Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  The song’s contemporary history began in 1952, when the Bahamian calypso-style lounge singer Blind Blake Alphonso Higgs (not to be confused with the American ragtime guitarist and singer Blind Blake), accompanied by his band, the Royal Victoria Hotel Calypso Orchestra, recorded “Delia’s Gone” as “Delia Gone” on his third album for the small Art Records label. Until then, no American recording of the song bore that title, but that suddenly changed, beginning with the versions released by Josh White and the young Jamaica-born calypso singer Harry Belafonte in the 1950s. Since then, Higgs’s rendition has nearly edged out the “Delia” that had emerged from Savannah around 1901. Versions recorded by Pat Boone and the Kingston Trio were based on Higgs’s or on some version derived from Higgs’s. So were those recorded by Johnny Cash (twice) and Waylon Jennings, Will Holt and Happy Traum, the ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn (with a calypso lilt) and the young rock group Cordelia’s Dad. There have, though, been some important exceptions, including the versions recorded by Paul Clayton, David Bromberg, Stefan Grossman—and Bob Dylan.

  Blind Blake Alphonso Higgs album cover, Art Records, 1951. (photo credit 7.5)

  The melodies of the American and Bahamian versions are as different as their refrains, but the stories are generally the same. Many of the American versions of “Delia” have, to be sure, two distinct elements in their narratives not to be found in the Bahamian versions. They often begin with some basic fanciful description of Delia, as in Blind Willie McTell’s: “Delia was a gambler, gambled all around / She was a gamblin’ girl, she laid her money down.” (Here the similarity with “Frankie and Albert” comes in focus; compare McTell’s with the first line of “Frankie,” recorded to almost the same tune by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928: “Frankie was a good girl, everybody knows / She paid a hundred dollars, bought Albert a suit of clothes.”) By contrast, the Bahamian “Delia Gone,” sung by Blind Blake Higgs (in an odd Brooklyn accent, vaguely reminiscent of George Jessel’s), immediately cuts to the action, quite true to the actual events, even though Higgs changes Cooney’s name to Tony:

  Delia cursed Tony, it was on a Saturday night,

  Cursed him such a wicked curse he swore he’d take her life.

  The American versions also commonly add a verse or two about Delia’s parents sobbing and moaning; or about how Delia’s mother said it wouldn’t have been so bad had Delia died at home; or about how Delia’s mother returned from a trip west to find her daughter dead. (The last of these resembles a line in “White House Blues” and adds further weight to the idea that the song about McKinley was the main source for the one about Delia and Cooney.) The Bahamian “Delia Gone” leaves out all of these family references.

  Many versions of both “Delia” and “Delia’s Gone” try to avoid racial connotations by giving Cooney one of a wide assortment of other names—Tony, Cutty, Curtis, or something else—thereby eliminating any allusion to “coon.” Otherwise, “Delia” and “Delia’s Gone” both cover the same four basic narrative elements in a variety of ways. First, there is the shooting, most often committed with a .44-caliber gun (and sometimes, as in “Frankie and Albert,” a “smokeless 44”). Sometimes the song omits any mention of the killer’s motive; other times it talks of how he became furious when Delia cursed him; and in still other instances the story is more complicated, as in this version, collected in 1937:

  Now Coonie an’ his little sweetheart,

  Settin’ down talkin’ low;

  Axed her would she marry him,

  She said, “Why, sho’,”

  Cryin’ all I had done gone.14

  When the time come for marriage,

  She refuse’ to go.

  “If you don’t marry me

  You live no mo’.”

  Cryin’ all I had done gone.

  Plainly at odds with what actually happened, though, even this version echoed, albeit in a distorted way, some key facets of the true story, particularly Cooney’s insistence that Delia was his wife and her fatal denial.

