophone, and clarinet, as well as the usual complement of guitars, fiddles, mandolins, bass, and drums. In three days of work, Dylan, Bromberg, and the band produced sufficient material for a brief album, mixing traditional folk songs, contemporary folk songs, a blues by Blind Willie Johnson, and Jimmie Rodgers’s “Miss the Mississippi and You.” Then Dylan shifted to his home garage studio in Malibu, armed only with a guitar and harmonicas, just as he had been at the start of his career, and began turning out more traditional songs to flesh out the Bromberg recordings. Quickly, though, the solo material that came pouring out of Dylan added up to more than was necessary for an entire album of its own. For reasons never entirely explained, the Dylan-Bromberg recordings were quietly shelved, and instead Dylan released the first of two solo acoustic albums, Good as I Been to You.

  Even when he turned his back on the 1960s folk revival, Dylan had explicitly honored the traditional folk music, with its myth, contradictions, and chaos; indeed, insofar as the folk revival prized old-time music for its supposed simplicity as well as purity, Dylan’s break, and even his turn to surrealism and electricity, can be seen as an effort to preserve the wilder spirit of folk music. “Folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple,” he told a pair of interviewers in 1965, contrary to the assumptions of many folkie purists. “It’s never been simple.4 It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I’ve never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight.”

  Bing Crosby in blackface for the film Dixie, 1943. (photo credit 7.2)

  Now that Dylan was feeling as if his creativity, if not exactly shut off like a faucet, had severely slowed—once “the songs would come three or four at the same time,” he said in 1991, “but those days are long gone”—he returned to his musical roots, continuing to add traditional material to his concerts and listening to fresh collections of blues, mountain songs, contemporary folk music, and more.5 Feeling as if he had nowhere to go, he knew very well where he should head: “If you can sing those [folk] songs, if you can understand those songs and can perform them well, there’s nowhere you can’t go.”6

  Recorded in July and August, the tracks on Good as I Been to You form a miscellany of old songs that included a turn-of-the-century blues, “Frankie and Albert” (in a mélange of different collected versions); an old English tune, “Canadee-i-o,” and an old Irish ballad, “Arthur McBride and the Sergeant,” recently given excellent new life on recordings by, respectively, Nic Jones and Paul Brady;* songs
made famous by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the Stanley Brothers, and Mance Lipscomb (including the latter’s “You Gonna Quit Me, Baby,” which also supplied Dylan with the album’s title); Stephen Foster’s heartfelt “Hard Times”; plus “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.”

  The simplicity of the arrangements, the pathos in the new cracking of Dylan’s fifty-one-year-old voice, and the retreat from any hint of studio excess impressed the critics, one of whom, David Sexton of the Sunday Telegraph of London, likened the album to the work of a ghost, inward rather than nostalgic. Yet the album, in retrospect, was an interesting but uneven warm-up. On some of the renditions—especially of the song “Tomorrow Night,” which had been a hit for Lonnie Johnson in 1947 and, much later, for Elvis Presley—Dylan showed he had entered the song and understood it anew; others—such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s “Diamond Joe”—owed more to other performers’ interpretations, but still bore Dylan’s personal stamp; but still others, notably “Canadee-i-o” and “Arthur McBride,” sounded like run-throughs of beautiful songs in the same versions that other, younger folksingers had recorded far better than Dylan ever could.

  Dylan only came into his own a year later when, spurred by the critics’ response, he returned to his Malibu studio with his guitar and harmonicas. There had been some complaints that Good as I Been to You failed adequately to credit Dylan’s sources, and in some cases (notably “Tomorrow Night”) completely snubbed the actual writers by calling the songs traditional, arranged by Bob Dylan. Dylan responded by composing his own liner notes, which, in an idiosyncratic, elliptical, at times cryptic style, stated exactly the source for each song and, less exactly, what each song meant to him. The track list was also darker and more coherent, grouped around American rural blues of the early twentieth century about aging, love gone wrong, and murder; a Civil War army ballad and a British navy ballad; two songs, back-to-back, that Blind Willie McTell had recorded; and, as a sudden final blessing, an old Sacred Harp ballad hymn he had learned from a Doc Watson record.

  Eventually given the title of its lead track, World Gone Wrong was varied but hardly random; as placed on the record, the songs formed a logical progression, moving, in the album’s middle portions, from a song about hot-blooded love and prostitution to a McTell song about aging and eros, to another song that McTell recorded about passion and murder, to “Stack A Lee” (otherwise known as “Stagolee”), a classic of street honor and murder, to the army and navy songs, and then to the concluding hymn. And Dylan entered each song and possessed it, as he had only begun to do in his recording the previous year. In sorrow, and in consolation, he discovered new things in some old things—not as old as some of the traditional songs on Good as I Been to You, but old enough to be of another era.

  What was new were the elements of a mature sensibility for Dylan’s music, no longer Dylan the young growling rebel of the 1960s, but a darkling survivor who, though wiser, still had attitude and understood it—attitude that was of the moment but also as old as the hills, deeply implicated in the American past but also timeless. Any of the album’s unsimple songs, and Dylan’s performance of them, reward a much closer listen, both for their own sake and for understanding the terrain Dylan had decided to traverse. None of them is sadder or more haunting than “Delia,” which has come down in many versions, including the one recorded by Blind Willie McTell—a song that originated in Savannah, Georgia, at the dawn of the twentieth century, but whose full story goes back a little bit earlier, and to a killing near the banks of the Mississippi River.

