Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Dylan performs the song as a hushed devotional. He begins with some jagged strummed guitar chords outlining the melody (slightly muffing a couple of them, which is in keeping with the record’s informal mood), then, settling down in a voice that is calmly comforting, he sings of coming to the grave site of the Lone Pilgrim, contemplating his tomb, and hearing someone say in a soft whisper: “How sweetly I sleep here alone.” The aural mood is placid, but the lyric is unnerving, or should be—for just as in the haunting ballad “Long Black Veil,” a dead man is speaking from the grave to the living. (Written in 1959 by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin, and first recorded by Lefty Frizzell, “Long Black Veil” only sounds as if it is as old as, or even older than, “The Lone Pilgrim.”) The whisper is not the blowing of the wind, or a magician’s illusion, or the singer’s imagination playing tricks on him: the singer doesn’t think he hears something say something, he hears. The buried corpse, or maybe the dead man’s invisible spirit, actually speaks, and the rest of the song belongs to that voice.

  The song’s lyrics date to 1838. Brother John Ellis, a twenty-six-year-old itinerant preacher for the anti-denominational Christian Connection—and a sometime poet—had been converting souls in Pennsylvania. His sect had originated in the merger, thirty years earlier, of three groups of dissidents: the Republican Methodists of Virginia and North Carolina; the self-styled Christians of New England; and some of the followers of the former Presbyterian evangelist Barton Stone. (Stone had been the leading force behind the momentous Cane Ridge, Kentucky, revival meetings in 1801, which are often seen as the spark that touched off the Second Great Awakening.) Eschewing creed as well as denominational distinctions, the Christians called themselves, simply, Christians and professed sole reliance on the Bible as the rule of faith and progress. Christian preachers were especially critical of the arcane but vicious sectarian fights that pitted Presbyterians against Methodists, Methodists against Baptists, and even clashing factions within these denominations against each other. Ellis, who had arrived in Pennsylvania from his native New York State to commence his preaching mission five years earlier, took a trip to New Jersey with one of his sisters during the autumn of 1838 and came to the town of Johnsonburg. There he found the grave of another Christian, dead for more than three years—the wandering preacher Joseph Thomas, better known as the White Pilgrim.

  Joseph Thomas, “The White Pilgrim,” circa 1835. (photo credit 8.3)

  Thomas was one of the more interesting seekers and holy men of the awakening. Born in the North Carolina backcountry shortly after the American Revolution, he was orphaned at age seven, then raised by an older brother who lived in Virginia and who arranged for his schooling. At age sixteen, after a camp-meeting revival caused him to undertake a year of intense private prayer, Thomas was convinced of his salvation and received the Lord’s call to preach the gospel. Baptized soon after as a Christian, he was also licensed to preach, having already displayed what he later called “my gift in speaking among the brethren.”7 The boy preacher was an immediate sensation.

  Over the ensuing decade, Thomas sermonized throughout North Carolina and Virginia, traveling as far north as Philadelphia, and he completed an eighteen-month, seven-thousand-mile tour of the western states, appearing in Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches as well as before his fellow Christians. Especially in the West, he later remarked, he found that popular religious devotion had achieved an “uncontrollable power.”8 Thomas married in 1812 and started a family, settling his household first near his North Carolina birthplace and a year later in a home he purchased in the Shenandoah Valley near Winchester, Virginia.

  By then, Thomas had grown to become an impressive figure—nearly six feet tall, with an athletic build, mild countenance, and friendly disposition. He was also exceptionally energetic, finding the time, despite his journeys, to work on far more than his preaching. In 1812, he published the first of two editions of his autobiography. And as he traveled about, Thomas collected the lyrics to liturgical music from every Protestant denomination, which he published in 1815 as The Pilgrim’s Hymn Book, Offered as a Companion to All Zion Travellers, a pocket-sized compilation of 169 hymns and sacred songs. The contents, Thomas wrote, were inclusive, “purely calculated for holy praise, and not partly to promote the opinions of a particular sect.”9 The hymnal lacked musical notation, yet it foreshadowed, in its breadth, the works of William Walker and Benjamin Franklin White. More than twenty of Thomas’s selections, including “New Britain” (known today as “Amazing Grace”) and William Billings’s “Rochester” (“There is a land of pure delight”), later turned up in The Southern Harmony, The Sacred Harp, or both.