  Second, there comes the killer’s trial. In McTell’s version, the verdict and the sentencing of Cooney Houston (whom he calls Cutty) are straightforward, although there is a hint that Houston was playfully impudent. When he asks the judge “What may be my fine?”—as if he expected such a light sentence—the judge says, “Poor boy, you got ninety-nine.” In another rendition, the killer confesses and asks about posting bond; the judge replies that although he could have “Connie” hung, he will sentence him instead to ninety-nine years in prison. The Bahamian Blind Blake keeps the ninety-nine-year sentence, but is more pointed about how “Tony” mocks the court; indeed, the defiance displayed by the killer in Blake’s song is so bold and pithy that it sounds amusing, and suddenly (though only for an instant) it switches the song’s emotional direction in the killer’s favor:

  Judge said “Sixty-four years in prison.”

  Tony told the judge “That is no time;

  I have a younger brother who’s servin’ nine hundred and ninety and nine.”

  At all events, the trial element in the songs conveys that something disturbing happened—either the killer outrageously expected a light sentence only to receive the heavy one he deserved; or the judge gave the killer a break by sending him to jail rather than the gallows; or the killer, convicted and facing his jail sentence, reacted with mocking contempt. Each version replicates a variant of what actually happened, or of what people might have perceived had happened—but in each variant, the killer looks bad.

  Next comes Delia’s funeral, which is almost always the same, along the lines of an early version of the song from Georgia that dates from before 1910, in a line that would become a standard blues description of going to and coming back from a cemetery: “Rubber-tired buggy, double-seated hack / Well, it carried po’ Delia to graveyard, failed to bring her back.”

  Finally, there is the killer in prison. The different versions almost always note the injustice of his living while Delia is dead, in lines very close to the ones in “White House Blues” that describe McKinley in his grave and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, in the White House, drinking from a silver cup. In his session with the Lomaxes, Blind Willie McTell put the killer—“Cutty” in his version—in a barroom rather than in prison, but otherwise the line was typical, with the added twist that most versions gave the killer a cup of tin, not silver:

  Cutty he’s in the barroom drinkin’ out of a silver cup,

  Delia she’s in the graveyard, she may not never wake up.

  Blind Blake Higgs’s “Delia Gone” basically preserved the line, in its usual form:

  Tony he’s in prison, drinking from an old tin cup,

  Delia she’s in the graveyard doing her level best to get up.

  In some cases, Cooney, or Cutty, or Tony, or whatever his name happens to be, is tortured by his crime. Sometimes he tells the jailer he cannot sleep, since all around his bed at night he can hear little Delia’s feet. But the bottom line, in most versions, is harsher—for the killer’s remorse is useless as far as poor Delia is concerned. Delia is dead, Cooney is alive, and all the penitence in the world cannot change that cold fact.

  It is a sad song, one of the saddest blues ever written. Yet even then, neither “Delia” nor “Delia’s Gone,” in any of the versions yet recorded or brought to light in print—including Bob Dylan’s—mentions the saddest facts of all in the original case: the tender ages of both Delia and Cooney, and the utter waste of their young lives. Were those facts added in, the desolation might be unbearable.

  Still, if Dylan’s version of the song, like all of the others, falls short of telling the whole sorrowful story, it is sorrowful enough. And by adding pathos to one of the very oldest blues songs, Dylan also took another step out of his own distress and toward a newfound creativity.

  Having given “Frankie and Albert” pride of place as the first track on Good as I Been to You, Dylan placed “Delia” and “Stack A Lee” (his version of “Stagolee”) back-to-back on World Gone Wrong
. The earlier album contained a good number of folk songs, including two beautiful ballads from and about other lands whose endings were anything but sad or tragic (though in the case of “Arthur McBride and the Sergeant” a kind of rough justice does get meted out to the two British soldiers and their “little wee” drummer boy). World Gone Wrong, by contrast, was all-American, and the selection was much darker, distressing, and poignant. There is one killing, a justified homicide, on the first album; there are four on the second, two murders and two deaths in combat (both Union soldiers killed in the same Civil War battle).