  After midnight on October 16, 1899, at 212 Targee Street, in a rowdy section of St. Louis, Frankie Baker, a black prostitute, got into a fight over another woman with her lover and pimp, Albert Britt, and shot him. Three days later, Albert died. Frankie was arrested right after the shooting, but the coroner’s jury decided that Albert had physically menaced her, and ruled it a case of justifiable homicide. Required to stand trial, Baker appeared in court and faced Judge Willis Clark, who went through with the formalities and duly acquitted her. “Why, the judge even gave me back my gun,” she later recalled.7

  Nearly two years later, on September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, a young anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, after waiting patiently in a greeter’s line at the Temple of Music, thrust a hand wrapped in a fake bandage at President William McKinley and fired two shots from virtually point-blank range. At first it looked as if McKinley would survive his wounds, but complications set in, and he died eight days later. After a hasty trial, Czolgosz was convicted and electrocuted at Auburn State Prison on October 29. “I killed the President for the good of the laboring people, the good people,” were the assassin’s last words.8 “I am not sorry for my crime but I am sorry I can’t see my father.”

  Utterly different by any conventional historical standard, as well as in their outcomes, the two murder-and-trial stories ended up having a good deal in common. Britt’s killing became the source for “Frankie and Albert”—one of three homicides in St. Louis in the 1890s that inspired such songs. (The other two were the killing of the patrolman James Brady by Henry Duncan in a barroom battle in 1890, which led to “Duncan and Brady,” and the killing, also in a saloon, of William “Billy” Lyons by a local pimp with local ward-heeler connections, Lee “Stack Lee” Shelton, over a Stetson hat, on Christmas night 1895, which led to “Stagolee.”) President McKinley’s assassination also inspired a song, “White House Blues,” which was serious enough in its early versions but became almost comically nonsensical on the recordings that made it famous more than twenty years later by the white country artists Charlie Poole and Ernest Stoneman. Even then, the song about the president would never be as popular as any of the others, least of all “Frankie and Albert” (which is even better known in its commercial pop-song incarnation, “Frankie and Johnny”).*

  “Stagolee,” “Frankie and Albert,” and “White House Blues,” composed within roughly six years of each other, shared some strong lyrical and melodic elements, and they shared them with yet another song about yet another murder—the shooting of Delia Green by her lover, Moses “Cooney” Houston, in Savannah, Georgia, on Christmas Eve night 1900. Like the other three ballads, “Delia” would be recorded by numerous well-known artists over the ensuing decades—including Dylan, who sang both “Delia” and a version of “Stagolee” on World Gone Wrong, and sang “Frankie and Albert” on Good as I Been to You.* Like the other three, “Delia” was a musical milestone. Blind Willie McTell, in his session with John and Ruby Lomax—when he sang his own version of “Delia”—dated the blues as a popular musical form back to (roughly) between 1908 and 1914. Other bluesmen who were old enough to know more or less concurred—and included “Delia” among the earliest blues songs.

  Around 1910, a blind teenager in rural South Carolina, Gary Davis, who had been teaching himself to play the guitar, heard, for the first time, someone playing in a style called the blues. These were worrying songs, Davis later explained: “got worried about a woman, or worried about a man, something like that.9 Get all stirred up in a cauldron. Thing like that is the blues.” The emotions were timeless, but the label was new, attached to songs that told a story and led to a point where someone is deeply unsettled or depressed about something. That first blues song that Davis ever heard was played by a man named Porter Irving who came to Davis’s town one day, out of nowhere, in around 1910, and performed, Davis recalled, “that song about Delia”:

  Oh, Delia, why didn’t you run,

  Here comes that sheriff with a 44 Gatlin’ gun

  All the friends I had are gone.10

  Over the decades to come, the Reverend Gary Davis made his own mark as a blues and spirituals singer and included a version of the old song in his repertoire (sometimes calling it “All My Friends Are Gone”), while he served as teacher, friend, and inspiration to a succession of performers, including Furry Lewis, Dave Van Ronk, and Bob Dylan. Dylan first tape-recorded “Delia,” informally, as early as May 1960, at his fri
end Karen Wallace’s apartment in St. Paul, yet because the relevant portion of the tape has never circulated, above- or underground, it is impossible to know which of the many versions of “Delia” he played. The version he recorded in 1993, though, came indirectly from Davis’s.

  Formal credit for inventing the blues usually goes to the educated black bandleader and composer W. C. Handy, and not to country pickers like the obscure Porter Irving. Handy’s name, and his refined later career, come as a surprise to modern listeners who identify the blues with Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and the other Delta-born musicians who contributed to the rise of rhythm and blues and of rock and roll. (The name came as a surprise to some of the old bluesmen as well: when the up-and-coming blues guitarist and singer Stefan Grossman asked Davis about Handy in the 1960s, Davis replied simply, “No, I ain’t never heard of him.”)11 Yet Handy, who in 1892, at the age of nineteen, briefly knocked around St. Louis, tasted the gaslit world inhabited by Stack Lee Shelton, Billy Lyons, Frankie Baker, and Albert Britt. “I wouldn’t want to forget Targee Street as it was then,” he wrote in his autobiography.12 “I don’t think I’d want to forget the high-roller Stetson hats of the men or the diamonds the girls wore in their ears … [t]he prettiest woman I’ve ever seen.” Handy’s memories of these women later roused him to write his famous line about the “St. Louis woman” with her diamond rings, powder, and store-bought hair, in “St. Louis Blues,” composed in 1914.