  By the time the first edition of The Pilgrim’s Hymn Book appeared, Thomas had transformed his ministry, following an intense personal reconsideration of religion in 1814. Now convinced, he wrote, that he had been called to provide an example of Jesus Christ, he would bear “a full and faithful testimony against Anti-Christ, and against the pride and fashion of this world.”10 He considered clothing especially important to his efforts; henceforth, he would spurn “the present fashion of dress” and wear a white robe, “indicative of the bride, having made herself ready for the marriage, and the innocency and purity which should characterize every minister of Christ.” He sold his Virginia home, as well as all of his other earthly possessions, relocated his family twenty-five miles to the south, and, the following year, commenced (initially on foot) a new ministry that would take him from his growing family for months at a time, preaching the word of God in his new white raiment. Thomas also carried and passed out copies of his hymnal, a service that forced him to bow to necessity and ride on a horse. Initially disparaged for abandoning his family and mocked (especially in his own neighborhood) as “Crazy Thomas,” he relocated his household to more hospitable ground in central Ohio around 1820. Over the ensuing decade and a half, though, he earned more fame than notoriety as the White Pilgrim.

  Except for his very last preaching tour, the details of the White Pilgrim’s travels after 1820 are sketchy, but he is supposed to have spoken to many thousands and converted many hundreds of souls, with what one eulogist called “the sweetest strains of eloquence” delivered in a melodious voice.11 His surviving sermons and more than two score poems contain an interesting mixture of Christian Connection precepts with social and political reflections. The White Pilgrim preached a gospel of simplicity, of the basic equality of humans before God, and of the primacy of compassion and charity among all the godly virtues. He argued a form of pacifism as well, describing war not as a holy scourge in retribution for men’s sins but as an unleashing of ungodly, hellish passions. Thomas forswore any political activity, but he paid enough attention to politics to write an extended poem on the debates in Congress over the expansion of slavery that led to the Missouri Compromise in 1820. And although, in that instance, he called for sectional comity, Thomas was a sincere hater of slavery and what he called its “bloody whips.”12 An egalitarian, he lauded in his poetry what he saw as the democracy of his new home in the North, where “the poor are rich, the rich are brought to see / Mankind are one beneath this blessed tree.”

  In 1835, Thomas—astride a white horse, its tack bleached in lime—took his message to the northern middle states of New York and New Jersey, with plans eventually to head up to New England, but he never made it all the way. Apparently, while walking the streets of Manhattan, he contracted smallpox and succumbed shortly thereafter in the village of Johnsonburg, New Jersey, about sixty miles west of the city, where he had just delivered a sermon. After a few days of suffering, he died, attended to in his final hours, one source claims, by a lone Negro nurse. According to several accounts, Thomas was originally buried in a disreputable old graveyard, set aside for gamblers and criminals. Popular belief held that the corpses of smallpox victims could somehow contaminate those already buried, and supposedly, despite the love and respect they had for the White Pilgrim, the elders of Johnsonburg decided to play it sa
fe. By these same accounts, eleven years passed before Thomas’s body was relocated to where it still rests, beneath a small, engraved marble obelisk, in the Johnsonburg Christian Church cemetery. If these accounts are reliable, the grave that Brother John Ellis saw in 1838 was not the one that we see today. Certainly Ellis did not see the obelisk, which was not erected until the late 1850s.