  Dylan wrote that his “Delia” “is one sad tale—two or more versions mixed into one.” The melody line is straight from the Reverend Gary Davis, as transcribed by one of his devotees, Stefan Grossman. The lyrics come, almost word for word, from the track called “Dehlia” on David Bromberg’s first album, which appeared in 1971. (Many of Bromberg’s lyrics, in turn, were the same that Blind Willie McTell sang on his Library of Congress recording, the verses scrambled in a different order.) Dylan made two tweaks, seemingly minor at first. Instead of describing Delia’s funeral, he substituted a verse (which Grossman had taken from Davis) that, out of nowhere, brought up race—marking the song as black—while also lamenting Delia in her grave:

  Men in Atlanta, tryin’ to pass for white,

  Delia’s in the graveyard, boys, six feet out of sight.

  More important, Dylan substituted the somewhat strange Davis/Grossman refrain—“All the friends I ever had are gone”—for McTell and Bromberg’s line, which is easier to make sense of from the very start of the song, “She’s all I’ve got is gone.”

  Bob Dylan, 1993. (photo credit 7.6)

  The song begins with Dylan strumming, then hitting a solid three-note bass run—a progression familiar from Davis’s (and, later, his younger friend and student Dave Van Ronk’s) “Cocaine Blues” that is also one of the hallmarks of this particular melody for “Delia.” (“Cocaine Blues” is another song Dylan has enjoyed performing from time to time since the 1960s.) Dylan sings the very first line with a deliberateness that immediately creates an ambiguity: “Delia was a gam-bol-ing girl, gam-boled all around,” which might mean she was a good timer, something of a tart, a run-around—a gamboler. Two verses follow about Delia’s parents, and Dylan’s voice, softer now, splinters with weariness and pain; the phrase “Delia’s daddy weeepp’d” drops like a tear. After a guitar break, the song switches to Curtis (his and Bromberg’s name for Cooney), who is looking high, looking low, having shot poor Delia down with “a crew-el 44.” And what is Curtis looking at? “Them rounders / looking out for me,” Dylan sings, in Curtis’s voice.

  After another guitar break, we are in the courtroom, and the judge is asking Curtis what this noise is all about. “All about them rounders, Judge,” he replied, sounding like a tough guy, “tryin’ to cut me out.” Not a word about Delia or her gambling (or gamboling); in court Curtis is fixated on the rounders, who are nameless and may just be delusions, existing only in Curtis’s mind. Neither does the killer display even a trace of regret or apology over his crime. And before the judge can ask the logical question—so, why did you shoot her instead of one of them?—the song has Curtis, freshly convicted, asking about his fine and being told, “Poor boy, you got ninety-nine.” Dylan then jumps to the jailhouse, where Curtis is drinking from an old tin cup, while Delia, in the graveyard, may not ever get up. Another guitar break then divides act 3 from act 4 in Dylan’s little drama.

  The final act features Curtis—we can picture him in his jail cell—now utterly alone, crying out in selfish anguish that borders on agony: “Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? / You loved all them rounders, never did love me.” And again, a little more to the point: “Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? / You wanted all them rounders, never had time for me.”* Curtis—who Dylan’s liner notes say “sounds like a pimp in primary colors”—shot Delia not because she had loved and left him but because she had never given him the time of day, because she loved those no-good other guys, because she wanted them, not him, with her body if not her soul. Curtis’s deed is beyond criminal; he is something of a fiend of egotism. But the song is a tragedy, not a melodrama. Curtis is the author of his own righteous undoing as well as of Delia’s unmerited death. And then, finally, as the song ends with the imprisoned killer’s obsession and grief, the refrain that Dylan took from the Reverend Gary Davis, and that has been a little puzzling throughout the song, falls in to make perfect, terrible sense. Curtis is reviled; he will never recover, and it sounds as if he will not be redeemed. All the friends he ever had are gone.

  Few versions of “Delia,” if any—including McTell’s classic and the astonishing version by David Bromberg—display more emotional and psychological acuity, and better dramatic pacing, than Dylan’s. That achievement, coming nearly a century after the song first appeared, is impressive enough, but even more so given that Dylan pulled it off by rearranging words and music that had already been out there for a very long time. Turning back to the old songs—and, with “Delia,” reaching to the very taproot of the blues—Dylan began relearning the lessons he had learned when he was just starting out, when his enthusiasm for those songs was feverish. The only drawback was that, because the existing words and music said nothing about Cooney and Delia’s ages (which Dylan could hardly have known independently), his “Delia” is still not as affecting as the actual events.

  The full musical effects of Dylan’s rediscoveries in ancient songs would not begin to come into view for nearly a decade. But in other ways, Dylan’s “Delia” marked a leap forward in how he conceived of himself and his art. The critic Bill Flanagan, in the finest review of World Gone Wrong, hit the point beautifully. “When Dylan sings, in this version of ‘Delia,’ ‘All the friends I ever had are gone,’ ” Flanagan wrote, “it breaks your heart.15 His world-worn voice reveals the cracks behind his stoicism in a way that this most unsentimental of singers would never allow in his lyrics. The weight of nobility and loss are as appropriate to this older Dylan’s singing as anger and hunger are to the snarl of his youth.”

  That weight, and the gallantry with which Dylan expressed it, had belonged to the blues from the start; it just took Dylan a half century of living his own life for him to be able to express it this way. And alongside nobility and loss were other realms of the spirit and the body, including the tender mercies of salvation that the older Dylan wanted to put across anew. For those, he looked to other venerable songs, including a hymn little known among his fans but sung often by others, honored by the faithful as one of the beloved reliables from the old good book called The Sacred Harp.

  But what of the dead? Moses “Cooney” Houston served just over twelve years of his life sentence. On October 15, 1913, the Georgia governor, John M. Slaton, signed an order approving his parole. Subsequent unconfirmed reports say that Houston got in trouble with the law again after his release, that he moved to New York City, and that he died in 1927, which would have made him a little over forty.

  The merciful governor Slaton soon found himself in trouble of a different kind. Five months before Houston’s release, the dead body of a thirteen-year-old white girl, Mary Phagan, was found in a pencil factory in Atlanta. In a controversial and still notorious trial, Leo Frank, the factory supervisor and a New York–raised Jew, was convicted of the crime on the basis of tainted evidence and sentenced to death. The anti-Semitism that surrounded the case was unmistakable, and the verdict caused massive civil-rights protests, which led to an unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Governor Slaton, believing that Frank had been railroaded, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Hounded by an irate public, his effigy burned and cursed, Slaton was soon voted out of office and forced to leave the state. On August 17, 1915, an armed mob lynched Leo Frank, and Georgia authorities filed no charges in connection with the killing—which sparked new protests and which today remains a subject of outrage and shame.

  No one has discovered who Houston�
�s friend Eddie Cohen was and why someone with that name was Emma West’s second cousin. Nor is it clear how Raiford Falligant came to be Cooney Houston’s lawyer.

  Laurel Grove Cemetery South, Savannah, Georgia. (photo credit 7.7)

  Delia Green is buried in Laurel Grove Cemetery South, in Savannah, long the city’s traditional burying ground for blacks, amid trees covered with Spanish moss. The exact location of her unmarked grave was forgotten long ago.

  * The second Wilburys album, released two years later and titled Volume 3 as a joke, was less successful artistically, chiefly because it did not include Orbison, who had died in the interim—yet it still reached number eleven in the U.S. best-seller charts and went platinum.

  * This is not to say that length is everything. Nashville Skyline, with its ten brief tracks, clocked in at twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds, the briefest of all of Dylan’s studio albums. Still, that album consisted of ten snappy original tracks, whereas more than half of Down in the Groove consisted of cover versions, leaving only about fourteen minutes of original material. This included one song held over from Infidels (“Death Is Not the End”) and the album’s best song, “Silvio,” which Dylan wrote in collaboration with the Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter. Clearly, Dylan’s songwriting muse was on the lam.

  * Those fans, and virtually the rest of the world, had no way of knowing it, but at least as early as the Infidels sessions in 1983 Dylan played around in the studio by recording several takes of Louis Jordan’s jump-blues hit from 1946 “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” and a Jim Harbert song, “This Is My Love,” which Frank Sinatra recorded in 1967 on his album The World We Knew. At one session, Dylan also played and sang Mel Tormé’s “Christmas Song” and the carol “Silent Night,” anticipating by more than a quarter century the release of Christmas in the Heart in 2009.