  Obelisk at the grave of the White Pilgrim, constructed in late 1850s at the Johnsonburg Christian Church cemetery, Johnsonburg, New Jersey. Inscription on the obelisk at the grave of the White Pilgrim. (photo credit 8.4)

  Ellis wrote his poem—which he entitled “The White Pilgrim” and which made direct reference to “Joseph”—soon after he visited the grave, and was later chagrined to hear it credited to others. The poem’s key elements and basic structure are contained in the song that eventually ended up as “Lone Pilgrim” on World Gone Wrong. But there were some complications along the way with respect to the melody as well as the lyrics. Benjamin Franklin White claimed he wrote the song when he included it in his expanded edition of The Sacred Harp in 1850; William Walker also claimed authorship in the third edition of The Southern Harmony in 1854. Both assertions were entirely untrue. Ellis wrote the basic lyrics, and substantially the same tune as appeared in both The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp appeared earlier as “Missionary; or, The White Pilgrim” (with most of Ellis’s verse, intact, as well as the lyrics) in a collection, Indian Melodies, by a Narragansett Indian, Thomas Commuck, published in New York by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845. How Commuck (who also claimed credit for the hymn) came upon Ellis’s poem is unknown. It is also unknown whether Commuck or the man credited as the book’s “harmonizer,” Thomas Hastings—the composer who wrote the melody of the classic hymn “Rock of Ages”—actually set the words to the music. But the tune is basically the same as a variant of the Scots air “The Braes of Balquhidder,” which the poet Robert Burns took for his song “Bonie Peggy Alison,” first published in 1788.

  The process of literary revision, from Ellis’s poem to the later hymns, was similarly convoluted. Commuck’s version added an entire verse that Ellis did not write (or at least did not include in the version he printed in his autobiography in 1895); yet Ellis’s and Commuck’s versions shared a verse about the White Pilgrim spreading the gospel, which both White and Walker later eliminated. In The Sacred Harp, White changed the relevant pronouns so that it is always the visiting singer, and not the departed pilgrim, who speaks, thereby removing the hymn’s most haunting feature. Complicating matters further, a broadside, entitled “The White Pilgrim” and published in New York at some point in the 1840s or 1850s, includes the Ellis and Commuck versions, but with an additional eight verses, describing a visit to the White Pilgrim’s widow—the first six verses taken from a subsequent poem of Ellis’s, “Reply to ‘White Pilgrim,’ ” written in 1843. Two things are certain: the song was highly popular before the Civil War, largely though not simply because of its inclusion in The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp; and “The White Pilgrim” became “The Lone Pilgrim” because of White’s and Walker’s revisions, probably undertaken to remove any reference to a specific individual or religious body that might cause controversy. Ironically, a tribute to a specific American holy man who despised denominations turned into a generic lyric about a solitary wanderer out of a desire to break through denominational barriers.

  In his notes to World Gone Wrong, Dylan wrote that he took “Lone Pilgrim” from an old Doc Watson record, and the version that Dylan sings is identical to the one Watson sings on the album The Watson Family, first released in 1963.* (Watson’s version, which he states was one of his father’s favorite hymns, is in turn a slightly shorter replication of the version in The Sacred Harp, except with the ghostly original pronouns restored.) Several recordings of the song appeared between Watson’s and Dylan’s, but either Dylan didn’t know them or they had no effect. The Watson family album, produced in 1963 by Dylan’s Village friend Ralph Rinzler of the Greenbriar Boys, is drawn from genuine field recordings made between 1960 and 1963 in Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina—and it thus has the spontaneous, homemade, “live” quality that is a key to World Gone Wrong (which might be described as a set of Dylan’s field recordings of himself).

  Watson’s rendition is both rich and piercing (the fiddle adds to that), in the peculiar combination that makes Watson’s singing so singular and enthralling. There is a charming, slightly clunky quality to the performance, as if Watson is trying hard to merge his tempo and phrasing to fit those of the fiddler (who is Watson’s father-in-law, the superb old-time banjo and fiddle player Gaither Carlton). On the second line of each verse, as the melody ascends—“And pensively stood by his tomb”; “And gathering storms may arise”; and so on—Watson’s timbre intensifies, placing an almost desperate emphasis on the fifth and eighth syllables (“stood” / “tomb”; “storms” / “rise”). Dylan, in contrast, sings only to his solo guitar strumming, and his voice is muted and tender throughout—melodious yet barely rising above a whisper. His voice becomes the one murmuring at the pilgrim’s grave.

  Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton, recording in New York, 1961. Photograph by John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers. (photo credit 8.5)

  Far more successfully than Watson, Dylan enters and inhabits the song’s core, offering a breathing spell from what he called inhumane modern technocratic convention—and offering consolation. The itinerant “I,” who sings the first three lines, suddenly becomes another “I,” the man who died and yet who lives, and who now gently speaks. This second “I” once wandered too, as compelled by his Master (or master), but (and here Dylan’s voice swells just slightly) he “met the con-taaaaa jun ’n’ saannk to the tomb.” His far-off “companion” and children should not weep now that he is gone. (Dylan does not sing the word “gone” so much as he exhales it.) “I” is free at last from earthly tempests; his rested soul has achieved the Lord’s many mansions and he is calm; and anyway he is not really gone, not completely, at least for the length of this song.

  Coming at the conclusion of an album of old ballads and blues about strange happenings, about men no longer able to do their women right because the world is going wrong, about rounders, gamblers, six-gun shooters, a blue-eyed, blue-bellied Boston boy cut down by Johnny Reb, and more, “Lone Pilgrim” is a reprieve, a coming to rest, a ghost note of a different order, and it is also a benediction. Dylan had found a new use for a fasola standard from The Sacred Harp, a song inspired by a godly, white-robed minister of charity, decency, and redemption—and a compiler of hymns—in an America convulsed by religious awakenings. The song, as he describes and performs it, might even have been a gloss on one of the White Pilgrim’s poems:

  Let me arise above the fame,

  Of riches and renown,

  Above in earthly monarch’s name,

  To an immortal crown.13

  Hearing Dylan sing “Lone Pilgrim” when my father fell ill in 1994, and then listening again over and over during the months after he died, brought a solace that came from the last place, and the last performer, I’d have expected it from. More than a decade later, it still brings solace, especially in the last two lines and the very last word, which is also the last word on World Gone Wrong: “The same hand that led me through scenes most severe / Has kindly assisted me home.” For that performance—of a song that few except Dylan’s most passionate fans remember—I will always feel a gratitude that is completely personal. But all of that aside, it is clear that with “Lone Pilgrim” and World Gone Wrong, Dylan had reached the end of the beginning of his own artistic reawakening and, assisted by the kind Master, had reached a place that at least felt more like home.

  World Gone Wrong was the rock-and-roll equivalent of a literary succès d’estime, garnering rich praise and poor sales. A few knowledgeable critics and writers, including the biographer Clinton Heylin, deemed it, along with Good as I Been to You, an unfortunate retread of the kind of cover mate
rial Dylan was performing in concert. Some detractors even condemned Dylan’s liner notes as wordy and incomprehensible. For the most part, though, reviewers agreed with Robert Christgau, who called the album “eerie and enticing” and perceptively noted the non sequiturs and other odd features in the old buried songs, usages that Dylan had long ago absorbed in his own songwriting “because he believes they evoke a world that defies rationalization.”14 The album won Dylan another Grammy, this time for Best Traditional Folk Album. But the recordings meant little to listeners who were not even born when the folk revival of the 1960s arrived, and the ranks of the older loyal folkies had thinned. The album fared far less well in the U.S. sales charts than had either Under the Red Sky or Good as I Been to You.

  Dylan himself, though, was pleased enough to play a portion of the acoustic material in a block of four important shows at Manhattan’s Supper Club in mid-November 1993. Dylan had booked the club with the hope of making a concert film for television as well as a new live album. The film and album projects never materialized. But the soundboard and audience recordings that survived (and have been widely bootlegged) show Dylan in top form, singing and playing acoustic guitar with his band, interspersing strong renditions of “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” and other songs from his mid-1960s zenith with traditional songs, including several from World Gone Wrong: “Ragged and Dirty,” “Blood in My Eyes,” “Jack-A-Roe,” and “Delia.” Heylin has called the shows “exceptional” and remarked that Dylan performed “with all the hurt that inner voice felt when left crying to be heard.”15